Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio is trying out to be the running mate for former president Donald Trump.
In addition, Vance’s detractors claim that the Ohio senator’s remarks regarding Ukraine must be welcome news to Russian despot Vladimir Putin, given that Trump has a track record of adopting stances that coincide with his own.
Vance has criticized US policies toward Ukraine this year in the New York Times, on the Senate floor, and even on a plane trip to Munich. He voted against lending support to the struggling nation. Additionally, he has demanded that talks to end the war begin right now.
The issue, according to several experts, is that Vance’s proposed approach will merely give Putin more confidence to attempt enlarging Russia’s borders and weakening the democratic states that surround it.
When previous autocrats decide they want additional territory and believe they can get away with acquiring it, they have not hesitated to break their word.
Bill Browder, an American-born investor who is now a human rights campaigner, said of Vance, “I don’t know whether he is just naive, or whether he is sinister
After Browder persuaded the United States and other western countries to impose penalties against Russian human-rights violators, Putin made repeated attempts to put him behind bars. Currently, he is regarded as one of Putin’s “fiercest enemies.”
When asked specific questions for this story, Vance’s office refused to comment on the record.
The junior senator from Ohio acknowledged in previous remarks that Putin may not be the most amiable person. Vance countered that fighting the Russian president is not his top priority.
In February, Vance declared, “There are a lot of bad guys in the world, and I’m much more interested in some of the problems in East Asia right now than I am in Europe.”
What Putin want
Tetiana Hranchak, a Ukrainian researcher who escaped Putin’s invasion and is currently a visiting professor at Syracuse University, said that not only does that exclude a large number of the United States’ most steadfast allies, but it also misrepresents the threat posed by Putin.
According to her, one needs to recognize that Putin regards himself as the heir apparent to figures such as Peter the Great and Joseph Stalin in order to comprehend his objectives in Europe.
Hranchak stated that Putin believed the United States-led West, Russia’s greatest adversary, had humiliated him greatly by bringing down the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union.
“Three obsessions dominate Putin’s mind: greatness, power. retaliation. Democracy does not pique his curiosity. In an interview earlier this month, she stated, “He wants to completely subjugate other people.”
“His goals are to establish a new Eurasian empire, exact revenge on the West, and exact revenge for the Cold War failure. It doesn’t matter to him how much it costs to establish his own power over all of Europe and to split Europe from the USA.
Vance denounced Putin during his February attendance at the Munich international security conference for the mysterious murder of Alexy Navalny, the head of Russia’s political opposition, whom Putin had detained.
But Vance has steadfastly stuck to the position that Putin most likely wants to hear from a U.S. senator and a leading contender for the vice presidency: that the US should cease providing financial support to Ukraine in order to help it repel Russia’s invasion. Vance uses the argument that Ukraine’s resistance is pointless to defend himself.
In Munich, Vance stated, “I return to this question about ‘abandoning Ukraine.'” “To be honest with you, if the $61 billion supplemental aid package that is currently making its way through Congress is approved, it will not significantly alter the situation on the battlefield.”
Equitable load
The senator has further maintained that the United States is left to bear the cost of defending its interests throughout the globe because Germany and other western European nations aren’t contributing fairly.
In April, Vance stated, “We have been told by the Europeans for the past three years that Vladimir Putin poses an existential threat to Europe.” And they haven’t replied as though that were genuinely the case for the past three years.
Famously, Donald Trump urged European countries that they needed to invest more in their own defense. Members of this chamber scolded him for his arrogance in suggesting that Germany should take the lead and foot the bill for its own defense.
Trump has often grumbled about the North Atlantic Treaty Organization partners of the United States not doing enough to support the alliance for mutual security. Trump has even made threats to completely withdraw from NATO.
There’s little doubt that Putin was thrilled at the possibility of US exit. That’s partly because, as Georgetown University international affairs professor and senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations Charles A. Kupchan wrote in the New York Times in 2022, Russia hates NATO security guarantees that have inched closer to its borders.
Furthermore, according to Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, and Robert Person, an associate professor of international relations at the U.S.
Military Academy, joining NATO requires democracy, and Putin worries that the alliance’s presence in his neighborhood threatens his own, undemocratic power, as they both wrote in the Journal of Democracy that same year.
Furthermore, it is arguable that Germany and the other NATO members are not contributing fairly to the situation in Ukraine.
Based on data published by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, the United States ranks just 16th among nations that provide support to the struggling nation per capita.
Furthermore, Germany declared in January that it planned to allocate 2% of its GDP on defense this year—a non-binding goal that Trump has claimed NATO members are failing to fulfill.
Challenging figures
In his pursuit of becoming Trump’s number two, Vance has maintained that the US lacks the military might to drive out the Russians and return Ukraine to its borders from 1991 and that Ukraine lacks the people to do it. In an April piece that appeared in the New York Times, he contended that the math simply doesn’t make up.
Despite its harsh conscription laws, Vance stated that Ukraine still requires more soldiers than it can muster. “And it requires more equipment than the US can supply.”
European security analyst Kupchan stated that while Vance is probably right that Ukraine would never be able to redraw its borders from 1991, he is incorrect to disparage American assistance for the nation.
After the United States and its NATO allies failed to take stronger action against Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, Charles Kupchan, a Georgetown University professor of international affairs and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, claimed that Putin was emboldened to invade Ukraine in early 2022.
Putin is facing difficult calculations as Russia is losing men and equipment, while Ukraine is confronted with overwhelming numbers. In an interview last month, Kupchan stated that calls like Vance’s to halt US assistance and try to pressure Ukraine into making quick concessions would simply give Putin more confidence.
According to Kupchan, “I believe that the objective is to wait out the Russians.” The Russians are currently holding out for us. They are waiting for Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and other opponents of aid to Ukraine to win so that (Putin) can rule Ukraine as he pleases.
According to Kupchan, Ukraine should adopt a defensive stance and may eventually have to give Russia control over areas in the far east or Crimea. However, he added, demonstrating to Putin that Ukraine and its allies are in it for the long run is the best way to convince him to keep to any agreement.
Kupchan declared, “We need to flip the script.” “We must demonstrate to the Russian people and leadership that we are more resilient than they are. The Russians will eventually grow weary of this. An estimated 350,000 people have died and been injured there.
Russia is bearing the heavy financial burden of this conflict. Making sure Putin is convinced that we will stick with our current course is crucial in this situation. I believe that’s the only time you’ll witness him give up.
Upcoming conflicts
Many regard Putin’s policy as an expansionist one, and if the US doesn’t pay to support Ukraine in resisting him there, it may have to pay a lot more to oppose him in a location like Poland.
Putin has a far better chance of winning if we stop helping Ukraine, according to Browder, whose dissident lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was beaten and tortured to death in a Russian prison.
And if Putin prevails in Ukraine, he would proceed to Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which are NATO partners that the United States is obligated by treaty to defend. This is putting aside the terrible, devastating humanitarian tragedy that would ensue.
J.D. Vance making the case that we shouldn’t be NATO members. Why would we fight Russia over small nations that the majority of Americans couldn’t locate on a map? And should he prevail in that argument, Putin would seize those nations before proceeding to Poland.
Another NATO member is Poland. Hopefully, at that point, more sensible minds would prevail and see that Germany needed to be protected.
As it is, the US is contributing comparatively little to Ukraine’s assistance, according to Kupchan of the Council on Foreign Relations.
“The assistance we’re offering is essentially a rounding error in the defense budget of the United States,” he declared. “But we are undermining the military might of one of America’s main enemies by giving that aid to Ukraine.”
Dubious reasoning: J.D. Vance
During a Senate floor speech in April, Vance mocked concerns about an imperial Putin.
“People who advocate for unrestricted funding to Ukraine frequently claim that Vladimir Putin will march all the way to Berlin or Paris if we don’t provide resources to Ukraine,” Vance stated. “Well, to begin with, this is illogical. Putin is unable to enter western Ukraine. How is he going to get to Paris in its entirety?
That, of course, ignores the fact that Ukraine has been able to keep Putin off of its western borders mostly because of American help, support that Vance wants to discontinue. Vance voted against the $61 billion in additional money for Ukraine that was brought to the Senate floor in April.
Vance also brought up what appeared to be a strange comparison between US participation in Ukraine and his Senate speech.
Vance explained that he enlisted in the Marine Corps in order to fight in the war. “Now, in 2003, I was a high school senior, and I had a political position back then: I believed the propaganda of the George W.
Bush administration that we needed to invade Iraq, that it was a war for freedom and democracy, and that those who were appeasing Saddam Hussein were inviting a broader regional conflict,” Vance said. Does anything we’re hearing now sound like that to you? Twenty years later, the talking points remain the same under other labels.
Except that a lot has changed between then and now.
In Iraq, the Bush administration launched an invasion while inspectors were still looking for WMDs, inciting suspicions of nonexistent WMDs there.
The project failed presumably because its planners failed to realize how much nation-building would be required of them while dealing with a populace that wasn’t thrilled with American presence.
In contrast, the legitimate government of Ukraine is pleading with the United States for help.
President Joe Biden has ruled out deploying American forces to Ukraine in order to prevent a “hot” conflict with Russia, which possesses nuclear weapons, twenty years after the United States attacked Iraq.
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