The Grand Strategy Behind J.D. Vance’s Latest Push To Kill Ukraine Aid

If Mike Johnson’s plan for Ukraine aid fails in the House, he might have Sen. J.D. Vance partially to blame.

Last week, the Ohio Republican authored a New York Times op-ed headlined “The Math on Ukraine Doesn’t Add Up,” and he’s followed that up by meeting with the House’s Republican Study Committee on Wednesday to whip against Johnson’s Ukraine bill.

Earlier this year I spent months speaking to Vance for an extensive profile exploring how the freshman Republican has become Donald Trump’s most loyal ally in the Senate, while also laying the groundwork for an even more expansive and radical vision of the “America First” worldview. During my hours of talking with Vance, he defended his persistent opposition to U.S. aid to Ukraine, which he — even more so than Trump — has elevated as a signature issue since entering the Senate last year.

Yet that opposition also emerged as one small part of Vance’s much broader — and more sweeping — theory of international affairs. If Vance gets his way, cutting off U.S. funding to Ukraine will be only the first step in a much broader reorientation of the U.S.’s role in the global order.

Vance is deeply skeptical of the so-called rules-based international order — the system of laws, norms and multilateral institutions established in the years following the Second World War to mitigate global conflict and facilitate international economic activity. As Vance sees it, this system has enriched economic elites while harming working-class people who are rooted in older industrial economies — all while failing to deliver on the ultimate goal of liberalizing non-democratic countries like China and Russia.

From this perspective, Vance does not see the United States’ decision to defend “the principles at the heart of the international rules-based order” in Ukraine as part of some high-minded and honorable policy. Instead, Vance sees it as a self-interested effort by economic elites to preserve a global order that advanced their interests while screwing over the type of people he represents in post-industrial Ohio.

As he once put it to me, “I think you have to rethink the entire project.”

In place of the rules-based international order, Vance thinks the U.S. needs to chart a new, more nationalistic system where individual nations are solely responsible for their own security and economic well-being, and more insulated from global economic and military entanglements. According to Vance, the first step toward nudging the world in that direction is ending U.S. aid to Ukraine — which, as became clear this week, depends on convincing his Republican colleagues in the House to kill Johnson’s foreign aid package.

Vance has marshaled several different arguments against additional U.S. aid to Ukraine, prompting his opponents in both parties to argue that he’s merely carrying water for Vladimir Putin and other authoritarian leaders. (Vance has, of course, pushed back against this characterization.)

When it comes to the specifics of the Ukraine bill, Vance has been pushing three main objections. In his New York Times op-ed last week, Vance argued that the current aid package — which would provide an additional $60 billion to Ukraine — would do little to shift the war in Ukraine’s favor. (Supporters of the current aid package have challenged this claim.) Vance also argues that the U.S. lacks the manufacturing capacity to produce the volume of weapons that Ukraine would need to win the war.

His last, and most explicitly partisan, objection stems from his preparations for Trump’s possible return to the White House next year. Vance has objected to a component of Johnson’s aid package — which proposes seizing Russian assets under the REPO Act and freezing the current sanction regime against Russia in place — on the grounds that it would tie a second-term Trump’s hands in his negotiations with Russia. This isn’t the first time that Vance has objected to Ukraine aid by invoking Trump, either. In February, when the Senate was debating its own version of the aid package, Vance told his colleagues that locking spending levels in place could create a hidden mechanism for Democrats to impeach Trump in his second term.

Yet Vance’s efforts this week to persuade his Republican colleagues in the House of these specific objections are, in many respects, secondary to his broader goal of shifting the Republican paradigm on foreign policy. As Vance explained to me during our conversations, this larger project goes beyond injecting some “realism” — or, as his critics would call it, “isolationism” — into the foreign policy debates on the right. In a more expansive sense, Vance sees the debate over Ukraine aid as a proxy for the debate over the direction of what he openly calls “the American empire” — and, by extension, of America as a whole.

“The really interesting debate that is happening between the establishment right and the populist right is [about] challenging the premise … that things are going really well,” Vance told me. On the one side, establishment Republicans believe that the American empire is trending in the right direction; populist Republicans believe that the American empire is on the verge of collapse. The establishment points to falling poverty rates around the world; the populist right points to falling birth and life expectancies at home.

“There’s just this desperate effort to just argue that everything’s gone well,” Vance told me, “and, man, I just don’t buy it at all.”