Trump’s latest move could prove to be a devastating blow for Ukraine

Trump regularly boasts he would end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of returning to the Oval Office, but offers little detail. By announcing JD Vance as his vice-presidential pick, however, he is indicating his intention to adopt a foreign policy that could be catastrophic for Kyiv, writes Mary Dejevsky

President Zelensky at a summit with the then President Trump in 2019 (Getty)

When Donald Trump announced his choice for vice-president on the first day of the Republican Party’s convention, the name – JD Vance – drew only mild surprise. The 39-year-old junior senator for Ohio was known to have been on the shortlist, and attention switched back almost at once to the main drama – the transformed dynamics of the presidential race as a result of the failed attempt on Trump’s life.

But there was an exception to the general equanimity over the nomination of Vance. In much of Eastern Europe, but most of all in Ukraine, Trump’s choice would be unwelcome in the extreme. While the pen portrait of Vance drawn by Western reporters was of a young venture capitalist of modest origins, known for his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, about life in the “other” America, this is not what his name meant in, say, Kyiv.

There, Vance is known primarily as a leading light of the US Senate’s efforts to block Joe Biden’s $61bn aid package for Ukraine. As the most eloquent of the bill’s critics, he became the voice of a growing constituency which has set itself against any deeper US involvement in the Ukraine war.

What might be seen as his opening salvo for the wider public was an opinion article published in The New York Times in April as the Congressional stand-off over the Ukraine aid bill entered its final stages. This caused a stir for several reasons.

It was partly the timing, coming as it did when the majority of influential voices – including the head of the CIA, William Burns – were warning that without this aid package, Ukraine could lose the war. It was partly that Vance had been given a platform by The New York Times, which was staunchly supporting Ukraine, so that Vance’s article stood out as a dissenting opinion, more than it might otherwise have done.

JD Vance used to be a firm critic of Donald Trump but is now one of his biggest cheerleaders (AP)

But the article was also noticed because of its cool, almost clinical, reasoning. It set out what amounts to the classic position of the realist school of US foreign policy, to the effect that in dealing with matters abroad, the paramount US consideration should be its own national interest.

Further help for Ukraine, he argued, was very much contrary to US national interests. It was good money being sent after bad, with Ukraine needing manpower as much as equipment. There were not enough munitions being produced in the world, let alone in the US, to supply Ukraine, and – finally – the proposed use of Russian assets abroad was not in the US interest.

In a subsequent address to the Quincy Institute, a Washington think tank, Vance went a lot further and set his Ukraine views in a wider context. Addressing the contradiction, as many would see it, between US policy towards Israel and Ukraine, he argued that if anything had to give, it should be US help for Ukraine. The US could not supply all its proteges with weapons, he argued, adding that it was quite wrong that Israel had been ordered by the US to direct some of its stockpiles to Ukraine. Ukraine, he said, should be the responsibility of the Europeans, who had – an echo of Trump here – been free-riding on US largesse to Ukraine.

Now it is being argued in some quarters that vice-presidential nominees do not really matter, so the choice of Vance need not be taken too seriously, by Ukraine or anyone else. Their chief purpose is to “balance” the ticket, by broadening the electoral appeal of the presidential nominee, and to capitalise on votes in the electoral college. Ohio, Vance’s state, represents a good bet here as it tends to vote with the winning candidate and comes with 17 electoral college votes. Trump’s choice could thus be seen as characteristically pragmatic, with next to no ideological import.

This is not quite true, though. One objection might relate to Trump’s age. Although a sprightly 78 – and temperamentally clearly as resilient as they come – the “heartbeat away” argument counts for more than it might do with a younger candidate, which makes Vance’s youth and his success outside politics additional assets.

Another is the way his views on foreign policy dovetail with those of Trump. From the earliest stage of his campaign, Trump has argued that the war in Ukraine should never have happened and that he would end it, as he sometimes boasts, within 24 hours of entering the White House.

Beyond this bare ambition, however, Trump has said little about how he would go about ending the war, which has led to questions about how different his Ukraine policy might really be from Biden’s. While Biden has been a vocal supporter of Ukraine, he has been criticised by many for making grand promises but failing to deliver. The accusations include being too afraid of provoking Russia, placing undue restrictions on the use of US-supplied weapons, and for not being tough enough with Congress. Cynics might add that, of the apparently huge sums earmarked for Ukraine, a great deal in fact goes to US arms manufacturers.

Until now, it was hard to judge how big a gap there was between Biden’s Ukraine policy and that of Trump. In selecting Vance, however, Trump has chosen someone with a coherent idea of US foreign policy and a clear rationale about how help for Ukraine does – or rather does not – fit into that. His views thus go some way towards fleshing out Trump’s stated intentions. Succinctly put, Vance would favour ending US military aid for Ukraine, and treating Ukraine as a European responsibility.

The likely consequence would be to quickly force Ukraine into some sort of territorial compromise with Russia and summarily halt Kyiv’s ambition to join Nato. Whether Volodymyr Zelensky could survive such a turn in US policy, and what a post-war Ukraine might look like, is unclear.

What is certain is that the Europeans would be unable to fill the gap left by the US. Even Germany, currently the continent’s biggest donor, lags far behind the US in what it is willing and able to supply to Ukraine. Furthermore, with the exception of the UK, Europe’s most ardent supporters of Ukraine are in political disarray. In France, President Macron may have to make policy concessions to a more doveish government, while Chancellor Scholz in Germany may well lose power at next year’s elections, to a centre-right CDU that is already calling for talks between Ukraine and Russia.

It is the US election in November, however, that will make the weather. And, with the nomination of JD Vance for vice-president, some of the clouds obscuring the implications of a Trump victory for Ukraine have suddenly cleared. There is likely to be much soul-searching in Kyiv in the days and weeks to come.