Vance’s bad week: vice-president risks becoming face of two Trump foreign policy failures | US foreign policy
Shortly before J.D. Vance’s ill-fated week traveling around the world, Donald Trump asked him at a private Easter breakfast how the Iran negotiations were progressing. “If this doesn’t happen, I blame J.D. Vance,” Trump said, laughing in the chamber. “If that happens, I get all the credit.”
The joke against Vance contained an unfortunate truth: This is not an administration that rewards failure.
The odds were already stacked against the US vice president when he flew to Hungary a week ago to help rally Viktor Orbán, the Maga movement’s closest ally in Europe who is facing election defeat after 16 years in power. Vance then traveled to Islamabad, where he held last-ditch talks to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and end the country’s nuclear program after Trump threatened to bomb the country “back to the stone age.”
Vance went 0 for 2 in one of the most painful weeks of his tenure.
Orbán is experiencing a historic landslide and negotiations have failed to end the war in Iran, leading Trump to impose his own blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. Vance’s ill-fated voyage revealed serious setbacks for Maga foreign policy; The first was to strengthen right-wing populism in Europe, and the second was to remove the United States from its recent foreign policy intervention in the Middle East.
Vance, meanwhile, has flouted longstanding agreements for U.S. leaders not to interfere in the elections of allies abroad and has failed to secure a landmark foreign policy achievement that could cast a shadow over an expected presidential run in 2028.
Among the damaging images were photos of him on stage with Orbán, one of Europe’s most illiberal leaders, who is trying to rally support from both the United States and Russia to fend off a challenge from his former minister Péter Magyar, who accuses Orbán of turning Hungary into a “mafia state.”
Hungarian officials were lobbying for Trump’s visit. Instead, they got Vance, whose travel during the major US conflict in Iran had caused consternation in D.C. The first time Vance called Trump to address the crowd in Hungary, it went to voicemail.
On stage at Orbán’s campaign rally, Vance railed against the intervention of European Union officials in Brussels, ending the speech with these words: “Go to the polls on the weekend, stand with Viktor Orbán, because he is defending you.”
Somehow the people of Hungary did not heed Vance’s advice.
Peter Magyar’s Tisza party was poised to win 138 seats in Hungary’s 199-seat parliament in a landslide victory; that party would offer a two-thirds majority that would allow Hungary’s next government to reverse most of the constitutional changes made under Orban.
It also threatens to disrupt a major center for global conservatism, with Hungary hosting government-sponsored right-wing think tanks and congresses that attract ultra-conservatives from the United States, Russia and other parts of the world.
Long before the votes were cast, Vance was already on his way to Islamabad, where he was heading a delegation that included envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and Iran’s leader. The 21-hour marathon talks led to no breakthrough, and Vance was forced to announce with a frown the “bad news” that “we couldn’t reach an agreement, and I think that’s much worse news for Iran than for the United States.”
Vance was an unlikely choice for this mission. The vice president, along with Tulsi Gabbard, is among the most anti-war members of Trump’s cabinet and has actively campaigned against a return to the “endless wars” he fought in as a soldier in Iraq. Heading the delegation made him the highest-ranking US official to meet with an Iranian delegation since the 1979 revolution in Iran.
Vance was said to have spoken regularly with Trump during the negotiations, indicating to some on the Iranian side that he did not have the authority to decide whether to accept Iran’s terms. During the talks, Trump downplayed the chances of a deal, saying “maybe they’ll make a deal, maybe they won’t, it doesn’t matter. From America’s perspective, we win.”
With talks now in tatters, Vance risks facing two foreign policy setbacks in a week. And Trump’s Pope Benedict XIV. Vance, a Catholic convert, could find himself embroiled in yet another international incident as he targets Leo as “criminally weak” and “terrible.”
