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Why Trump’s Choice of Vance as Vice President Has to Do with US Foreign Policy

German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, known for his sarcastic remarks, once said that the United States is protected by weak neighbors to the north and south and by fish to the east and west.

Although Bismarck wanted to emphasize America’s latent geographical advantages, its remoteness confers another advantage that has come to characterize post-Cold War American domestic policy: the United States has the power and the resources to shape the international system, but at the same time it stands apart from it in a way that the United States cannot afford in the Old World.

There is, then, a striking contrast between America’s historically unprecedented ability to influence the world and the lack of foreign policy in its public discourse. Until now.

Former President Donald Trump’s decision to name Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio as his running mate went against two established trends: the choice of vice president is unimportant, and foreign policy plays no role in America’s domestic politics.

The choice unleashed a political firestorm unlike any vice presidential announcement in recent history, much of it focused on the foreign policy positions. Vance’s opponents have scrutinized his positions with a magnifying glass, grasping for convenient labels. Within less than a day of the announcement, Vance was described as everything from a “arch-isolationist“that spells the end of Reaganism to a “hawk“on almost every problem except for the war in Ukraine.

Yet this piecemeal approach to understanding Vance and his significance on the GOP ticket misses a larger and much more important context. It is true that Vance has made Ukraine something of a signature foreign policy issue, and has emerged as one of the Senate’s most forceful critics of a Western Ukraine policy that not delivered the results that the White House architects expected. But Vance’s vision of the Ukraine conflict, compelling and well-articulated as they areunderlie a deeper set of beliefs that reflect the changes in American politics.

On the level of party dynamics, Vance’s selection is nothing less than a stunning rejection of a tired, fading foreign-policy consensus that is increasingly disconnected from the challenges facing the United States. It is as strong a signal as any that Trump, if he wins in November, will likely seek to bring the war in Ukraine to a swift end as one of his first policies. It is also possible, depending on a wide range of domestic and external factors that are difficult to predict, that Trump, with influence from Vance and others, could pursue a broader repositioning away from knee-jerk interventionism and unnecessary foreign entanglements.

It is in this light that Vance’s defiant stance on Ukraine becomes a means to a much larger strategic end. believeslike a large portion of the American population and, at least to some extent, the man at the top of the GOP ticketthat the nature of the transatlantic relationship must change if the US is to find a strategically sustainable footing in an era of renewed great-power competition.

There is little doubt that the war in Ukraine and the West’s response to it impaired Europe, hampering its economic dynamism and making it increasingly dependent on the United States. For a new generation of realistic foreign policy thinkers, this dependence should not be celebrated as a form of “unitbut is instead a burden that further exacerbates a long-standing pattern of American over-involvement in Europe.

Vance has made the case that Europe needs to stand on its own two feet militarily and do more to provide for its own defense. This argument, which resonates with a new style of populist politics that has radically transformed the GOP in the past decade, sidesteps the usual talking points about the need for more “burden sharing“to the more fundamental realization that post-Cold War US alliance structures must be modernized to better respond to the challenges facing the US today.

This is not an argument for leaving Europe or NATO, which no prominent figure in the realism and restraint coalition supports, but for moving toward a transatlantic relationship characterized by partnership rather than what has increasingly become a kind of one-sided dependency. None of this is possible while Europe is wracked by the most destructive war on its continent since 1945, which explains the urgency with which Vance and others representing the new populist face of the GOP are seeking a negotiated end to the war in Ukraine as it enters its third year.

On a broader level, Vance’s political rise represents a generational passing of the torch to a new wave of politicians who have taken on the difficult task of reshaping America’s place in the world after decades of policy decisions steeped in an arrogant, ill-conceived drive to preserve a waning post-Cold War culture. unipolar moment in which the United States has been able to operate virtually unchallenged on the world stage. Defying the established left-right political spectrum, these leaders are drawing national attention to the fact that the U.S. balance of resources and obligations has been unsustainable for years. They see the connection between over-involvement abroad and decline at home and trying to find ways to break this destructive cycle.

The debate over means and ends in foreign policy has long been a sideshow in the larger drama of American politics, relegated to small expert circles in academia and think tank circles. But even a superpower as favored as the U.S. was in the 1990s and early 2000s can only stretch itself so far and for so long before retreat becomes inevitable.

America’s global challenges have reached critical mass; a veil of normalcy and “business as usual,” sustained for decades by America’s vast comparative advantages and the absence of comparable competitors, has been abruptly lifted by simultaneous crises in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Trump’s election as vice president was heralded by an unprecedented explosion of public interest in foreign policy among concerned voters across the country. In a longue durée perspective on American history, Vance’s selection may well prove to be a turning point for the democratization of American foreign policy. After decades of benign complacency, American voters have concluded that foreign policy is too important to be left to technocrats and special interests. Whatever happens, a Rubicon has been crossed in Milwaukee.

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