The ‘enigma’: Why Jd Vance Befuddles The World

If you want to make a foreign official roll their eyes in exasperation, ask them about President Donald Trump. If you want to make them freeze like a deer in headlights, ask them about JD Vance.

The vice president — currently the strongest likely contender for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination — is increasingly on the minds of global power players as they scan the U.S. political horizon. Foreign officials who have dealt with Vance tell me they’ve found Vance and his allies to be influential on foreign affairs inside the Trump orbit.

In this diplomatic crew, there’s a hope that, should he reach the Oval Office, Vance will be a more predictable president than his current boss and run a more disciplined policy-making process.

But Vance also is unnerving officials in many capitals. They worry he’s too willing to put ideology above reality. They fret that he doesn’t know enough about world history. In some cases, they’re concerned that he doesn’t have a clear stance on issues in many parts of the world.

“He's an intellectual, so he's got all the positives and negatives of intellectuals,” a European diplomat told me. “He’s very smart and has a great deal of sort of abstract, theoretical depth, but he's probably not much of a pragmatist and doesn't really know a huge amount of the ins and outs of history and how the world works.”

I granted the diplomat and others anonymity to be candid about someone they may have to work with for a long time.

Vance is only 41 and hasn’t served long in public office. The diplomats and officials I spoke to know he must be careful right now not to stray far from the views of the looming, emotional Trump. They also don’t expect Vance to already have a fully formed agenda for the world to splash across the pages of Foreign Affairs.

Still, based on Vance’s moves so far, some foreign officials worry that when he does craft that vision, it will be lacking in depth and nuance, and more about scoring points than solving problems. (This is a worry expressed in some corners of the Trump administration, too.)

It was Vance, after all, who led the verbal attack on Ukraine’s leader in that infamous Oval Office meeting, an incident that led many diplomats to conclude Vance was an arrogant jerk. It is Vance who — in a Signal group chat, at last year’s Munich Security Conferenceand elsewhere — has accused European countries of relying too much on U.S. defense aid and cracking down too hard on conservative speech. It’s also Vance who talks about saving European and Western civilization from mass migration.

Vance’s concerns about the world are rarely rooted in traditional foreign policy issues such as nuclear proliferation, conflict management or, to be more modern, climate change. Dig a little, and you realize that he sees foreign policy largely through the lens of U.S. domestic issues. Often, those issues revolve around economics, class and culture.

The takeaway for one former Latin American diplomat? “He doesn't really care about the interests of any other country.”

That could be dangerous, because despite Vance’s love of borders, problems in a land far, far away can suddenly explode on America’s doorstep.

As my colleague Ian Ward and others have chronicled, Vance believes the post-World War II rules-based global order, with its multilateral bodies and free trade, was a project that over time screwed over the U.S. working class for the unrealized dream of turning China into a democracy. Vance, an Iraq war veteran, thinks many in the working class died in “forever wars” that did little to promote American interests. U.S. societal cohesion is further threatened by too much immigration, he says. Vance, who is married to an Indian-American woman, insists that such anxiety is not about race or ethnicity, but about values.

He does, however, seem concerned about a country’s religious makeup, at least when it comes to Islam. Vance, a Catholic convert, has said he hopes his Hindu wife will someday become Christian.

Nearly all of the dozen diplomats I spoke to said Vance is more of an ideologue than Trump. There’s also a sense that a Vance-led America would be more isolationist than Trump’s America. Some expect Vance to significantly downsize America’s military footprint abroad.

“I don't think he's going to swing back to America being the principal donor of aid and security across the planet,” a second European diplomat predicted.

Vance is dead-set on strengthening the U.S. economy, especially to help the working class and rebuild America’s manufacturing base, said Sumantra Maitra, a senior fellow at the conservative Center for Renewing America and a Vance ally. He also is unlikely to let the U.S. be the world’s policeman, Maitra told me.

But other leaders should not underestimate Vance’s knowledge or characterize him as someone who cannot adapt to reality, Maitra said. “He is extremely well-read …When people say JD Vance is ideological, what they mean to say is he’s a lot more determined about shifting the grand strategy of the U.S.”

For foreign officials, though, many of Vance’s claims about globalization, migration and more are wild oversimplifications that could further hurt America’s alliances.

For instance: Yes, in recent decades, though not immediately after World War II, U.S. manufacturing has declined. But numerous factors beyond global institutions and China affected that trend, including advances in technology. Further, Vance’s claims that mass migration threatens European “civilization” ignore how diverse the continent has always been. (Try telling Germans and Italians that they are the same.) Vance seems to largely ignore steps Europeans have taken to limit migration, not to mention how many migrants flee to Europe precisely because they believe in values he says he extols, such as freedom of speech.

Does Vance not know such details? Or does he not care? Maybe he’s exploiting a political opportunity. Or maybe he wants to challenge what he sees as conventional wisdom from a failed elite.

What if people get hurt? It’s hard to forget how Vance (and Trump) spread falsehoods about Haitian migrants in Ohio eating pets. When Vance was confronted about this, he defended his actions by saying he needed to “create stories” to bring media attention to the suffering of Americans.

Regardless of his views, Vance is one of the few reliable conduits to Trump, who remains the ultimate decision-maker on foreign policy at present.

The vice president’s influence is enhanced in part by the positioning of some of his aides and associates. Diplomats in particular pointed to Andy Baker, the quiet operator who serves as deputy national security adviser. Vance’s office also is viewed in some corners as a good workaround to communicate with the White House, given the downsizing of Trump’s National Security Council staff. On policy related to Myanmar, for example, activists have found a receptive audience among Vance aides, a person familiar with the situation said.

Vance has been part of the discussions on all the major Trump foreign policy debates, from Iran to Greenland, diplomats and people familiar with Trump inner circle dynamics said. (Vance insists he was fully briefed on the operation that captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, despite some reporting to the contrary. He reportedly got involved in discussions related to the conflict between Rwanda and Congo as well.)

Vance was involved in talks for a ceasefire between Iran and Israel after a brief war last summer. “He’s very results-oriented,” a Middle Eastern official said. “He can be forceful in mediation, but also very professional. He’s willing to push both sides.”

The diplomats having the hardest time understanding Vance are those from Latin America, Africa and Asia. That’s because the vice president has paid limited attention to their regions. He has warned about China, though typically through an economic lens that shows his concern about U.S. workers.

“He’s such an enigma to us,” one Asian diplomat said.

In a statement, Taylor Van Kirk, a spokesperson for Vance, said the vice president’s “role in this administration’s foreign policy is very simple: He is there to ensure President Trump’s America First foreign policy is being implemented at every step of the way.”

Should he run for president, one of Vance’s biggest challenges will be explaining — and perhaps in some cases distancing himself from — Trump’s foreign policy choices. Already in his first year as vice president, Vance has had to engage in some acrobatics to justify Trump’s military operations against Iran and Venezuela.

He won’t be alone. Every GOP candidate will have to reckon with Trump’s record. That potentially includes Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has a much longer foreign policy resume with plenty of flip-flops (but a softer touch with the Munich crowd).

Foreign officials take solace in the fact that Vance once opposed Trump before doing so made it impossible to succeed as a Republican. It shows that Vance, despite being ideological, can still be flexible, though perhaps for opportunistic reasons.

“Life would be easier if we could choose our problems,” a European official opined about a future President Vance. “Instead, we deal with the ones we get.”