John Jefferson
On October 26, J.D. Vance, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, marked a distance with Israel on the escalating situation in the Middle East. On the Tim Dillon Show, he acknowledged Israel’s right to defend itself, but cautioned that “America’s interest is sometimes going to be distinct [from Israel’s]. Sometimes we’re going to have overlapping interests, and sometimes we’re going to have distinct interests.” He clarified further that the U.S. interest “very much is in not going to war with Iran”. Such a war, Vance emphasized, “would be a huge distraction of resources; it would be massively expensive to our country”.
These remarks are significant for several reasons. First, they are said in the midst of a tightly fought presidential election, with most polls suggesting the Harris–Trump showdown is a toss-up. When it comes to Israel, especially during an election, what most U.S. politicians typically offer is the boilerplate of platitudes on Washington’s “ironclad” commitment to Israel’s security and efforts to out-hawk each other on the “pariah states” like Iran.
As Responsible Statecraft’s Kelley Vlahos noted, commenting on the debate between Vance and Governor Tim Walz, trying to outgun a Democratic opponent on Iran rhetoric is what a more hawkish Republican candidate, like Nikki Haley, would have done in Vance’s place.
It is true that Vance did sound some conventional lines in that debate, such as a need to stand by Israel, but what is noteworthy is that he did not seize on the opportunity to burnish his aggressive credentials, even though the CBS anchor Margaret Brennan made it easy for him to do so by framing the only foreign policy issue as a question of whether the candidates were ready to preemptively strike Iran (a nation, lest we forget, not at war with the U.S.). Vance did repeat allegations about the Biden-Harris administration easing some $100 billion to Iran; when reminded by his opponent of Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal with Iran in 2018, however, he said that “diplomacy is not a dirty word,” suggesting a potential openness to talk to Tehran.
Second, those skeptical of the Republican Party’s shift to a foreign policy restraint have often alleged that that shift is opportunistic and selective—namely, implying that the only war the Republicans did not like was the one in Ukraine, as it is seen as a Democrats’ war fought for “liberal” causes.
It is true that Vance lamented some “Americans leaders’” propensity to identify a “good guy” and a “bad guy” in that war, which led to a firestorm of accusations of cozying up to the Russia’s President Vladimir Putin—ignoring the fact that Vance did condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The point he was making, though, was that the war has exhausted both countries and it was now “time to stop killing.”
Coming out against a war on Iran—a highly unpopular country in the U.S. (and for good reasons)—gives some credence to the notion that the GOP’s fresh restraint could be more than just an opportunistic partisanship. This impression is reinforced by statements of other influential Republicans like Elbridge Colby, the former high-ranking Pentagon official and a strong candidate to be the Trump II national security advisor, who has confessed himself to be an “‘iconoclast’ to the idea of a hyper-aggressive, wildly expansive foreign policy that would get us in to a lot of wars—and lose them.”
Conversely, neoconservative luminaries like William Kristol and Robert Kagan, who resigned from the board of the Washington Post over its failure to endorse Kamala Harris for presidency, are migrating to the Democratic party. Both Kristol and Kagan are unrepentant cheerleaders for the Iraq invasion some 20 years ago. And Harris found a common cause with a key architect of that war—the former vice president Dick Cheney and his hawkish daughter, the former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY).
None of that, of course, means that there is now a clear-cut divide between an ostensibly pro-restraint GOP and the pro-war Democrats. It’s more complicated than that. Some hawkish Republicans are reportedly being mulled for key national security positions in the hypothetical new Trump administration, such as Ric Grenell, the former ambassador to Germany and acting national intelligence director, Arkansas’s Senator Tom Cotton, and Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state and now a lobbyist for a Ukrainian telecommunications firm.
At the same time, there are pro-restraint Democrats, such as Vice-President Harris’s foreign policy adviser Philip Gordon, tagged for the top national security jobs should Harris win. Drawing from his own extensive executive experience, Gordon wrote a sensible book about the futility of regime change wars in the Middle East.
What matters, however, is the trajectory. That the influential ascendant Republicans like Vance and Colby (not to forget the self-styled Nixonian realist Vivek Ramaswamy) oppose “forever wars”, while the Democrats embrace hawkishness, is indicative of where both parties might be heading in terms of foreign policy.
That may make a difference after November 5. As the outgoing Biden administration put the THAAD anti-missile defense system in place in Israel and sent Americans to make it operational to deter possible Iranian attacks—without restraining Israel’s own escalatory actions—it is “gambling with American lives in a manner that may leave scores killed from retaliation by Iran or Iraqi militias,” warns Trita Parsi, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft’s executive vice-president. If the Trump-Vance ticket wins, it will have a chance to show leadership by following up on Vance’s remarks on Israel and Iran, and act to ensure that no U.S. soldiers are killed, as Parsi put it, “in a war they did not fight for America and that Congress never authorized”.
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