The Vance Doctrine

The Vice President's commencement address at Annapolis was a definitive and welcome break with the past.

The last vice president to serve during wartime was also the last president to have done so: George H.W. Bush (1924-2018). Bush’s presidency, unlike that of his son’s, was marked, mainly, by a prudential approach to foreign affairs. Bush’s warning about the dangers of unleashing the demons of “suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred” in post-Soviet countries such as Ukraine went, alas, unheeded. Yet the administration of Bush I was also the last, perhaps until now, that understood that a mature power, as the columnist and grand strategist Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) pointed out,

…will make measured and limited use of its power. It will eschew the theory of global and universal duty which not only commits it to unending wars of intervention but intoxicated its thinking with the illusion that it is a crusader for righteousness.”

Lippmann would have scorned the bipartisan fantasies of global omnipotence that came into vogue in the decades following Bush’s presidency. What in retrospect appear to be faddish, if not absurd, texts from the 1990’s, such as Francis Fukuyama’s ‘End of History'; Charles Krauthammer’s ‘The Unipolar Moment’; and Paul Wolfowitz’s draft of the 1992 Defense planning guidance (later popularized as the ‘Wolfowitz Doctrine’), served as the intellectual basis for the disastrous series of wars that were to follow.

As it happens, Vice President JD Vance is the first sitting vice president since George HW Bush to serve during wartime. And at a commencement speech at the US Naval Academy’s 2025 Commissioning Ceremony, Vance delivered a coup de grace to the outdated yet still dangerous notions of American unipolarity that have animated US foreign policy for the past thirty plus years. It is for that reason that the speech was largely ignored by a media ecosystem that remains very much in thrall to the ideas and concepts that have resulted in upwards of a million deaths worldwide since 9/11 (for a breakdown of the damage done by the series of wars launched by George W. Bush and his successors, see Brown University’s Cost of War Project.)

Vance reminded the midshipmen that,

…We had a long experiment in our foreign policy that traded national defense and the maintenance of our alliances for nation building and meddling in foreign countries affairs, even when those foreign countries had very little to do with core American interests.

Taking aim at the aforementioned theories of American primacy from the 1990s, Vance noted that,

…Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, our policymakers assumed that American primacy on the world stage was guaranteed. For a brief time, we were a superpower without any peer, nor did we believe any foreign nation could possibly rise to compete with the United States of America.

So our leaders traded hard power for soft power. We stopped making things, everything from cars to computers to the weapons of war, like the ships that guard our waters and the weapons that you will use in the future. Why do we do that? Well, too many of us believe that economic integration would naturally lead to peace by making countries like the People’s Republic of China more like the United States.

Over time, we were told the world would converge toward a uniform set of bland, secular, universal ideals, regardless of culture or country, and those that didn’t want to converge, well, our policy makers would make it their goal to force them by any means necessary.

About the strategy (or lack thereof) of the Bush-Cheney foreign policy, Vance observed that,

…Our leaders pursued what they assumed would be easy jobs for the world’s preeminent superpower.

‘How hard could it be to build a few democracies in the Middle East?’ Well, almost impossibly hard, it turns out, and unbelievably costly. And it wasn’t our politicians that bore the consequences of such a profound miscalculation; it was the American people, to the tune of trillions of dollars. But more than anyone, it was born by the people who were in your shoes, just a few short years ago, by our service members and their families.

Vance told the assembled that those days are over. “I want to be clear,” he said. “The Trump administration has reversed course. No more undefined missions, no more open ended conflicts. We’re returning to a strategy grounded in realism and protecting our core national interests.”

Lippmann himself couldn’t have said it better.

James W. Carden is editor of The Realist Review.