Foreign policymakers worry that the vice president embodies a potentially permanent shift in the United States’ approach to European allies.
In a chain of private messages among President Donald Trump’s top national security officials, Vice-President JD Vance appeared, even behind the scenes, to be serving as one of the administration’s most consistent sceptics of foreign intervention – a key component of Trump’s “America First” platform.
The dynamic has been on display in rancorous encounters in Europe, in an angry Oval Office meeting with Ukraine’s leader, in blistering assessments of US allies during Vance’s public appearances – and now inside a private group chat about plans to bomb Yemen’s Houthi militants.
All of it has international policymakers scrambling to adjust their strategies.
Diplomats, ministers and other senior leaders abroad are zeroing in on Vance as one of their biggest challenges as they confront how to handle Trump’s second term. They say Vance appears to be the most committed in Trump’s inner circle to scaling back international commitments.
That ideological viewpoint contrasts with what these leaders say is Trump’s more transactional nature. The President, they felt, could be swayed with flattery, US investments and other deals that he could present as easy victories. Vance is a trickier counterpart and more sceptical of them in ways they can do little to address.
Mindful that the Vice-President could be Trump’s successor in 2029, some officials say Vance’s policies could be emblematic of a deeper and more permanent shift in how the United States operates in the world – one that extends even beyond the massive disruption that Trump has already created.
“There’s a battle going on within the party over foreign policy. And there was a little window in that Signal chat,” said Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, a senior adviser at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a group that advocates a more restrained role for US military engagement in the world and has hosted Vance for foreign policy discussions.
“I was heartened to see that JD Vance was at least providing some red-teaming, some pushback on what seemed to be another unauthorized military action against another country,” Vlahos said.
In the text thread with Trump’s top national security advisers on the encrypted chat app Signal, which was first published by the Atlantic, Vance stood out among a raft of senior administration officials by raising a red flag of concern about the planned attack on the Houthis, which began to unfold March 15.
Vance told the group he would be out of town for most of the day visiting a manufacturing facility in Michigan, a trip intended to highlight his and Trump’s stated commitment to bringing jobs back to the US.
“But I think we are making a mistake,” Vance said to the group about the bombing, according to the text messages obtained by the Atlantic. Vance went on to explain that the Houthis were interfering much more with Europe’s trade in the Suez Canal than with that of the US, and it would be hard to explain to the public why it was necessary for the US to get involved.
People close to Vance have noted that the Vice-President, apparently unaware that a journalist was on the thread, committed in the group text to keep private his reservations about the operation and said he would support the plan if Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth and other officials involved believed they should move forward.
That didn’t stop him from raising concerns with the others on the chain about who stood to benefit the most from the operation, if Trump’s foreign policy would come across as inconsistent and if US officials were acting too quickly.
Vance was “open” to a strike on the Houthis – despite being “sceptical” of taking action immediately – and was not suggesting that conducting one should be off limits altogether, according to a person with knowledge of his position, who, like others interviewed for this article, was not authorised to speak publicly on the matter.
Had Vance been adamantly opposed to taking action, he would have been more insistent, the person said. And when Hegseth sent text messages shortly before the bombings outlining the specifics of the planned attack’s timeline, Vance replied with a message of support: “I will say a prayer for victory,” the Catholic convert wrote.
But the Vice-President made clear in his messages that he saw downsides worth considering – chiefly that Europeans stood to benefit more from the action.
“I just hate bailing Europe out again,” Vance wrote.
That message came weeks after the Vice-President delivered a blistering rebuke of European officials at the Munich Security Conference in February.
The speech astonished many of Europe’s centrist leaders, especially Germans, who saw it as an effort to boost the right-wing Alternative for Germany days before national elections. Like Vance, the party is deeply sceptical of migration. Some of its supporters have also embraced the “extremist” label and revel in acts such as the stiff-armed Nazi salute, which is banned in Germany.
“You cannot win a democratic mandate by censoring your opponents or putting them in jail,” Vance told the crowd of Europe’s security elite.
Friedrich Merz, the centre-right politician who days later led his Christian Democrats to election victory, has reacted by saying that Germany can’t continue to depend on the US nuclear umbrella, upending generations of national policy that viewed close transatlantic relations as core to the country’s security and identity.
Later that month, Vance instigated a public argument in the Oval Office with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that ended with administration officials ejecting the Ukrainian from the White House.
“You should be thanking the president for trying to bring an end to this conflict,” Vance told Zelenskyy, sparking the fierce exchange.
The Trump administration, in particular Vance, has argued repeatedly about how European nations have been coasting on US defence spending. People with knowledge of Vance’s mindset have noted that his comments in the text thread echoed those same concerns.
Beyond his tough-on-Europe stance, Vance raised other concerns about the downstream effects of such an attack. Oil prices could see a “moderate to severe spike,” he wrote in the Signal exchange.
Vance allies suggested that his frank remarks reflected his desire not only to prompt a conversation about ideological consistency for consistency’s sake but also to look out for Trump’s public image. Trump, according to multiple officials in the text thread, including Hegseth, had already given the green light for the mission.
“I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now,” Vance wrote, in a rare deviation from Trump’s positions since taking office, though doing so in private.
Others downplayed scrutiny of Vance’s comments by noting that he made the same arguments in private that he has already made in public. Vance wanted to ensure that Trump had been given all the facts about the potential attack, including that European nations stood to benefit more from it than the US, said a second person with knowledge of his intentions.
Vance was seeking input from his colleagues, the person said, about whether they also shared concerns over how well-briefed Trump had been. But he ultimately trusted the rest of the group’s consensus, the person added.
Trump has backed Vance’s sceptical approach to Europe in the days since the conversation was published.
Trump “believes that Europe has been, as the Vice-President put it, freeloading on the backs of American taxpayers and off the backs of the United States of America. And he wants to ensure that Europe pays their fair share,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Wednesday.
Trump’s focus on trade imbalances has led many US allies to settle on a formula they hoped would curry his favour: major purchases of US-made weaponry that could boost US jobs while bolstering their defences at the same time.
The approach was successful during Trump’s first term in part because many of the President’s foreign policy advisers came from traditional Republican backgrounds and were not averse to a robust US military presence around the globe. Mike Pence, Trump’s first-term Vice-President, fit that bill – but the two men are no longer on speaking terms.
Pence’s nonprofit advocacy group, Advancing American Freedom, issued a policy paper Tuesday congratulating Trump on the military action in Yemen. “The isolationists are wrong,” the paper read.
Vance is now at the forefront of Republican leaders who view US power differently. Many, like Vance, are wary of anything that could drag Washington into foreign entanglements, even if US jobs could result from European orders of US weaponry.
Vance has been happy to serve the role of provocateur – including this week, when he plans to visit a US military base in Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark that Trump has said he wants to take over. Danish and Greenlandic leaders were riled by the original plan for second lady Usha Vance to come uninvited to the territory to watch a dogsled race in Greenland’s capital, but now they say they are comfortable with a trip that is confined to the base.
A third person familiar with Vance’s role in internal conversations said that, similar to the Signal chat, the Vice-President frequently takes the role of sharp sceptic of decades of US policy towards Europe.
Three years into the war in Ukraine, for instance, Vance has regularly questioned the US interest in continuing to ship arms to Kyiv – especially when major economies such as Germany have continued to be slow to increase defence spending, invest in their military industries and display as much urgency to help Kyiv as he says Washington has.
“We have to accept that there are trade-offs,” Vance said last year before he was picked by Trump to be the Vice-President, saying that he believed that US industrial might needed to focus on competition with China. “America cannot manufacture enough weapons to support four different wars in four different corners of the world. We just can’t do it.”
Vance’s allies say his approach is indicative of a generational shift in US policy and that his views are on the upswing.
“You see younger people under the age of 55, Gen X and younger, who are like, ‘You know what? Those wars sucked. We were sold a bill of goods. We aren’t the world’s policeman anymore, and we can’t be,‘” Vlahos said. “And I think he reflects a lot of that.”