Donald Trump’s selection of JD Vance as his 2024 running mate has disquieted America’s security partners in Europe and Asia. If America’s 45th president returns as its 47th and a Vice President Vance holds sway, the implications for Europe are clear. Vance argues that President Joe Biden’s arming of the Ukrainians has passed the point of diminishing returns and that it distracts from America’s challenge of greatest import: China’s rise. But while Vance has called for a focus on Asia, what exactly a Vance-inflected foreign policy would mean for the region is not obvious. Vance’s well-documented body of thought on American society, governance, and strategy offers some clues, however, on how he would approach China, Taiwan, and related questions.
The theme that runs through Vance’s rise to prominence – from the publication of his acclaimed 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy to his selection by Trump this July – is a belief that America’s elites have failed the country’s common people. Economically, Vance is a standard-bearer for the argument that a neoliberal consensus hollowed out the industrial heartland. The culmination, as this theory goes, was the bipartisan welcoming of China into the global trading system and a resulting “shock” to the American economy. In foreign affairs, he argues that Washington has spent American power recklessly and destructively since the Cold War’s end, most notably in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Vance’s is a more restrained foreign policy than Republicans have advanced in some time. It is not, however, dovish.
The Vance Doctrine is to narrow the use of American power to protecting the interests of the American people. Not merely America First, but Americans First. Inversely, it is to eschew the use of American might in service to elite ideological concerns (like ridding the world of communism or defending human rights) or in service to highfalutin abstract interests (like a regional balance of power).
Contrary to the stereotype of the chest-thumping Republican, Vance has stated that he is alarmed by runaway bipartisan hawkishness towards China, seeing in it, perhaps, the same hubris that led members of Congress from both parties to overwhelmingly support George W Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. Whereas some Republicans, such as Trump’s last Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and former House Select Committee chairman Mike Gallagher, call for a comprehensive pressure campaign to undermine Beijing, Vance wants to avoid unnecessary confrontation with China.
Indeed, Vance’s is a more restrained foreign policy than Republicans have advanced in some time. It is not, however, dovish. Vance, suggests the American foreign policy scholar Walter Russell Mead, carries on the pugnacious populist tradition of early nineteenth-century US president Andrew Jackson. As Mead theorised in his book Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World, domestically Jacksonians despise concentrations of elite power in business, government, and even the military. Internationally Jacksonians like Vance draw tight bounds around the national interest. As Vance himself has said, Jacksonians “pursue [the national interest] ruthlessly”.
Absent threats, Mead noted in July, Jacksonians have little interest in foreign affairs. Expressing that attitude, Vance has argued “China should not make our stuff, and we should try to avoid war with China”.
Reading between the lines, the Vance Doctrine should give Taiwan pause. Few economic arrangements are more totemic of the neoliberalism Vance laments than America’s dependence on its chip exports. If America doesn’t manufacture “the components that Americans rely on for their everyday life,” Vance said in a May 2024 speech, “then we are never going to be able to build the kind of middle class that we want in this country”. Though the comment was in the context of China’s industrial rise, it could just as easily be interpreted as a critique of America’s relationship with the Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC.
Few economic arrangements are more totemic of the neoliberalism Vance laments than America’s dependence on its chip exports.
While Vance’s political ally Elbridge Colby, a probable pick for a high-level foreign policy job of his own in the event Trump wins, sees keeping Taiwan out of China’s hands as the lynchpin of America’s global strategy, it is difficult to square Colby’s form of structural realism with the Vance view that the country has simply been doing too much for too long in too many places. Vance might defend the island in the near term, but such an action would appear contingent upon Taiwan’s current centrality to the semiconductor supply chain. If America’s bipartisan industrial policy goal of manufacturing advanced chips at home succeeds, Colby and Vance may no longer share common ground on Taiwan.
To date, Vance has endorsed Washington’s longstanding posture towards Taiwan crisis scenarios of “strategic ambiguity”. He has also emphasised the importance of supplying arms to Taiwan in order to deter China from catalysing a crisis. In fact, he has called a Chinese invasion of Taiwan “the thing that we need to prevent more than anything” because “it would be catastrophic for this country. It would decimate our entire economy”. Yet Vance has offered nothing like the moral support and martial promises the Biden administration and former Secretary of State Pompeo have. It would indeed be hard for Vance to do so without contradicting his rhetorical commitment to avoiding overextension and adventurism.
Of course, the vice president is but an adviser. The power will be possessed by his boss-to-be, Donald Trump, if the election goes the Republicans’ way. Considering Trump’s recent remark that Taiwan “took” America’s chip business, his inclinations on Taiwan seem similar to Vance’s. Those inclinations will be the engine that drives policy in a potential second Trump term; Vance, though, provides an intellectual chassis that may be on the road for some years yet. For Taiwan, it suggests the time for greater defence self-sufficiency is nigh.