Jd Vance's Gamble On Ukraine Aid Paid Off

When Vice President JD Vance piped up during President Donald Trump’s meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office last week, he made a high-stakes gamble. Not only is it unusual for vice presidents to interject in public meetings between heads of state, but his comments also threatened to upset the carefully calibrated role that he has carved out during the first month of administration: A supporting act to Trump and the president’s bombastic sidekick, Elon Musk.

Yet Vance’s gamble to temporarily step into the limelight has paid off in at least one significant way. After Zelenskyy left the West Wing without signing a highly anticipated mineral rights deal, the White House responded by adopting one of Vance’s signature foreign policy initiatives: a total pause on U.S. military aid to Ukraine.

The administration’s decision to pause all aid to Ukraine may very well end up being little more than a bargaining chip in Trump’s efforts to bring Ukraine back to the negotiating table on a cease-fire deal, and it could be swiftly reversed if Zelenskyy makes additional concessions to Trump. Yet even if the pause is short-lived, it marks a striking elevation of the non-interventionist foreign policy vision that has been championed by Vance — one that, until recently, remained far outside the Republican mainstream.

When Vance entered the Senate in January 2023, he was one of only a handful of elected Republicans who publicly questioned U.S. support for Ukraine, and he was alone among the Senate GOP in calling for the U.S. to stop the flow of aid outright. “The thing that I’m most proud of is that we are on the cusp of radically changing U.S. policy towards Ukraine,” Vance told me in late 2023 when I interviewed him for a profile in POLITICO Magazine. “It’s taken a lot of work.”

During his two years in the Senate, he labored to chip away at the GOP’s hawkish conventional wisdom with decidedly mixed results. In April 2024, after Vance took the lead in lobbying his Republican colleagues in the House to oppose a $61 billion supplemental aid package to Ukraine, a majority of Republicans — including House Speaker Mike Johnson — joined Democrats in rebuffing his position by voting for the package.

Now, less than a year after a majority of congressional Republicans rebuked that dramatic move, the Trump administration has implemented Vance’s vision at a particularly sensitive diplomatic moment.

That reversal is due in no small part to Vance’s influence over the shape of the new administration. Since Trump’s victory in November, Vance and his ideological compatriots have played a major role in staffing the ranks of the administration’s foreign policy shop. Andy Baker, a senior foreign policy adviser in Vance’s Senate office, played a central role in staffing Trump’s Department of Defense, which now includes staffers like Dan Caldwell — a leading voice among conservative “restrainers” and a longtime informal adviser to Vance — as a senior adviser to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The middle tiers of Trump’s Pentagon and State Department, where most of the practical policy work gets done, is chocked full of conservative restrainers and realists like Elbridge Colby, who is currently awaiting confirmation as undersecretary of defense for policy, and Alexander Velez-Green, who left the Ukraine-skeptical Heritage Foundation to join Trump’s DoD.

Those staffing moves shed light on an important point of distinction between Trump’s approach to foreign policy and Vance’s. In reporting on Vance, I have heard several conservatives suggest that while Trump approaches discrete foreign policy issues transactionally — as a business negotiation modeled on The Art of the Deal — Vance approaches them ideologically, as proxy wars in a larger battle over the shape of the global order. In the Vancian foreign policy matrix, pausing aid to Ukraine isn’t just important as a ploy at the negotiation table; it’s a critical first step toward undermining the “rules-based international order” that Vance believes has led to the misapplication of American power abroad and the decline of American economy power and cultural strength at home.

This worldview — which Vance explained to me at length when I interviewed him last year — is more complicated than the transactionalism that undergirds Trump’s foreign policy. But with Vance now in the vice president’s office, it has a powerful advocate in the West Wing. It starts from the premise that the “rules-based international order” — including the web of U.S.-led multinational organizations like NATO and the IMF that are necessary to sustain it — is essentially a cover for an American empire that enriches global economic elites at the expense of the material and spiritual well-being of the types of Americans that Vance grew up with in his hometown of Middletown, Ohio. The upside of that compromise during the Cold War, Vance has argued, was supposed to be the extension of liberal democracy and free-market economics to places like China. But now that that promise has failed to materialize, the system perpetuates itself merely to serve the economic interests of a global elite.

Instead, as Vance told me last year, “if that fundamental goal [of liberalizing places like China] has not materialized, then I think you have to rethink the entire project.”

This critique fuels much of the hostility that Vance’s allies feel toward Ukraine. In the eyes of conservatives like Vance, Zelenskyy has become a totem of all the foreign nations that have benefitted from the protection and largesse of the U.S.-led postwar order — which is to say, all the people who, in Vance’s mind, have benefited from the slow destruction of his own community.

Understood in this light, Vance’s comments in the Oval Office chiding Zelenskyy for his lack of gratitude to the U.S. — “Have you ever said ‘thank you’ once?” Vance barked — resonate beyond the current negotiations over a cease-fire deal. They recall, instead, a comment that Vance made at a campaign event in Newton, Pennsylvania last September. “You know what I wish Zelenskyy would do when he comes to the United States of America?” Vance said to an audience of MAGA-hatted supporters, gathered under an open-sided barn in the middle of an empty field. “Say thank you to the people of Pennsylvania and everybody else.”