A Final Look at the Popularity of J. D. Vance’s Position on Ukraine

Picking up on last week’s debate, I see John McCormack responded that J. D. Vance’s position on Ukraine is unpopular if one looks closely.* Well, let’s look again.

John again lays heavy emphasis on a February 19 clip in which Vance says, “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.” John presents this quote five times in text and once in an embedded video in the first six paragraphs.

Effectively McCormack then takes on the role of an attack-ad consultant by opinining that, “if you play a video clip of Vance uttering that single sentence,” most Republican voters will recoil.

I wonder. Will they?

John’s post is a long exegesis of that one sentence — which he takes to hold all the true substance of Vance’s position. John says that taking this sentence alone implies that Vance is against all forms of aid to Ukraine, and all sanctions. Every other Vance statement on the issue is measured as a shift, a reversal, or a lie. When Vance praises Trump for having deterred Russia, John replies in effect, “I thought you didn’t care.”  When Vance gives qualified support to sanctions, John says the same.

But this is tendentious. Just watch a fuller clip from which the “I don’t really care” sentence is pulled. Once you look beyond those eight seconds, things open up.

“I’ve got to be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” Vance said. “I do care about the fact that in my community right now, the leading cause of death among 18-to-45-year-olds is Mexican fentanyl that’s coming across the southern border.”

Vance goes on to say: “I’m sick of Joe Biden focusing on the border of a country I don’t care about while he lets the border of his own country become a total war zone.”

This is what could be called Vance’s position on Ukraine. Compared to other problems at home — chaos at the border, drugs in our community, inflation — Ukraine hardly rates at all. Vance has repeatedly noted that Congress authorized $14 billion in aid for Ukraine in the space of a week, whereas for four years they would not approve just $4 billion to build a border wall at home. Sometimes Vance takes a question about Ukraine and pivots to saying that the media talk about Ukraine more than inflation.

And it hasn’t changed at all since the offending clip. Every single time the subject comes up on television interviews or in debates, this is the position Vance reiterates, that other issues far outrank Ukraine.

You can see similar responses here, here, here,  here, here, and here.

It was reiterated in a guest column in Ohio:

In addition to the reckless risks that Gibbons and Mandel push upon America, the issue of priorities becomes central. Right now, as corporate media delivers  nonstop, breathless coverage  of Ukraine, and Washington establishment officeholders pontificate endlessly about defending a border 5,000 miles away, we have an  all-out border crisis  of our own.

I will be damned if I am going to  prioritize Ukraine’s  eastern border right now when our own southern border is engulfed by a human tsunami of illegal migrants.

This is not the portrait of someone backing off, but doubling down consistently. In polling from before the war, inflation far outranked every other issue, foreign policy was at the bottom, below health care and inflation. There’s good reason to believe this hasn’t been truly disrupted by events.

Vance hit his two opponents for supporting a “European-led” no-fly zone. What did they do? They backed down in the next debate and inched toward Vance’s position. Would they do so if they thought it was so unpopular?

John also hits me for laughing at the idea that Republican voters care deeply about Ukraine. I said that it was a debate for insiders. I stand by it. The vast majority of Americans do not want a major role for the United States in this conflict. In one poll, only 26 percent of respondents wanted the U.S. to have a major role. The rest opposed this. The same poll also found that major involvement was more unpopular with Republicans: “Democrats are more likely than Republicans to think the U.S. should have a major role in the conflict, 32% to 22%.”

What is a major role? It is maddeningly difficult to get precise polling on foreign-policy options when it comes to Ukraine. But some polling has been done. Target Point surveyed Pennsylvania Voters in late February, asking them what the U.S. response should be:

The options present an unambiguously dovish option — do nothing, not our problem,  which got 14 percent. And another one: impose strongest possible sanctions and seek a diplomatic resolution, which commanded 45 percent. Together, that takes you to 59 percent. Only 23 percent support arming Ukraine to “kill as many Russians as possible,” the option that most excites pundits in Washington. Less than one-fifth of respondents are for sending U.S. troops.

This debate obviously matters much more to insiders than to Americans, which is why news networks are continually broadcasting less and less content on it. And I think insiders sense it. That is why Eliot Cohen is in the Atlantic, pre-shaming the American voters for their “self-deterring beliefs” about the war. It’s why George Packer complains about Americans not having the sufficient attention span for the war and not being “worthy” of defending Ukraine.

One of the reasons our Founders put the power of war into the hands of the legislature was that they knew executives tended to aggrandize their power in war. The court intellectuals of our executive branch wish for precisely this, because it aggrandizes them, too.

Though there is no perfect way of measuring this, I would bet that every chance that Vance gets to explain his position on Ukraine, that he prioritizes other pressing American concerns above this conflict, he is helping himself. That’s why people who disagree with him are anxious to cut him off after eight seconds, and extrapolate for him.

*On a personal note, in the final paragraphs of my first response, I wrote that “hawks were making an underhanded and dishonest argument about Vance.” As I wrote the post I had in mind a number of figures, but without naming them the only person readers could conclude that I meant was my colleague, John, whom I lumped in and damned with them. That was wrong of me for two reasons. One, I assigned to him an ulterior motive not in evidence — attacking Vance on behalf of his rivals — that would make NR’s mission impossible. John is quite right that not every criticism contains an implicit endorsement. And two, John has always been a good colleague and deserved his presumption of good faith. For this (and all my sins this Lent), I’m sorry.