Why JD Vance is fighting the GOP establishment over Russia

JD Vance hasn’t exactly hidden his hostility to Ukraine. After spending much of the year positioning himself as Trumpworld’s foreign policy philosopher, the vice president is now on the defensive following fierce backlash from within his own party to a plan, backed by the administration, to end Russia’s war of aggression as it approaches its fourth year.

Following days of talks with the Ukrainians in Switzerland, and hush-hush meetings in Abu Dhabi with the Russians, several Republicans on Capitol Hill found themselves confused, if not openly critical. When the plan leaked last week, it was largely panned, including by Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., who chairs the Senate Armed Services committee, as favoring Russians too heavily.

The proposal calls for Ukraine to significantly reduce the size of its military, cede land to Russia — including land that Russia does not currently control, like regions of Luhansk, Donetsk and Crimea — relinquish its long-range missiles and vow to not join NATO. According to Reuters, the plan drew some elements from a Russian document.

In exchange, Moscow would face few meaningful concessions and win a full return to the global economy, with the erasure of every sanction imposed since Putin’s first invasion in 2014.

“He’ll have to like it, and if he doesn’t like it, they’ll just have to keep fighting, I guess,” President Donald Trump said of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Nov. 21. “At some point, he’s going to have to accept something.”

To many Republicans, the proposal’s asymmetry was glaring. To Vance, it was the entire point.

The plan reflects more than the reported diplomatic gamble by top Trump advisers Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff flying high off a negotiated settlement to Israel’s war in Gaza. It reveals the rise of a new GOP foreign policy worldview, one in which Vance is a central architect. And nothing illustrates that better than the man Trump has deployed as his lead emissary in the negotiations: Army Secretary Daniel P. Driscoll.

Driscoll is not a traditional diplomat. He is Vance’s longtime friend — a Yale Law School classmate, close political ally and, increasingly, operational arm within the administration. The 38-year-old also currently serves as acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which is not typically a position boasting a purview in European security negotiations.

Sending someone so closely tied to Vance — and effectively bypassing the administration’s official Ukraine envoy, Keith Kellogg, who is considered broadly sympathetic to Kyiv and who, perhaps tellingly, will leave his post in January — signals the degree to which the peace framework is aligned with Vance’s worldview. As Army Secretary, Driscoll has already worked closely with the White House on domestic deployments of National Guard troops. Now he is shaping the contours of a major global conflict.

This alignment is not accidental. During a combustible White House visit in February, Vance infamously berated Zelenskyy for what he called insufficient gratitude for U.S. support. The plan’s posture toward Kyiv reflects that animus, along with Vance’s broader “realist” world view — one that is, incidentally, shared by Fox News‘ Laura Ingraham.

Congressional Republicans — who spent two years accusing former President Joe Biden of weakness on Russia — are openly revolting against the Trump-backed plan.

“Putin has spent the entire year trying to play President Trump for a fool,” former Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R. Ky., said in a statement on Friday. “If Administration officials are more concerned with appeasing Putin than securing real peace, then the President ought to find new advisors.” 

McConnell, who spent years branded as “Moscow Mitch” by Democrats and is retiring after nearly 40 years in the Senate, took to social media on Monday to press his point. “[T]hose who think pressuring the victim and appeasing the aggressor will bring peace are kidding themselves. Which difficult concessions are we pressing Russia to make? How does limiting Ukraine’s defenses against future aggression increase the likelihood of enduring peace? The price and stability of peace matters, and our credibility is on the line. Allies and adversaries are watching: Will America hold firm against aggression or will we reward it?”

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In response, Vance exploded. 

“This is a ridiculous attack on the president’s team, which has worked tirelessly to clean up the mess in Ukraine that Mitch–always eager to write blank checks to Biden’s foreign policy–left us,” Vance wrote Monday on X, asking if the Republican candidates in Kentucky who want to replace McConnell “share his views.”

From there, Vance went into a characteristic tirade about America’s decay, housing prices and what he decried as the obsession with Europe of the “beltway GOP” instead of over the struggling “real Americans” at home. 

The implication of Vance’s invective was clear: Anyone supporting Ukraine is part of a decadent elite. Donald Trump Jr. joined in on Nov. 25 to claim McConnell was “bitter” because voters had rejected his “globalist agenda.”

At the Halifax International Security Forum over the weekend, Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who is retiring, said McConnell’s criticism didn’t go far enough. He warned against “making Putin feel like he has a win here.”

While the resistance to the administration is strongest in the Senate, some House Republicans have also sounded warnings. 

Senior House Republican Michael McCaul of Texas, who sits on the Foreign Affairs Committee, said on ABC’s “This Week” he would “not advise” Ukraine to sign the peace plan without more ironclad security guarantees. Retiring GOP Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska dubbed the peace plan “Witkoff’s Ukrainian surrender plan,” placing the blame with Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff, who is headed to Moscow to sell the deal.

Mike Pompeo, who served as secretary of state during Trump’s first administration, told Fox News that “any so-called peace deal that limits Ukraine’s ability to defend itself would look more like a surrender” and leave Putin more “emboldened.” 

But leaders like McCaul, Pompeo and McConnell represent the last remnants of the Republican Party that believed in alliances, deterrence and American power abroad. Vance is the face of the new GOP — nationalist, grievance-driven, suspicious of international commitments and convinced that America’s real enemy is its own governing class.

By inserting his closest ally into the center of the Russia-Ukraine negotiations, Vance has turned a global security crisis into a proving ground for his emerging political machine. When McConnell blasted the peace plan, he wasn’t just criticizing Trump. He was threatening Vance’s ascendancy. And Vance reacted like a man who knows he now has the muscle to punch back.