Vice President JD Vance heralded the administration’s new foreign policy approach as a “generational shift” during his address to the graduating class at the U.S. Naval Academy.
In his speech on Friday, Vance praised the outcomes of President Donald Trump’s trip to the Middle East and bashed the foreign policies of recent presidents, whom he argued were too focused on nation-building across the globe.
“I actually think the most significant part of that trip is that it signified the end of a decadeslong approach in foreign policy that I think was a break from the precedent set by our founding fathers,” he said. “We had a long experiment in our foreign policy that traded national defense and 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.”
During the president’s trip to the Middle East, he announced investment deals with leaders from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The deals raised questions about the administration’s willingness to overlook concerns from people skeptical of those governments.
“What we’re seeing from President Trump is a generational shift in policy with profound implications for the job that each and every one of you will be asked to do,” he added. “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 peers, 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,” he added. “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 policymakers would make it their goal to force them by any means necessary.”
VANCE, RUBIO BRING POPE LEO XIV LETTER FROM TRUMP AND CHICAGO BEARS JERSEY
Vance, a retired Marine, is one of a handful of Cabinet officials who deployed during the Global War on Terror, deploying to Iraq in 2005.
“How hard could it be to build a few democracies in the Middle East?” he asked rhetorically. “Well, almost impossibly hard, it turns out, and unbelievably costly.”
