JD Vance and the Republican vets who think America should do less, not more, abroad

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Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance served in the U.S. Marine Corps, and he’s the first veteran of Iraq or Afghanistan to appear on a presidential ballot.

But Vance isn’t a hawk; in fact he now leads a contingent of war veterans in the Republican party who oppose U.S. military intervention abroad.

“I served my country honorably and I saw when I went to Iraq that I had been lied to,” Vance said on the Senate floor in April after the chamber passed $61 billion of new aid for Ukraine.

He essentially accused his colleagues of getting fooled, just like he was when he believed in the Iraq war.

“My excuse is that I was a high school senior. What is the excuse of many people who were in this chamber or in the House of Representatives at the time and are now singing the exact same song when it comes to Ukraine? Have we learned nothing?” he said.

“Realism and Restraint”

In Congress, military service can be a key credential for talking about U.S. foreign policy, especially war. For decades Republican veterans were more likely to hold a hard line in favor of interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Texas, for example, a former Navy SEAL with visible wounds from his deployments, frequently defends what’s considered the establishment view on Ukraine.

“It’s not really about Ukraine it’s about Russia,” he said last year while encouraging his colleagues to support military aid to avoid the chaos of a world without American global leadership. “The only way that world comes back is if America pulls back.”

But Vance, who served in Iraq with Marine Corps public affairs, took a different lesson from his