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J.D. Vance’s Foreign Policy Vision
Duration
0:00 / 40:12
Published
July 25, 2024

Donald Trump’s decision to tap Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate marks the culmination of a Republican foreign policy transformation. While some aspects of Trump’s foreign policy choices in his first term alienated neoconservatives, other elements aligned with their views—and his previous vice presidential pick, Mike Pence, hailed from the interventionist wing of the party. By contrast, Vance has stridently denounced the Iraq War and criticized US funding for Ukraine. His selection suggests that a second Trump term could represent a sharper break from GOP orthodoxy on foreign policy and heralds the rise of a realist nationalist vision for how the US should conduct itself around the world.

On this episode of On the Nose, senior reporter Alex Kane speaks with historian Suzanne Schneider and political analyst Matt Duss about the ideology driving Vance’s agenda, his argument that “America First” foreign policy must include US support for Israel, and how a second Trump administration would differ from the Biden administration on international affairs.

Thanks to guest producer Will Smith and to Nathan Salsburg for the use of his song “VIII (All That Were Calculated Have Passed).”

Articles Mentioned and Further Reading:

Light Among The Nations,” Suzanne Schneider, Jewish Currents

Vance on Iran: ‘If You’re Going to Punch the Iranians, You Punch Them Hard,’” Matthew Kassel, Jewish Insider

Vance’s Keynote Speech at Quincy Institute/The American Conservative Conference

Trump Taps Vance as Running Mate, Anointing Ideological Successor,” Matthew Kassel, Jewish Insider

Leaked Memo Shows J.D. Vance’s Anti-Woke Ideology on Foreign Affairs,” John Hudson, The Washington Post

Harris Candidacy Gives Democrats a Chance to Pivot on Gaza,” Matt Duss, Foreign Policy


Transcript:

Alex Kane: Hello and welcome to On the Nose, the Jewish Currents Podcast. I’m Alex Kane, a senior reporter for Jewish Currents and your host today. Donald Trump’s choice of Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate marks the culmination of a Republican foreign policy transformation. Post-9/11, the party was dominated by the neoconservatives and hawks who invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, and while Trump’s first term did include some novel foreign policy choices that the neocons hated, it also had elements they liked, and his vice-presidential pick, Mike Pence, hailed from the interventionist wing of the party.

The choice of Vance, however, is at the very least a break from the old way of thinking, reflecting the rise of a realist, nationalist wing in the party. Vance denounces the Iraq war in strident terms and is highly critical of US funding for Ukraine while sounding extremely hawkish notes on China. We’re going to be discussing that and more--and what it means for the GOP’s foreign policy--with two guests: Suzanne Schneider and Matt Duss. Suzie is a historian, writer, and core faculty member at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Matt is executive vice president at the Center for International Policy, a progressive nonprofit focusing on foreign policy. Matt and Suzie, welcome to On the Nose.

Matt Duss: Thank you, Alex,

Suzanne Schneider: Great to be here.

AK: So let’s start with going a little bit beyond Vance. I was wondering if you guys could sketch out the universe of this new hawkish nationalist foreign policy movement within the GOP. What are the factors fueling its rise? What does it believe, and what organizations and figures is Vance aligned with?

SS: Well, I think one piece of this is the emergence over the last several years of the national conservatism movement, which is a project of the Edmund Burke Foundation, which was created by the Israeli American political theorist Yoram Hazony in order to bring the model of independent, sovereign nation-states back into the focus. So part of that comes with a critique of liberal internationalism, which, at the theoretical level, Hazony and his cohort associate with a sort of imperial project. So, institutions like the EU, or the UN, or the ICC--all of these things are very much on the chopping block for this group. And many of Vance’s views on foreign policy (to the extent that we’re able to suss them out thus far) seem very closely aligned with that coming out of the NatCon world. Remember: He was at the inaugural NatCon conference in 2019; he’s been there almost every single one. So one way into understanding the sorts of policies he’s likely to advance is by understanding what’s happening in that world.

AK: What are some of the additional principles of national conservatism as it relates to foreign policy?

SS: In some ways, national conservatism invokes a sort of America First language--that the primary purpose/responsibility of the government of the United States is to serve the interests of the citizens of the United States. We can really get into all of the various ways in which this America First project differs from the alpha version of that. Because, of course, they’re not interested in a total abandonment of US hegemony or of the imperial scale of American politics, but they are more selective in terms of which foreign conflicts they want to intervene in. And so, very broadly--and you mentioned some of this during your introduction--but the positions are very hawkish on China. A sense that funding the Ukraine War is detracting our attention from focusing attention on China, which is the major threat, and a real desire to differentiate support for Israel from that of Ukraine because these things have often been tied together in the foreign policy discourse over the last 10 months or so. And they’re at pains to differentiate them and to make the argument that while American support for Ukraine should be suspended--or needs to be tied to these very clear strategic goals--there, of course, is no such kind of criteria laid out for Israel. There’s a whole number of reasons that they give for that, but extremely hawkish on Israel, as we should not be surprised, given the extent to which this movement is fully in bed with a very right-wing form of religious Zionism, from Hazony down the line. I want to let Matt Duss speak to this as well.

MD: Sure. I would step back and look at the core argument that Vance is making (and that Trump has been making) going back to 2016, in foreign policy but generally, which is that the elites are screwing you. They’re taking care of themselves. You are getting a raw deal. And this applies to foreign as much as domestic policy. If you go to Vance’s speech last week at the convention, I thought it was really interesting. It was billed as a foreign policy national security speech, but it was mostly focused on trade, and jobs, and economics, and how America’s Heartland had been deindustrialized. And he used his own personal story, obviously, as a young person from a poor community who had gone and done his duty for the country--joined the Marines, went to Iraq. “But I was lied to,” he said, and that gets traction, because that is correct, right? I mean, this is not something made up; it is very real.

What you had said about the neocons in the Iraq War, I think that’s right, but it is important to remember that the Iraq War was very much a bipartisan project. The neocons were mostly Republicans at that point, but you had many (including our current president) who were supportive of it. It was something that had strong bipartisan support. So I think that when Vance (and before him, Trump)--I will never forget, I forget when during the 2016 primary it occurred, but it was very early on when Trump was up there with like 30 other candidates. It was one of those huge cattle calls, like everyone was up there, and Trump just comes out, and he’s like: The Iraq War was a huge screw-up; 9/11 was George W. Bush’s fault. And everyone was like, “Oh my god, I can’t believe he said that,” but everyone who was not inside the Beltway was like, “Yep, sounds right. Agree with it.” And it was this wake-up call that the way that we have been talking about foreign policy--the way the foreign policy establishment has talked to each other about this--just doesn’t have much truck anymore with Americans. I think it’s important to understand that, to get where Vance is coming from. It’s a very anti-elite argument, and the reason people believe it is because it is based on a lot of reality.

Now, getting to how I would characterize it. I see this word “isolationist” thrown around so much, and I just really disagree with it. If you look at Trump’s actual record as president, it is not isolationist. It is unilateralist. It is militarist. It’s basically just this idea that these rules--America should be able to use violence and do what it wants, unbound by rules, and so should our friends. I think that’s what you also see from Vance. If anything, it is even more imperial, despite the fact that--I think what Suzie was just saying--how it’s anti-imperial. I mean, it is, on its base level, a kind of imperialism, because with Trump, it’s always about: What are we owed? We’re getting ripped off, but as the most powerful country in the world, we are owed tribute. I mean, that is very basically imperialist. If you want to be part of the protection racket, you got to pay up. And again, Vance may put a softer edge on that, but that is really one of the kind of driving principles there.

SS: I am, similarly, really dismayed by the rapidity of labeling him isolationist because that’s not what this project is about. It’s unilateralist, or selective hawkishness--however you want to narrate it. It certainly does not entail a retreat from the world stage or imagining a world in which America is not a global hegemon that is able to enforce its will on various regions. I wanted to just pick up, Matt, on what you said in terms of why this lands, why this tracks. Because it does echo the reality of so many people’s lived experiences, and that, in the same way that Trump could stand up there and break with the foreign policy establishment--and particularly within the GOP about all of the apologetics around the Iraq War; even though it was a shit show, it was fundamentally good because it got rid of Saddam Hussein, so on and so forth. They’re doing the same thing on economic policy. And this is why these things do garner attention, and they do track, because they’re reflective of a broadly shared experience. Our economy does suck, and wages are too low. They’re willing to say these things and break with, at this point, 40 years of conservative economic orthodoxy. So it doesn’t surprise me that they’re also making this differentiation on the foreign policy track. They’re really trying, at each step, to carve a unique life for the new right--whatever we want to call it--that will be different from the neoliberal orthodoxy, and so on and so forth.

AK: I spent part of the past week reading through some of Vance’s Senate speeches and interviews. I found, as you guys referenced, a lot of denunciations of endless war and specifically the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, which of course, Vance participated in as a Marine. What was surprising to me is that in October 2023, as US soldiers found themselves targets of Iranian-allied groups in the Middle East following the October 7 Hamas attack and subsequent war in Gaza, Vance said it would be a mistake to strike Iran itself. However, in a Fox interview after he was picked to be vice president, he praised Trump’s decision to assassinate Iranian general Qasem Soleimani and said, “If you’re gonna punch the Iranians, you punch them hard.” So how should we understand Vance’s current Middle East militarism, which is seemingly contradicted by his denunciations of endless war?

MD: This is like I was saying. Looking at Trump’s actual record, there were two specific moments when the US was really close to war, one of which was in the wake of the assassination of Soleimani. If you remember--a lot of people don’t remember because Trump is a Republican, this didn’t get as much attention--but there was the attack on Al Assad airbase. An hours-long attack by the Iranians in retaliation for that assassination, in which over 100 American service members endured severe concussions and brain injuries. Thankfully, none of them were killed. But again, this was something that Trump denied at first and then slowly dribbled out the information. So that retaliation was pretty severe in terms of what was experienced by American service members. But again, tensions were extremely high.

And then you look at 2017, the war of words between Trump and Kim Jong Un, another moment when we were really at the brink. Both of these situations could have easily gone the other way. We basically got lucky. Again, war didn’t happen, but I think it’s a recklessness and a performative macho--this is how we advance our interest, by showing strength. But then at key moments, Trump, following his own logic, could have followed through in a catastrophic way. But again, it doesn’t show any kind of rigorous approach to policy. It is just really performative. I’ll keep using that word because that’s Trump: Trump is a performer, and that’s a very, very key way--he’s a very good performer, I will say. That’s a really important way to understand how he approaches policy and politics in general.

SS: Specifically, with regard to the Middle East, Vance echoes many of the talking points that you see, both in conservative circles but on the Zionist right in particular: that the United States’ job is to write the blank checks for weapons. It is not their job to have any sort of input about how those weapons are used or to micromanage the war. Yoram Hazony has said explicitly this. You hear Vance saying basically the same thing, recently, on the show Hannity. That in order to end the war quickly, the United States has to stop tying Israel’s hands. It’s one of the ways that they blame the Biden administration for the continuation of the war, is that Israel has not been able to actually take the gloves off and act with the full fighting force because it’s been overly cautious as a result of the various strictures that the Biden administration has put upon it.

MD: It’s funny that Ukraine hawk[s] make that exact same argument about Ukraine: that Ukraine has not been allowed to win by Biden.

SS: But then, of course, they will turn around. Vance authored a letter, which was very fascinating, last October, I think like 10 days after the war began, something like that. In an extremely short period of time, he authored a letter with Kevin Roberts, of the rebooted Heritage Foundation, which is also in this aligned camp, criticizing the attempt to tie aid for Israel to that of Ukraine funding for the war. And they really tried to differentiate these two projects, basically by saying that Ukraine is more like a client state, it’s not democratic. They truly went out of their way to justify the alliance with Israel on the basis that it was a democracy, as opposed to Ukraine, which is this very corrupt post-Soviet state, and that there are achievable goals in the context of Israel, which did not exist in the context of Ukraine, and that all of those things differentiated it.

And Hazony has similarly made this case that unlike Ukraine--where the Ukraine not just wants US military, actual artillery and military equipment, but they really want US advice, men on the ground, NATO membership, all of these things--Israel is a fully functional state, able to wage its own wars. It doesn’t require American troops. It doesn’t require American oversight. It doesn’t require any of those things. All it requires is that flow of weapons, and it is this key ally in a way, then, that Ukraine is not, because it’s fully able to stand on its own two feet. So it’s really fascinating to see them attempting to triangulate that and really differentiate here.

And then the final thing to add on Vance and foreign policy in the Middle East is that he’s very much already speaking about the revitalization of--you have these normalization talks with Saudi Arabia and with other Gulf states, and the assumption being that they will continue to just shunt the Palestinians to the side, and that they will be able to play ball again, and that some sort of extension of the Abraham Accords (which [are] often trotted out as Trump’s signature foreign policy success) is the way to achieving some sort of stability in this region. Just completely running roughshod over any sort of Palestinian rights or national aspirations.

AK: I did want to get into Israel because there’s a lot of interesting things going on. Obviously, as we referenced, Vance has argued that an America First foreign policy should include US backing of Israel because it serves America’s interests. He referenced how Israel is helping the United States develop missile defense technology in his speech to the Quincy Institute and the American Conservative magazine a couple of months ago. That said, his Israel rhetoric hasn’t quieted worries among (at least some) pro-Israel Republicans from the neocon wing. Eric Levine, a Republican donor and Republican Jewish Coalition board member, told Jewish Insider earlier this month that Vance’s larger foreign policy platform is antithetical to a pro-Israel agenda, while the American Enterprise Institute’s Danielle Pletka worried that one day, Vance could abandon Israel. So what should we make of their worries? Is it possible Vance is a fair-weather Israel friend? Or is it a core principle, as perhaps, Suzie, you were talking about?

MD: Also, at that Quincy Institute speech, he talked about how America is still a large majority Christian nation, and Christians take very seriously the fact that their Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, lived in this piece of land. And, you know, I’ve spoken elsewhere--I mean, I grew up in the evangelical church. I get what he’s saying here. It is a very valid point. The fact that people are raised with this understanding of their own culture, their own religion--this has enormous political implications. It does go a long way to help explaining why Americans retain an enormous sympathy for Israel, just generally, even people who don’t know very much about foreign policy or about the Middle East at all. They’ve been raised, historically, just to see Israel as part of their own story, and I think that’s very powerful. It’s hard for me to see a situation in which Vance, for reasons both of his own understanding of his religious faith and also because of the nature of the Republican base, ever really shifting from that in any dramatic way.

SS: Yeah, I also don’t see him realigning on this. Basically, everything he says about Israel (and Middle East foreign policy more broadly) seems to echo what Hazony says in almost lockstep fashion. I would be shocked to see him really depart from that. There are some interesting question marks, though. Like he’s not cosponsored these two bills on antisemitism that were moving through Congress in May. He offered support for his own--introduced his own bill on the encampments that would essentially remove federal funding to universities that didn’t dismantle their encampments. But there were some eyebrows raised because he did not sign on as a cosponsor, either to this Countering Antisemitism Act or the Antisemitism Awareness Act that would require the Department of Education to use the very much contested definition of antisemitism that includes anti-Zionism.

AK: I mean, that’s just an example of these emerging fault lines on the right when it comes to Israel, particularly Israel as a domestic issue. There’s probably broader alignment on US support for Israel (the nation) and Israel’s military occupation, but there is more and more an aversion on the right to using the state to police antisemitism--or, I should say, purported antisemitism. That’s not true across the board. You do have people like Tucker Carlson (who, of course, is very close to J.D. Vance), who is also saying “Why is the US spending so much money on Israel?” for his own nationalist reasons. But I think what you’re pointing to, Suzie, points to this fear, I would say, among some conservatives about empowering the state to police speech. In particular, when the Antisemitism Awareness Act came up, you had people like Matt Gaetz saying, “Well, this would say the Bible is antisemitic because the Bible says Jews killed Jesus.”

AK: I wanted to go a little deeper on the Christian aspect of this. Matt, you mentioned how Vance explained that Christianity is a key part of why he thinks the US always will support Israel. There was a piece of news that came out last week that was probably buried amidst all of the other news going on: A Washington Post reporter, John Hudson, obtained a questionnaire that Vance gave to nominees to be US ambassadors, and Vance held up a lot of these potential US ambassadors. He asked them things like: Would they increase the number of gender-neutral bathrooms in US embassies, or boost resources for gender dysphoria and gender transition care, or raise the progress flag during regional Pride celebrations? So I just wanted to bring up that report and ask: How should we understand how Vance’s religiosity informs his foreign policy world? Obviously, Vance is a Catholic--or converted to Catholicism. I don’t know what, really, to make of that.

SS: One thing that’s interesting about Vance is that much more so than many politicians, he is really embedded in this “new right” intellectual world. And if you look at some of the figures that are floating around there, and people that he cited as being influential on his thoughts, you have all of these--what are called the Catholic Integralists--so people like Patrick Deneen and Sohrab Ahmari. And the essential argument of this crew is that, actually, state power is required to enforce some sort of religious virtue. Patrick Deneen even goes as far to say that, actually, Christians are not a moral majority anymore. They’re a moral minority, and only state power can make them into the majority force once more. So you do have, again, at the intellectual level at least, these sorts of new currents, particularly coming out of Catholic intellectual circuitry, about the way that state power can be used to enforce certain religious principles and reengineer a virtuous populace. So I would think about some of Vance’s noises about the pride and gender-neutral bathrooms, et cetera, also through that lens of: If we’re going to have control over the state, then what exactly are we going to use it for?

MD: Right. The big piece that laid a lot of this out and got a lot of eyes on it was Sohrab Ahmari’s piece about drag queen story hours. Just the idea that public libraries would be hosting places for kids where drag queens read them stories is unacceptable but an example of how the state, through the instrument of public libraries, was contributing to the degradation of our society, and therefore, state power should be used to create a better society. Of course, they are the ones who define what the better society is.

SS: The idea that separation of church and state was a mistake is something that’s really coursing through this end of the “new right” intellectual world. They just had a session devoted to it at NatCon in DC a few weeks ago. It’s part of Hazony’s work, that really, the idea is that each state needs to endorse, and support, and further whatever the majority religion is in all of these public spheres. So is this traditional? Is this actually conservative? No, but it’s a radical break, actually, with American tradition that’s justified through this lens of preserving what is good and sacred about the nation.

MD: And it also, like all fundamentalist movements, harkens back to a mostly imagined perfection, like perfect era when men were men, and women knew their place, and the kids were well-dressed and well-behaved. And again, this goes back to, partly, an economic argument. A breadwinner could work a job, and support a family, and buy a home and an automobile, and have a good life. So it’s important to understand the economic factors at play here. What we hear from Vance and the people that Suzie mentioned--they have refined this into a really aggressive and potent message about the need to retake the power of the state and change things back.

SS: When you keep in mind that kind of regressive social policy that’s working behind all of this--I mean, truly an obsession with demography, an obsession with: Why aren’t people having more babies, specifically nice white babies? All of this also is the stuff that fuels the willingness, at least selectively, to take on corporate power, particularly big tech. All of the idea of “woke capitalism.” There’s a culture war undercurrent that has paved the way for some of these seemingly progressive economic policies on antitrust or on other kinds of economic positions.

AK: Whenever I’m reading about J.D. Vance, he’s often referred to as, quote-unquote, an “Asia-first conservative,” by which they mean someone who wants to focus US foreign policy on--why the obsession with China? How does that fit into the larger agenda that he’s pushing?

MD: Well, first off, the obsession with China that has cropped up in Washington, again, is bipartisan, and it has happened very quickly. And my usual preamble here is like, yes, there are certainly reasons we should be concerned with the Chinese Communist Party’s vision for the world and its treatment of its own people and all of that. But this hysteria that has gripped Washington, it serves several purposes. For the general foreign policy establishment--and there are definitely people like this in the Biden administration, too, in the Democratic Party--they see it as a useful tool for rebuilding or reforging or reconsolidating the so-called foreign policy consensus, which has broken up since 2016. It’s like: Well, we can all at least come back together and agree that China is the biggest threat since the history of sliced bread, and we can all unite politically and build political unity around this idea.

MD: It serves another purpose, I think, for the right, which is--I mean, it’s certainly cultural and civilizational. This is part of the reason why they see Putin, potentially, as a partner. Though I definitely am not someone who criticizes or thinks it’s appropriate to criticize people who disagree with me on Ukraine as like, tools of Russia. I think that’s a bunch of bullshit. People can have good-faith disagreement about Ukraine policy, but there’s definitely a strain of that thinking which sees Putin as this avatar of white Christian nationalism--also anti-woke, also anti-gay--but that the real threats are the Asian hordes, as represented by China. The last point I’ll make is there is also--and this is where I get to the valid argument--the economic argument they make. And again, you heard Vance saying this in his speech last week, it was: We sent our jobs to China. And again, that is true, but that’s not something China did to us. That’s something corporate America did to us with the connivance and cooperation of both of our political parties. But again, it is a valid argument.

SS: Yeah. I mean, I was just going to echo that. In his speech at NatCon a few weeks ago, Vance says that it was the United States’ industrial base that allowed it to prevail during the Second World War, right? Nothing else--not military might, but really, the industrial base and that we are in this weakened position as a world power, precisely because we have offshored so much of that. We’re not making these critical products anymore. All these strategic industries have been basically sent abroad to, as he says, to people who hate us, and it puts the United States in this particular area of vulnerability.

So there’s this way in which the idea of restored manufacturing--the resuscitation of that 1950s era worker abundance, domestic harmony dream--goes with the idea that we will become a world power again, and we’ll be able to exert our might where we want to by having this restrengthened industrial base. And the other thing is, I don’t know how much this is at the forefront of his thoughts or not, but certainly for the kind of--for Hazony and for others who are very interested in maintaining America’s unconditional support for Israel--Hazony has become a massive China hawk in the past few years. You didn’t see that as part of his thought earlier. It wasn’t really in, like, The Virtue of Nationalism, but over the last few years, he’s gone with the with the broader flow here. I think there’s some real concerns in that world about what a China-dominated international order would mean for Israel. China has this very, very different relation--they don’t have necessarily bad relations with Israel, but they have a completely instrumental relationship on trade, technology, right? Certainly not a special relationship of the sort that the United States has. So I think that there is also some idea that America has to maintain this global hegemonic position in order to project power in places like the Middle East that they want to.

MD: Which is interesting because you would think that China is right up his alley, in terms of a nation that’s getting what it needs. But I guess it’s not a part of the, quote, unquote, “Judeo-Christian traditions.”

SS: Not only that, Matt. I was listening to a podcast he did with David Goldman from Tablet, who writes on East Asia and is also a massive China hawk. And they’re making the argument that, actually, China’s not a nation-state; it’s an empire. And so it tilts into that category of the bad empire, not the good.

MD: Yeah, I feel like this is an argument with a bunch of escape hatches. I don’t know. Maybe it’s not completely on the level.

AK: I wanted to end by contrasting the Vance and national conservative foreign policy vision with their political opponents: the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party has spent the past nine months backing Israel’s relentless assault on Gaza and arming Ukraine in its fight against Russia. So, as we’ve been discussing, the narrative that the GOP is anti-intervention or isolationist should be looked at quite skeptically because the GOP also supports Israel’s wars and wants to ramp up tensions with China and a lot of other states. But I can see how some Americans might buy the narrative that the GOP is, in fact, skeptical of American interventionism when the two countries that are in wars are being armed by the Biden administration--that is, Israel and Ukraine. So, my question is: What happens when the Democratic Party is pursuing the foreign policy that it has pursued over the past four years with the Biden administration, and how does that allow the GOP to frame itself as the party that is anti-intervention?

MD: The events of the past 48 hours have, I think, undercut some of the arguments that Trump and Vance were already making, but there’s definitely more to be done. But I’ll just go back and say, looking at Vance’s speech, there were three big hits on Joe Biden’s foreign policy records. One was his support for NAFTA. Another one was his support for China’s entry into the WTO. And the last was, of course, his support for the Iraq War. All of which kind of buttress this argument that these elites--of which Joe Biden has been a part for over 50 years--did this to America’s working people. Those arguments are no longer valid. He can make them against the Democratic Party more broadly, but not against Kamala Harris. And I do think that’s important because they will be forced to contend with just Kamala’s record as it is over the past four years and some of what she did in the Senate. But I do think Kamala’s response to that is like: Well, in the past four years, we have done major investments in American industry, in American manufacturing. We have done, frankly, more than Trump did, to turn the page on neoliberal trade and economic theology. And obviously, she doesn’t have to deal with the Iraq War question because I don’t think she ever said anything about that. She certainly wasn’t in Congress at the time. So again, I don’t think she’s going to want to completely distance herself from Biden, obviously, personally. But again, those arguments aren’t going to land on Kamala as they would as they would on Biden. But still, you do have a kind of democratic foreign policy and economic orthodoxy that, even though it is in flux, is still going to have to find a way to respond to those claims.

SS: Yeah, and I would just add that the particular vulnerability here is that, of course, there’s some truth to these things and people experience that; people are not dumb. The idea that there’s all these foreign policy misadventures which have gone horribly awry, that come from this hubristic attempt to project American willpower globally--I think these things deeply resonate. Just as the coming of the new right has allowed the GOP an opportunity to pivot away from that old kind of orthodoxy, I think the Democrats also are going to have to figure out how they are going to pivot away from some of that. And obviously, the responses that they formulate are not going to be (or should not be) the same ones of these--the unilateralists, or the selective hawks, whatever you want to call them. But I think recognizing the limitations in those foreign policy positions, in the same way that there’s a wider recognition now of the limitations in the economic neoliberal orthodoxy, would probably be a good thing for the Dems going forward.

MD: I want to completely agree with that because I feel like that is where the disconnect has been in Biden’s approach. I mean domestically--and even, in some ways, in foreign policy--I think he’s had enormous accomplishments because he has broken with that old economic doctrine on foreign policy. With a few exceptions, he has maintained this commitment to American primacy, to American global military hegemony, without seeming to really understand how you cannot have both of these things. I mean, part of the opportunity--and I’ll have a piece for Foreign Policy that should come out later this week, perhaps when this podcast comes out, that talks about the opportunity that I think Kamala Harris has to bring these two things into some constant, and that requires not taking a selective approach to the question of human rights and international law as Biden and Vance do. Because, as I said, their whole approach--it’s not isolation. It’s just: We get to use violence, and our friends get to use violence wherever and whenever we want, and the rules are to be imposed on our adversaries. The world does not accept this, especially countries in the developing world, the Global South--whatever word we want to use--that have seen America behave in this way. And they’re just--if we need to work with, and appeal to, and create relationships with these countries and with these peoples, then this kind of double standard is just no longer going to cut it. So I think changing that is a real opportunity that Kamala Harris has.

AK: I want to look ahead to a Trump/Vance administration if, obviously--we have a whole election to happen, and Kamala Harris could very well win--but if the Trump/Vance ticket wins the election, where do you expect to see the sharpest break from Biden’s foreign policy and also the most continuity with Biden’s foreign policy?

SS: We say historians are very bad at predicting the future. Fuzzy crystal balls. I would expect the breaks to be around Ukraine, frankly, but I really don’t know. I think that they will further empower Israel to wage this extremely destructive war, and with the idea that all of the parties will return to the table because they’re too afraid of what the Trump administration might do. I think they’ll put priority on restarting normalization talks and sidelining the Palestinians. So I think all of those noises that the Biden administration has made over the last several months about the need for a two-state solution, all of this stuff is like zombie diplomacy, as far as I’m concerned, to begin with. But I think that any pretense that that is on the table will just get shunted to the side.

MD: Which, I think, will lead to more instability and ultimately, potentially, to more wars that young women and men will have to go fight. I generally agree. I mean, the approach to Russia/Ukraine seems clearly to be an area where it’s going to be different. I think in some cases, a Trump/Vance administration will just accelerate or make more aggressive policies like China and in Asia. Another thing worth noting here is the border and immigration and the impacts that that will have in Central and South America. Because it’s not just--even though they are talking about bombing Mexico to go to war against the drug cartels, it’s--if you remember, Trump essentially supported regime change, or an attempted regime change, in Venezuela. Who knows how he will deal with a Lula administration in Brazil. Again, I think the US-Brazil relationship has been a really unsung success of the Biden administration, going back to the way they handled the elections, which could very well have turned out to be a military coup, but the US did some really good diplomatic work there. But I think we really need to change our relationship with that region, and Trump will change it very much for the worse.

AK: Well, thank you so much, guys. This was really, really interesting and enlightening.

And that’s our show. As always, check out more of our work at JewishCurrents.org, subscribe to our magazine, and rate us on your podcast apps. We will see you next time.


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