President Donald Trump announced on Monday that he has chosen Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) as his vice presidential running mate, prompting widespread interest in the senator’s policy stances and what he brings to the ticket.
While a junior senator best known as a best-selling author –Vance was elected to Congress in late 2022 – he has shared his opinions on how the American government should handle its international affairs extensively, crafting an outlook on the world that prioritizes America’s national interests in foreign policy decision-making.
Below are a collection of Vance’s commentary on the world’s most urgent conflicts and how the U.S. should relate to its allies and neighbors.
Ukraine
While not yet in the Senate when Russian strongman Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Vance has consistently questioned what American interests Washington’s involvement in Ukraine is serving – and challenged Ukraine’s European neighbors to do more to help Kyiv confront the threat. Vance has also referred to the Ukraine war as a “distraction” by the administration of President Joe Biden from greater problems at home and what he considers America’s largest geopolitical threat, the Chinese Communist Party:
Prior to his election, Vance made headlines by stating, “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another. … I’m sick of Joe Biden focusing on the border of a country I don’t care about while he lets the border of his own country become a total war zone.”
He has since sharpened that stance to a call for Americans to “focus on our own problems first,” telling NBC News in March 2022 that emphasizing a focus on domestic issues was “not inconsistent with helping the Ukrainians.”
In an article co-authored with Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts in November 2023, Vance reinforced his opposition to the Russian invasion but suggested that “Europe take the lead in support for that war.” The authors compared the situation in Ukraine to that of Israel, noting, “Israel has wealthy neighbors, but they are not going to assist Israel’s war effort, and aid is unlikely to come from any source but the U.S.”
“The same cannot be said of Ukraine, whose wealthy EU neighbors—notably Germany and France—could provide considerably more assistance,” the article highlighted.
Vance has also asserted that Ukraine is not sufficiently important to American national interests to justify the emphasis Biden has placed on it.
“It’s not that we don’t admire the courageousness of the Ukrainians. We certainly do. It’s that America is stretched too thin,” he said in April. “We do not have the industrial capacity to support a war in Ukraine, a war in Israel, potentially a war in East Asia if the Chinese invade Taiwan, so America has to pick and choose.”
More recently, speaking to Breitbart News in June, Vance expressed alarm at the idea of a potential NATO incursion into Ukraine to go to war with Russia.
“They’re saying we need to send NATO ground troops into Ukraine. That is insane,” he said. “There is no compelling American interest that would justify NATO getting directly involved with this conflict.”
“You need somebody to say, ‘Enough with the craziness. Enough with the bullshit. We’re not sending NATO troops unless there’s a direct threat to NATO, which, look: this war is not a good thing, but it is not a direct threat to NATO,'” he concluded.
China
Vance has made confronting China’s intellectual property theft, manufacturing dominance, and geopolitical threats a top issue of his senatorial term. On Monday, he took one of his first media opportunities following the announcement of his nomination, an appearance on Fox News, to discuss China. Vance told host Sean Hannity that he hoped to work towards bringing the Ukraine war “to a rapid close so America can focus on the real issue, which is China.”
“That’s the biggest threat to our country and we are completely distracted from it,” he asserted.
As senator, Vance has proposed legislation to directly confront Chinese challenges to America’s well-being. In March, Vance introduced a bill to limit Chinese government access to American capital markets.
“If the Chinese Communist Party doesn’t want to play by American rules, they shouldn’t be allowed access to our financial markets,” he told Breitbart News at the time. “Ohio workers and our manufacturing industry have suffered the consequences of the CCP’s illegal currency manipulation for far too long. It’s about time we hold them accountable and force them to follow the law.”
Vance has also urged America’s cybersecurity authorities to take more actions to combat state-sponsored Chinese hacking.
The vice presidential pick also considers a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan to be a high-profile threat to the United States, contrasting that possibility with the ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
“This is really important for Americans to understand: the Taiwanese control the American information technology industry because we allowed them to manufacture all of our computer chips,” he said in an April 2023 appearance on Fox News. “If the Taiwanese fall to China, it will cause a Great Depression in this country. We have to prevent that from happening. But to prevent it, we have to be self-sufficient and we have to make our own weapons.”
Expanding manufacturing at home, Vance has insisted, is central to confronting the China threat and to acting in the face of rampant human rights violations by the Chinese Communist Party.
“One of the big mistakes we’ve made as a country—bipartisan—is we let China make way too much of our stuff,” Vance told Breitbart News in June. “We let Mexico make way too much of our stuff. If you look in a lot of ways at what Biden has done on the green energy stuff, they’ve been doubling down on a lot of very stupid policies because where are all the minerals mined for the green energy economy? They’re mined in China. Where are a lot of the components made? In China.”
Similarly, in an interview with CBS News’s Face the Nation in May, Vance expressed support for tariffs on China, stating, “If you apply tariffs, really what it is is you’re saying that we’re gonna penalize you for using slave labor in China and importing that stuff in the United States.”
“I certainly agree that we need to apply some broad based tariffs, especially on goods coming in from China and not just solar panels and EV stuff,” he continued. “We need to protect American industries from all of the competition. Because here- here’s the thing, Margaret, the reason China beats us, it’s not because they have better workers, it’s because they’re willing to use slaves.”
Israel/Middle East
Vance is an enthusiastic backer of America’s alliance with Israel and has condemned Biden’s policies in the aftermath of the October 7 Hamas siege of the country.
“Our goal in the Middle East should be to allow the Israelis to get to some good place with Saudi Arabians and other Gulf Arab states,” he told CNN in May. “There is no way that we can do that unless the Israelis finished the job with Hamas. If they can’t even do that, the attitude of the Middle East will be, you can’t trust these guys.”
“You’re never going to defeat the ideology of Hamas, but you can root out those commanders, those final military trained battalions. I think we should empower the Israelis to do it,” he suggested.
Like the China issue, Vance has stated that a singular focus on Ukraine has undermined America’s ability to arm Israel.
“In January, the U.S. raided one of our major arms stockpiles in Israel, designed to support our allies in that region, and instead transferred 300,000 155mm shells to the war in Ukraine,” Vance wrote in the Heritage article. “It is becoming abundantly clear that the U.S. has overcommitted resources and attention to Ukraine at the expense of allies like Israel and Taiwan.”
Vance has rejected calls to diminish the importance of Israel in American foreign policy.
“A big part of the reason why Americans care about Israel is because we are still the largest Christian-majority country in the world,” Vance said at an event in May. “The idea that there is ever going to be an American foreign policy that doesn’t care a lot about that slice of the world is preposterous.”
Latin America
Most of Vance’s public commentary on Latin America has regarded the issue of fentanyl entering American communities from Mexico. The senator supports the use of the U.S. military to fight drug cartels and suggested the Mexican government is a suboptimal partner in fighting organized drug trafficking.
“We know about the fentanyl problem and we basically turned the Mexican drug cartels into the world’s biggest terrorist and criminal organizations, and what are they doing? They’re profiting off the deaths of people in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin,” he told Breitbart News in June. “That’s a big, big problem.”
Vance told NBC News in July 2023 that fighting drug cartels is a valid military action for the United States.
“I want to empower the president of the United States, whether that’s a Democrat or Republican, to use the power of the U.S. military to go after these drug cartels,” he said. “We have to recognize the Mexican government is being, in a lot of ways, destabilized by the constant flow of fentanyl.”
While he has offered limited commentary on the region’s three communist regimes – Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua – Vance issued categorical support for anti-communist protesters in Cuba while a Senate candidate in July 2021.
“It’s amazing to see the people of Cuba actually getting out there and protesting for their freedom and against the oppression and the deprivation of a communist government,” he told radio host Sebastian Gorka, “So I wish them all the best, and it’s exciting.”
Vance noted the protesters waved American flags, remarking, “If they wanted help from the Biden administration or the Biden regime, they’d be more likely to get it if they wave the rainbow flag or the BLM flag because, unfortunately, our own government doesn’t even see our own flag as a symbol of freedom the way that Cubans do.”
WATCH: J.D. Vance Says “Of Course” He Would Be “Interested in the Job” if Asked to Be Trump’s VP