With the Republican presidential ticket now set, foreign policy commentators and editorial pages have come to characterize Donald Trump and J.D. Vance as staunch isolationists who would pull up America’s drawbridge, shatter Washington’s traditional alliances, and give the world’s autocrats more license to run roughshod over the so-called rules-based international order. This is a profound misread of the two men.
It’s easy to see why so many Americans and Europeans are worried, if not petrified, about Trump and Vance’s worldview. The two are extremely skeptical of the transatlantic alliance in its current formulation, so much so that Trump has flirted with withdrawing the U.S. from NATO if Europe doesn’t spend more on its defense. Trump and Vance haven’t minced words: they see Europe as too complacent given its security environment and perfectly comfortable with outsourcing its defense to the U.S. all while taking advantage of the American worker through lopsided trade terms. On Ukraine specifically, the Trump-Vance ticket is unified in its belief that continuing the status-quo policy not only brings added strain on the U.S. defense industry but delays the inevitable diplomatic settlement Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will eventually have to work out with Russia to end the war.
But it’s outside of the European theater where Trump and Vance’s instincts are far more hawkish than the conventional wisdom suggests.
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