Vance’s selection solidifies Trump’s hold over the GOP

Ohio Sen. JD Vance’s selection as Donald Trump’s running mate has cemented the Republican Party’s reorientation away from the internationalist approach to the world that characterized it for the six decades before his rise.

In his brief political career, Vance has embraced militantly isolationist, protectionist, and anti-immigration positions — the three critical elements of the defensive nationalism that Trump has stamped on the GOP. Trump’s pick reflects his confidence that he has subdued resistance in his party to his agenda for global affairs, which includes retreat from traditional alliances, soaring tariffs and severe measures against undocumented immigration, including mass deportations.

“We don’t have any more mixed signals,” said Bill Kristol, a long-time conservative strategist turned Trump critic. “We now have Trump and a younger and more committed version of Trump. It’s just a decisive move toward America First on foreign policy.”

Trump’s selection of Vance is one of the clearest barometers of the former president’s tightening hold over the GOP. In 2016, Trump felt compelled to choose as his vice president Mike Pence, who provided a bridge to an array of constituencies suspicious of the New York business executive at that point. Those included Christian conservatives, the business community, congressional insiders and traditional Republican foreign policy hawks shaped by Ronald Reagan’s vision of the US as the muscular leader of the free world.

This time Trump felt impregnable enough inside the GOP to choose a running mate who doesn’t offer outreach to any of those groups (except, to some extent, social conservatives). Instead, with Vance, Trump chose an acolyte and potential successor who could deepen and extend the direction the former president has set for the party.

While Trump in 2016 “needed to play the politician” in mollifying other Republican factions, “now Trump doesn’t need anyone in the party – he has conquered everyone,” said Geoffrey Kabaservice, director of political studies at the libertarian Niskanen Center and author of a history of moderate Republicans. “Even people who said terrible things about him have bent the knee. And he thinks anyone who has voted for any stripe of Republican has no choice but to go along with this new definition of what the Republican Party is.”

The distance between that “new definition” and the GOP’s traditions before Trump may be the greatest in the intertwined issues revolving around America’s interactions with the world.

Trump’s rise represents a kind of bookend to one of the most consequential moments in the GOP’s history. In the 1952 GOP primary, Dwight Eisenhower, who championed international alliances and close ties with Europe to contain the Soviet Union, defeated Sen. Robert Taft, who was skeptical of all those ideas.

Eisenhower’s victory over Taft proved a turning point. As I’ve written, “Every Republican presidential nominee over the next six decades – a list that extended from Richard Nixon through Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney – identified more with the internationalist than isolationist wing of the party.”

Isolationism reminiscent of Taft, joined with protectionism and nativism, first resurfaced as a force in the GOP with Patrick J. Buchanan’s two presidential campaigns in 1992 and 1996. But it wasn’t until Trump’s ascent in 2016 that a candidate who departed from the party’s internationalist consensus claimed the nomination.

In office, Trump moved away from the GOP’s traditional free trade stance, imposing 25% tariffs on an array of foreign imports (not only from China but also Europe and even Canada) and renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement started under George H.W. Bush. He pursued hard-edged policies to restrict undocumented immigration (including building miles of border wall and separating migrant children from their parents at the border). And he expressed deep skepticism about the value of America’s traditional alliances in Europe and Asia: John Bolton, who served as his national security adviser at the time, has said publicly that he feared Trump was on the brink of quitting NATO at a 2018 meeting of the alliance.

One senior national security official in Trump’s first term, who asked for anonymity to candidly describe direct conversations with him, told me that the ex-president fundamentally did not accept the dominant view in both parties since World War II that the US benefited from having friendly allies cooperating in a rules-based international system.

“He wouldn’t see that keeping Europe safe and free is in our security interests, let alone our economic ones,” the official said. “He simply can’t get beyond the fact that many of our allies are not contributing their fair share to our collective security, whether it is in Europe or Asia.”

While Trump faced relatively little internal resistance over his hardline policies on trade and immigration, his determination to retreat from international alliances was limited by opposition from many of his senior national security officials, who had roots in the party’s Reaganite internationalist traditions. Those included national security advisers Bolton and H.R. McMaster, Defense Secretaries James Mattis and Mark Esper, and Secretaries of State Rex Tillerson and Mike Pompeo.

To many observers, Trump’s selection of Vance sent an unmistakable signal that the former president no longer feels compelled to defer to such voices. “If you had any hope that a second Trump administration might be persuaded to have a more balanced policy towards Europe, and particularly Ukraine, that hope was dashed by the pick of Vance,” said Ivo Daalder, CEO of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and US ambassador to NATO under President Barack Obama.

The GOP’s internationalist wing is still substantial in the Senate, noted Richard Fontaine, the former foreign policy adviser to the late Republican Sen. John McCain and now the CEO of the Center for a New American Security, a centrist thinktank. But they would have very limited levers to compel Trump to play a more engaged international role, he said.

While Congress can try to restrain a “maximalist” president pursuing an expansive foreign policy agenda, Fontaine said, there’s little it can do to force action from a president “closer to a minimalist” in his view about American commitments. With an eye on a possible second Trump presidency, Congress has passed legislation preventing a future president from formally quitting NATO without legislative approval. But if Trump simply refuses to dispatch US troops to repel a future Russian attack, “there is no one who can compel him to defend NATO allies,” said Fontaine, co-author of the new book, “Lost Decade: The US Pivot to Asia and the Rise of Chinese Power.”

In Vance, Trump has picked a running mate and governing partner likely to nudge his boss further toward a retreat from the world. “Vance is the real deal: He is a mini-Trump and he will reinforce Trump’s instincts,” said Matthias Matthijs, a professor of international political economy at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies. “This is America alone, draw up the drawbridge.”

Since entering politics, Vance has been a full-throated supporter of each element of Trump’s defensive nationalism. Vance’s first campaign ad in his 2022 Senate race highlighted his support for Trump’s border wall and forcefully rejected the idea that hostility to undocumented immigration was racist. In the Senate, Vance has backed trade restrictions and, in one of his first interviews after his nomination for vice president, the Ohio Republican unreservedly seconded Trump’s skepticism of traditional free trade agreements. “NAFTA destroyed the manufacturing economy in Pennsylvania and Michigan, a real estate developer from New York, Donald Trump was actually right about that issue,” Vance told Fox News.

Vance has been most unequivocal in criticizing the internationalist approach to foreign policy centered on robust alliances. He has been among the most unbending Republican opponents of continued aid to Ukraine; although larger numbers of Republican senators opposed earlier versions of the aid, Vance was one of just 15 GOP senators who voted against the final $95 billion package of aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan this spring.

“I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” Vance told Steve Bannon in an interview soon after Russia’s unprovoked invasion. “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.”

Later in a debate on the Senate floor, Vance issued a sweeping denunciation of the nation’s internationalist tradition that linked America’s assistance to Ukraine to the nation’s frustrating interventions in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.

“The bipartisan consensus in American foreign policy has led to effectively graveyard after graveyard after graveyard, [and] $34 trillion in debt,” Vance declared. “We have purchased on the backs of our children and grandchildren a number of graveyards all across the world.”

To the beleaguered Republicans upholding the party’s internationalist banner, Vance’s selection was an ominous portent. “They are celebrating that choice both in Milwaukee tonight and in Moscow,” former GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger, an Air Force veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, said after Trump announced the selection last week while Republicans were gathered in Wisconsin for the convention. Likewise, Bolton said of Vance and Trump: “The bottom line is these are candidates who do not fundamentally understand that a strong American presence in the world is good for us here at home.”

But while the remaining Reaganite internationalists in the GOP were disappointed by Vance’s selection, they could not have been surprised. On each of the key elements of defensive nationalism, Trump has indicated that he intends to push much further in a second term than he did in a first.

On immigration, beyond completing his border wall and requiring asylum seekers to “remain in Mexico” while their cases are adjudicated, Trump has pledged to deport an unprecedented number of undocumented immigrants already living in the US, complete with detention camps and use of the National Guard to round up deportees.

On trade, Trump has moved far beyond his first-term actions to promise sweeping tariffs of 10% on all imports and additional levies of 60% or more on products from China. He’s openly mused that he might seek to fundamentally reorient the federal budget by raising tariffs high enough to replace the federal income tax – which budget experts point out is a mathematical impossibility.

Trump’s skepticism of international alliances remains undiminished. In one of the campaign videos he’s used to sketch out a second term agenda, Trump says that if reelected, he would “finish the process we began under my administration of fundamentally reevaluating NATO’s purpose and NATO’s mission.” Policy analysts at the Center for Renewing America, a thinktank attempting to define a Trump second term agenda, have sketched plans for what they call a “Dormant NATO,” with the US technically still within the alliance but reduced to a minimal role.

In an interview with Businessweek published last week, Trump even cast doubt on whether he would defend Taiwan from an invasion by China — a commitment that has been a deliberately ambiguous, but enduring, pillar of American foreign policy. (Biden on multiple occasions has explicitly pledged to defend the island.) Trump cited the logistical challenges involved (“Taiwan is 9,500 miles away,” he said. “It’s 68 miles away from China”), but also raised philosophical objections to defending Taiwan. After complaining that Taiwan “did take about 100%” of the US semiconductor business, Trump insisted, “I think, Taiwan should pay us for defense. You know, we’re no different than an insurance company.”

Trump’s skepticism about defending Taiwan placed him even further on the isolationist spectrum than Vance. Like Taft and other GOP isolationists in the 1940s and 1950s, Vance has argued for reducing US involvement in Europe to free resources to confront China in Asia. Fontaine said all evidence suggests Trump doesn’t view China much differently than any other country, including long-standing allies, that he believes “have taken advantage of us for a long time.”

Trump, though, does share his running mate’s desire to decouple from Europe. Beyond Trump’s general suspicion of NATO, that instinct will likely be felt most immediately in an effort to force Ukraine to reach a negotiated settlement that requires Kyiv to make significant territorial concessions to Russian President Vladimir Putin. (Vance has publicly called for such a deal on multiple occasions.)

A reelected Trump would likely pressure Ukraine by threatening to cut off arms shipments if it doesn’t reach an agreement. But Daalder, like other experts, believes Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would resist such pressure and fight on. The idea that a Trump administration could “deliver a peace that no one else can is a figment of their imagination,” Daalder said. “The reality is the Ukrainians will fight until the very, very bitter end in order to defend themselves, and they are not going to listen to Donald Trump or J.D. Vance about whether that continues.”

Matthijs believes Putin might be equally resistant to a negotiated settlement. “I think he wants it all still,” Matthijs said. “He wants Trump eventually to say ‘I don’t care,’ and is betting on the fact that the Europeans will eventually fall apart over it.”

A reelected Trump who denies or diminishes aid to Ukraine, but cannot force an end to the fighting, might expose himself to grave political risk, two right-leaning foreign policy analysts recently argued in an article for The Bulwark, an online publication published by conservatives critical of Trump.

“The fall of Kabul and Afghanistan to the Taliban in the summer of 2021 was an ugly disaster for the Biden presidency, one for which it has been rightly excoriated,” wrote Aaron Friedberg and Gabriel Schoenfeld. “The fall of Kyiv and Ukraine to the Russians, if Trump and Vance have their way, has the potential to be far uglier. … Unlike in Afghanistan, the horror show will unfold on television in the heart of Europe.”

That prospect is only one of the political risks Trump’s defensive nationalism could pose. Economic forecasters have projected that the combination of Trump’s sweeping tariffs and mass deportations could reignite inflation. And while polls show substantial support today for mass deportation, many are skeptical that would endure once Americans see images of mothers and children being rounded up, or held in detention camps.

The more fundamental challenge is that Trump’s skepticism of US international commitment strains the central fault line between Republican-leaning voters with and without a college degree. A national survey by the Chicago Council last year found support for a robust US international role among Republicans has fallen to a nearly 50-year low; but support for engagement and alliances remained strongest among GOP-leaning voters with at least a four-year college degree. Those were the same white-collar suburban voters that provided the core of support in this year’s GOP primary for former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who unreservedly articulated the Reagan-era view of American international leadership.

Alone, differing views on America’s relations with the world may not be enough to peel many of those Haley-type voters away from Trump this fall. But their unease about abandoning Ukraine (and/or Taiwan), imposing prohibitive tariffs on imports and deporting millions of people, might provide Democrats openings among them, particularly when combined with their discomfort with Trump’s belligerent style, and the party’s overall shift right on social issues.

With the selection of Vance, Trump has broadcast his belief that he has conclusively won the internal GOP debate over all aspects of US interactions with the world – foreign policy, immigration and trade. The remaining question is whether that internal victory is liberating Trump to pursue policies that will ultimately cost him with a broader audience of Americans, either in the campaign or a second presidential term.