At the recent Munich Security Summit, U.S. Senator J.D. Vance, a first-term Republican from Ohio, was the skunk at the garden party. Vance, a Trump ally, has long been an outspoken skeptic of American involvement in the Russia-Ukraine war, and has angered his more establishment GOP Senate colleagues for his penetrating criticism of Washington’s conduct of this proxy war.
Yet his critique is making headway. Politico, the voice of mainstream Washington, conceded this week that “J.D. Vance has a point” in saying that the U.S. cannot produce munitions and weapons to continue backing Ukraine. Immediately after the Munich conference, the Financial Times published a tough Vance column calling on Europeans to shoulder more of the burden for their own defense. Vance wrote, in part:
We owe it to our European partners to be honest: Americans want allies in Europe, not client states, and our generosity in Ukraine is coming to an end. Europeans should regard the conclusion of the war there as an imperative. They must keep rebuilding their industrial and military capabilities. And Europe should consider how exactly it is going to live with Russia when the war in Ukraine is over.
If Donald Trump reclaims the U.S. presidency in the November election, Vance can be expected to play a major role advancing the administration’s legislative and policy goals in Trump’s new term. I sat down in Munich for an interview with the senator, who in 2016 published his memoir Hillbilly Elegy—a book that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said moved him to tears. Vance told me he and Scholz met earlier in the day at the Bayerischer Hof, and had exchanged warm greetings. It might have been one of the only times a European Munich conferee this year was happy to see the rising young Republican senator.
You are one of the U.S. Senate’s leading skeptics of further aid to Ukraine. Does the Munich Security Conference feel like hostile territory?
I certainly feel like I’m in a hostile territory, I think there is a very broad consensus that the West should be funneling as many resources and weapons to create as possible. And I feel like I’m the only guy sort of shouting in the wilderness saying, ‘What’s the strategy here? What’s the endgame? How do you get out of this conflict without completely destroying the country of Ukraine—demographically, infrastructurally, economically?”
And unfortunately, I think that the participants in the conference are, by and large, so wrapped up in an anti-Putin mindset, that they can’t think rationally about the strategy and the conflict. It’s fine to not like Putin, I don’t like Putin. But that’s not a foreign policy vision.
How do your foreign policy views differ from the Atlantic consensus?
Well, I think I’m just much less moralistic about these things. I approach these questions by asking myself, “What is in America’s national interest?” And I’m much less interested in what makes people feel good, or allows them to beat their chests to declare moral superiority. I’m much more interested in identifying what’s in the best interest of the country.
There are obvious ways in which our interests conflict with Vladimir Putin’s. There are ways in which we are, I think, accelerating the development of his relationship with China, which is very much not in our best interest. And so, if I look at this conflict, I’m not just asking for an end game for Ukraine; I’m asking why are we making it more likely that Vladimir Putin aligns himself with Communist China, when we should be trying really hard not to push any country into the arms of Beijing. We are damaging our own national interest because it feels good, I guess, to hate Putin.
I think a second difference is that I’m extremely interested in questions of hard power. I don’t think that most international decisions, most foreign policy decisions, are driven by anything other than national self-interest. And so, I’m less interested in how many millions or billions of dollars Germany gives to Ukraine. I’m much more interested how many artillery shells they’re donating, and is Germany’s capacity to produce the weapons of war in the future? I think there’s a real blind spot in the West when it comes to the actual machinery of warfare. We are way too focused on financial commitments, and way to uncaring about things like manufacturing power.
There’s a third difference. I think that there is a real desire, especially among people who are older than fifty, to dwell in the glory years of American foreign policy. You know, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 1990s, when America was the true global hegemon. In that world, you really didn’t have to think about scarcity in foreign affairs. America could do everything, because it was so much more powerful than any other country.
Those days are over. We live in an increasingly multipolar world. China is a real economic and military competitor. In that world, America can’t just impose its will, as if it didn’t face scarcity concerns. It has to make trade-offs, and has to focus. Unlike much of the foreign policy establishment, I believe we should be much more focused as a country on East Asia, much less focused on Europe.
You were four years old when Reagan left office, and in kindergarten when the Berlin Wall fell. Do you think your age gives you an advantage in seeing the world more realistically than your older colleagues, who may be nostalgic for the glory days?
Oh, certainly. I think Reagan was a good president. But I don’t have nearly the hagiographic response to Reagan as most of my older conservative colleagues. For example, I think his immigration policies were disaster. You can blame the fact that California is now blue state on Ronald Reagan’s immigration policies like let’s not pretend that he was perfect at politics.
Actually, he was much smarter than both his critics and his supporters believe. If you go back to what the neoconservatives were writing about Reagan’s foreign policy in the 1980s, he was trying to wait out the Soviet Union—to contain it where appropriate, engage it where appropriate, but build up the American economic machine to provide a useful counterbalance to the Soviet Union. The neocons of the 1980s wanted a more aggressive stance against the Soviet Union. Reagan, however, thought that could lead to nuclear war. But he also understood that we didn’t have to push things to that degree.
It’s interesting that in matters of restraint and realism, Reagan is much closer to Donald Trump’s view than to the neoconservatives, who now use Reagan as a sort of icon.
Volodymyr Zelinsky said at the Munich Security Conference, “May our world based on rules never become the world of yesterday” But the Russians have a strong case that the West broke its word on NATO expansion. Plus, if you talk to Hungarian conservatives, and Polish conservative living under the new, EU-backed government of Donald Tusk, they will tell you that the rules are whatever favors the policy interests of Washington and Brussels. Are they wrong?
No, I don’t think they are wrong. In fact, there’s a complete lack of self-awareness among the Western establishment on this point. Their efforts to turn whatever they happen to believe into the only morally upstanding and morally correct viewpoint is really insulting to everyone’s intelligence.
You know, the EU has kept billions of dollars of promised aid away from Hungary, because of its views on Ukraine. It captured billions of dollars of promised aid from a previous government in Poland, because of the conservative Polish government’s views. That’s not a rules-based order. That’s Europe, from Brussels and Berlin, imposing liberal imperialistic views on the rest of the continent. If you want to have a rules-based international order, you shouldn’t penalize Poland or Hungary for having politics that are different from Brussels—but that’s exactly what they’ve been doing. So I think it’s completely absurd on its face.
A lot of Americans really mistrust the so-called rules-based international order, because it hasn’t been good for a lot of American citizens. It’s been really good if you’re the sort of person who comes to the Munich Security Conference every year. But if you’re an American whose town was destroyed, because the factory that sustained that town was moved to China as part of the rules based international order—well, you’re not inclined to spend tax dollars and want to defend that order in 2024.
David Cameron, the British Foreign Secretary, said in Munich that there must be consequences for Russian dissident Alexei Navalny’s death. Do you agree and if so, what should the consequences be?
Cameron’s statement is completely devoid of meaning. What would additional sanctions on Russia actually accomplish given that Western sanctions against Russia for the past 18 months have proven ineffective? Are we talking about bombing Moscow? What does he actually mean by “consequences”? It sounds like a completely hollow threat from a person who hasn’t thought about what his words actually mean in practice.
Now, look, Navalny was, as far as I know, a brave guy. He was an admirable guy. He was a fascinating figure, intellectually and ideologically. But this the idea that we’re going to penalize Vladimir Putin, like we would spank a misbehaving child, completely overstates what America and NATO are capable of doing in the 21st century.
You recently said on the Senate floor that America needs to be focused more on its own problems. What do you mean by that?
Advocates of aggressive American foreign policy fundamentally mistake cause and effect. They say that America is strong, because our foreign policy resolve is strong., and because we aggressively push American ideals out to the rest of the world. The reality is that we are able to push America’s ideals out to the world when we have a strong core at home.
The Americans who fought in World War II were incredibly brave and incredibly competent. The reason America won World War II is because we were the arsenal of democracy. Our industrial economy was booming, and we were able to send troops all over the world, armed with the best equipment and the best weapons, and still have a functioning economy at home. I am not an isolationist. America should have a leading role in the world. We really are the indispensable power. But to be the indispensable power, we actually have to be powerful. To be powerful, we have to take care of our problems at home—and right now, America has some extraordinarily pressing problems.
Such as?
Well, I’d say these are problems that a lot of European countries face as well. We have a terrible migration crisis in the United States. Probably ten percent of our population is illegal aliens, and another 15 percent are in an irregular situation with the law, in one form or another. It takes a lot of work to assimilate such a large number of people into your society, and to do it carefully, to ensure that it doesn’t disrupt health services, education services, and so forth. Not to mention the amount of human trafficking, drug trafficking, and sex trafficking that happens because of the American southern border with Mexico. That’s number one.
Number two, we have a massive demographic problem the United States of America. We’re an aging country. We were the last western country that had healthy demographics, even 15 years ago, but it’s now fallen off a cliff. We have rising suicide rates, especially among our young people. Life expectancy has fallen too. In the Kentucky county where my family from, the life expectancy rate is 67 years old. That’s comparable to a lot of Third World countries today.
And oh, by the way, we de-industrialized our entire economy over a thirty-year period. I think all of these problems need to be addressed before we can meaningfully play a leading role in the 21st century.
There has been talk that you might be on the shortlist to be Donald Trump’s vice presidential running mate. If he asked, would you serve?
Of course I would think seriously about it. I think he’s clearly the best choice to be the next president. And as I’ve said, I wanted to help him as much as possible. That said, I really like being a senator. I want to make a pretty big impact doing what I do. Despite the media reports, I’ve never spoken with Donald Trump about becoming his vice president. My basic attitude towards this is, it’s probably media speculation, and he probably won’t ask me. If he does ask me, I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.
What do you think Trump got wrong in his first term? I suppose this is a way of asking what you think he needs to do differently if he gets a second one.
The single biggest problem with the first Trump administration was personnel. Think about this from Trump’s perspective as an outsider to politics. He comes into the Oval Office, he has no pre-existing political network to hire from. There were a lot of people in the administration that were very solid, but there were a few people that were absolutely disastrous. John Bolton, the neocon-in-chief, should have been nowhere near the Trump White House. Jeff Sessions was a great senator from Alabama, but should not have been the Attorney General. And I think there were sort of some hiring decisions that I think were based on Trump not having a network to hire from, people who knew Washington, D.C. And I think that would be much different in a second term.
You told the New Statesman recently, “My grandma’s politics was a sort of hybrid of left-wing social democracy and right-wing personal optimism. There are virtues in both those worldviews.“ What are those virtues?
On the democracy point: when people need good jobs, you can’t expect people to create prosperity for themselves when the only jobs that are available are minimum-wage service sector jobs. Sometimes people get down on their luck for no fault of their own. When people get sick, people break a leg, they need health insurance. There needs to be some sort of social insurance system that covers people who are struggling.
I think the personal uplift side has virtues as well. One is that even if your life has been unfair, it’s very counterproductive to see yourself as the victim of unfairness. Sometimes you have been dealt a crappy hand, and you have to play that hand as well as you can. There’s real virtue in deciding to take it on the chin and keep moving forward. There’s virtue in not making excuses for yourself, again, not because people don’t have bad luck, but because they do.
It’s very unhealthy to deny that there’s unfairness. But it’s also very unhealthy to become consumed by the unfairness in your own life. And you have to kind of navigate that middle point, I think, to be certainly an effective political leader, but just an effective human being.
The valorization of victimhood is one of the main problems with American public life, because victimhood is a source of power? Do you see this breaking? Can politics play a role in breaking it?
I think culturally, it’s much less powerful now than it was five years ago. People are not as willing to accept the framing of “I’m a victim, therefore, you should listen to me and defer to me.” We’ve already gotten sick of being told that we should listen to somebody not because they have a smart idea, but because they have a certain identity. So it hasalready broken a little bit.
One of the ways that public policy should address this is that we should promote excellence, and we should reward excellence. And yeah, you’ve got to cover for the people who are down on their luck. But the sole focus of public policy should not be addressing unfairness. Fundamentally, if you want to address some issues of fairness, one of the most important things you can do is empower the truly gifted.
European Parliament elections are coming up in June. The populist Right parties are hoping for a really big showing. What would you like to see happen politically in Europe?
Well, aside from populist victories, I would really like to see European elites actually listen to their people for a change. What was the takeaway from Brexit? It’s that British voters wanted more control over their immigration system. But what did they get? They got more immigration, with less control—from a Tory government! [Giorgia] Meloni’s victory in Italy was very much a rejection of the immigration policies in Brussels. And yet, she’s been a complete catastrophe when it comes to actually reducing migration to Italy.
The AfD [Alternative for Germany] is doing well was purely because there’s a rising resistance to mass migration in Germany.
You hear European elites and American elites talking in frightened tones about threats to democracy. Isn’t it a greater threat to democracy if people keep voting for less migration, but don’t get it? I’d really, really like to see the leadership respond to what European voters are clearly crying out for. And one of the ways for that to happen, is you just keep on making the message louder and louder. In the context of these coming elections, I want to see the people who are advocating for national sovereignty and foreign policy realism dominate as much as they can.
What would a second Trump term mean for Europe?
I can’t speak for Donald Trump, but I think there would be a very strong desire for the Europeans to take a much more self-sufficient role on defense. That means sufficient manpower to defend their sovereignty, but also sufficient manufacturing capacity to produce the weapons necessary to do so for a longer-term war. There’s this really weird thing that happens in Europe, where, on the one hand, we’re told that Vladimir Putin is an existential threat to Europe. But on the other hand, you have to drag the Europeans to spend 30 percent less of their GDP on defense than the United States spends of its GDP on defense. If Russia really an existential threat, then we shouldn’t have to beg and plead to get you to spend what you are supposed to. So I think the message of the Trump administration to Europe is going to be: you need to pay your bills, and you need to step up your defense.
Given how old Trump and Biden are, I sense that whatever happens this fall, it’s going to be the last hurrah for the Baby Boomers. As your generation—the Millennials—moves more and more into power, how do you think that that is going to change American conservatism? And how do you think it’s going to change American politics in general?
That’s a good question. First of all, I think the Boomers still have a little bit of fight left in them. If there’s anything we’ve learned about the Baby Boom generation, it’s that people always write their obituary way too early.
As for Millennials’ conservatism, it’s much more animated by the concerns of parents, as opposed to grandparents. Millennials are really worried that their kids have a viable pathway to the middle class. Are they being educated at their schools, or indoctrinated into weird gender ideologies? Can you actually afford to buy a home and raise a family on a reasonable middle class income. So I think that you’re going to see a conservatism that rejects the libertarian orthodoxy of the establishment Right on economics, but really leans into some of the cultural battles of the 21st century.
Last question. At the National Conservatism conference in Miami a couple of years back, you gave a speech in which you said that universities are the enemy. In light of that, and in given the fact that you are an Ivy League law school graduate, what do you make of what happened at Harvard these past two or three months? I’m talking about the plagiarism scandal that cost Claudine Gay, the first black woman to lead the university, her job.
What happened at Harvard was, in some ways, confirmation of the thesis, right? We saw identity elevated over ideas. There’s this weird way in which, obviously mediocre people are protected because they fit a particular political narrative. What happened at Harvard is a perfect manifestation of the idea that the universities are not so much after the pursuit of truth, as they are about enforcing dogma and doctrine.
They are enforcing dogma that is hostile to American conservatives, but that doesn’t mean that I think we can give up on the universities, I think we actually have to recognize that they are the gateways to a lot of important professions and institutions in our country. One takeaway from what happened at Harvard is that these academic institutions are just paper tigers. We should be really aggressively reforming them in a way to where they’re much more open to conservative ideas.
By taxing their endowments?
Yes, and by reforming the tax code to take away their charitable status for tax purposes. European readers may not know that under current U.S. tax law, private donations to universities are tax deductible. We need to really go after the university bureaucracy focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion.
You know, the closest that conservatives have ever gotten to successfully dealing with left-wing domination of universities is Viktor Orbán’s approach in Hungary. I think his way has to be the model for us: not to eliminate universities, but to give the a choice between survival or taking a much less biased approach to teaching.
Orbán is the first major conservative leader I’ve ever seen who refuses to accept the status quo that says the Left owns the media and the universities. The Left doesn’t even recognize how destructive its own ideological hegemony is. It gets completely bent out of shape when anybody questions it.
I think it’s that’s why Orbán is so effective. You know, the, the late great Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said that the great conservative insight is that politics is downstream from culture, and the great liberal insight is that culture can be affected by politics. In some ways, I think Orbán is taking an American liberal insight and using it for conservative purposes. And whether it’s the incentives that you put into place, funding decisions that are made, and the curricula that are developed, you really can use politics to influence culture. And we should be doing more of that on the American Right.
