On Foreign Policy, Vance and Rubio Are Two Sides of the Same Coin
The Vice President and the Secretary of State aren't so different.
There are three paths one can choose when discussing the 2028 Republican presidential primary. The first is the obvious one: that Vice President JD Vance is the obvious frontrunner and that he will almost certainly win the nomination. The second is the less obvious one, that Secretary of State Marco Rubio will win instead, either as a result of a spirited challenge to the vice president or due to Vance refusing to run. And the third, as recently argued in Politico, is that some sort of dark horse akin to Los Angeles’ Spencer Pratt will successfully challenge Vance.
The third should be dismissed immediately. Spencer Pratt is running a spirited campaign for mayor of Los Angeles, but he is a Republican in, well, Los Angeles. As my colleague Evan Riggs recently wrote in these pages, Prattism may soon be a major force in the GOP. But Politico’s prognostication that Pratt – a little-known reality star – can challenge JD Vance in the 2028 nomination is the Gambler’s fallacy: it assumes that something will happen again because it just happened.
The “just happened” here is Donald Trump shocking the world with his rise in 2016. But Trump’s win was so shocking because it was so rare; the reason people stretched back to “Dewey defeats Truman” – nearly 70 years prior to 2016 – was because major upsets do not happen often.
As for Vance losing to Rubio or to someone else? There is nothing in the polling or the state of play, outside the wild hopes of a certain segment of the Washington-based right, which would lead one to believe that Vance will lose (more on that here).
The most likely scenario – Vance and Rubio running together, with Trump’s blessing – is therefore all that’s left. But there’s still one more argument against it that some have tried to make: that their foreign policies do not align.
The biggest display of this supposed difference was in the response to their Munich Security Conference speeches, delivered a year apart. Vance’s speech was justifiably caustic, targeting European establishments for their restrictions on free speech. Rubio’s address, delivered earlier this year, was – on the surface – more conciliatory, making paeans to our shared history and to the need to save Western civilization.
As such, this led foreign commentators and governments to see the two as somewhat opposed: opposite ends of a Trump administration split between supposedly neoconservative-lite individuals and isolationists. But this is a complete misreading of the state of foreign policy on the American right, and the views of the two men.
Vance has been painted by the media, and by individuals still stuck in the Cold War, as an isolationist, incredibly wary of foreign entanglements. The vice president is not an isolationist – almost no one is – but he is indeed wary of foreign entanglements.
Someone else who is? Marco Rubio, whose State Department withdrew the United States from 66 international organizations earlier this year. Rubio has also repeatedly express frustration with NATO, making the case that the Cold War-era relic must be “valuable” to America. Adding to that thought, he said:
So obviously one of the things that I’ve always used – and I’ve long been an advocate for NATO in my time in the Senate, and one of the arguments I always made was that these bases in the region provided us logistical options that we wouldn’t otherwise have. And when some of those bases are denied to you during a conflict that we’re involved in, then you question whether that value is still there. So that’s going to have to be discussed. There’s no doubt about it.
This is far from the Anne Applebaum or Michal McFaul types who have been resoundingly supportive of NATO no matter what, as they believe that America’s national security is inherently affected by who controls the eastern portion of the Black Sea. Rubio, in contrast, clearly values NATO for its ability to allow America to power project.
Vance likely puts less of a value on power projection, specifically into the Middle East. But he is no less of a civilizationist – he, and Rubio, simply want Europe to embrace Western values, as opposed to desiring to becoming a liberal internationalist global soup.
Vance opened his address not with an attack, but with an expressed desire “to talk about…our shared values.” He stated his belief that we were “on the same team,” pleading with all attending to “do more than talk about democratic values. We must live them.” He then proceeded to blast “EU commissars” for prohibiting speech, and gave a list of frightening examples, from Scottish citizens not being able to pray within their own homes if they lived near an abortion clinic to annulled Romanian elections based on false claims of Russian interference. On this latter point, the vice president pointed out – likely to the chagrin of the audience – that “if your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with.”
Of particular concern for Vance was Europe’s lack of defense spending and its lack of understanding of what once made it great:
Now, this is a security conference, and I’m sure you all came here prepared to talk about how exactly you intend to increase defense spending over the next few years in line with some new target. And that’s great, because as President Trump has made abundantly clear, he believes that our European friends must play a bigger role in the future of this continent. We don’t think— you hear this term, “burden sharing,” but we think it’s an important part of being in a shared alliance together that the Europeans step up while America focuses on areas of the world that are in great danger. But let me also ask you, how will you even begin to think through the kinds of budgeting questions if we don’t know what it is that we’re defending in the first place?
Reactions to Vance’s speech were venomous, with numerous European officials blasting the vice president for interfering in European affairs.
Reactions to Rubio’s, by contrast, were more positive – at least initially. But over the following days, a seeming reality sunk in for the European elite: that Rubio had said essentially the same thing as Vance, just in a different way.
The Secretary of State opened his address, like Vance, by making reference to something that united America and Europe; in this case, it was our “shared alliance.” But he then proceeded to blast the liberal international order and the loss of a focus on national interest. Whereas Vance’s primary critique was freedom of speech, Rubio’s was the dangers of mass migration. He painted Western civilization’s past in glowing colors – as it should be – describing our connection as “the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.”
Rubio, toward his closing, elaborated upon what he wished for from Europe:
And this is why we do not want allies to rationalize the broken status quo rather than reckon with what is necessary to fix it, for we in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline. We do not seek to separate, but to revitalize an old friendship and renew the greatest civilization in human history. What we want is a reinvigorated alliance that recognizes that what has ailed our societies is not just a set of bad policies but a malaise of hopelessness and complacency.
This is fundamentally no different from Vance’s argumentation. Both demanded Europe defend itself and understand why Western civilization was once great. They just did it differently, with Vance highlighting the deep issues in Europe’s present and Rubio seeking to inspire them by invoking their past.
Call it bad cop and good cop. Call it president and vice president.
Both of course have disagreements. Rubio likely is more supportive of robust action abroad, be it in Cuba or Iran; on the latter, reporting has indicated Rubio was moderately supportive or neutral toward the conflict, whereas Vance was opposed. But presidents and vice presidents often disagree on some issues. Donald Trump and Vance even clearly disagreed on some issues before the 2024 election; likewise did Trump and Mike Pence, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
The question is if they agree on most things, and if they are motivated by the same desires.
On foreign policy, the answer to that question seems to clearly be “Yes.”
If JD Vance and Marco Rubio do end up sharing a presidential ticket, they will have no issue doing so. When it comes to how America should behave abroad, they are two sides of the same coin.
Anthony J. Constantini is the policy director at the Bull Moose Project. He is writing his Ph.D. on populism and early American democracy at the University of Vienna in Austria and tweets at @AJConstantini.