This past week has been a disaster for Vice President JD Vance. He embarked on two foreign adventures — campaigning for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and leading peace negotiations with Iran — that ended in total failure. Orbán lost by an enormous margin; Iran quit the talks, and President Donald Trump announced a new blockade on the Strait of Hormuz.
These events are not just humiliating for Vance, but reflect a deeper failure of his vision for the world — one that he hoped to advance as vice president, but appears to be crumbling just as he tries to take the MAGA mantle.
When it came to US foreign policy, Vance has had two overarching goals: to turn the United States into a patron of Europe’s far-right parties, and to move away from the kind of military adventurism that had long defined the Republican Party.
In both areas, he is failing spectacularly. European far-right parties across the continent are increasingly distancing themselves from Washington; Trump’s foreign policy has been militaristic since pretty much day one, and has only escalated over time.
And these failures are related. Trump’s foreign policy aggression, on issues ranging from Greenland to Iran, has alienated Europeans en masse. Rather than see him as a kindred spirit, populists increasingly see his nationalist ambitions as in conflict with their own.
“The Trump administration is currently toxic for most far-right parties in Europe,” said Cas Mudde, an expert on the European right at the University of Georgia.
The stakes here are big — not just for Vance’s personally, but the future of the broader right.
Vance, like other would-be successors to Trump, has tried to stake out a distinctive vision for the MAGA movement and its future after the president. His ambitions for a stronger global right are part of that package. But as vice president, Vance has been forced by necessity to defend Trump’s record even when it betrays his own purported core principles. The weekend’s twin disasters showed just how politically and practically untenable this marriage is turning out to be.
It’s a tough spot for him to be in, but ultimately a problem of Vance’s own making. He thought Trumpism could be a vehicle for his own ideology — when in fact it was always defined by to Trump’s own impulses. Vance, and his ideological fellow travelers, will have to live with the consequences of his error.
Vance’s postliberal foreign policy
Like many on the right, Vance saw Trump as an ideological opportunity.
Vance is the highest-profile avatar of the right-wing tendency termed “postliberalism:” a distinctive group of mostly Catholic intellectuals united by a particular critique of the pre-Trump political order. Postliberals believe that the greatest problems of modernity are, at heart, the fault of liberalism.
The liberal preoccupation with individual rights, markets, and social “progress” has, in their view, produced a world stripped of meaning — one in which people feel depressed and impoverished because they lack the spiritual sustenance to feel otherwise. In their view, liberalism should be replaced by a vaguely defined postliberal alternative: one in which the state, guided by religious logic, is much more involved in shaping the moral character of its citizens. Carrying out this project would require not just winning elections, but a kind of “regime change” in America that would force liberal intellectuals and activists from their positions shaping public discourse and morals.
There is a reason that postliberals like Vance openly admired Viktor Orbán’s regime: They saw his state as a model for what the United States should become.
If this all sounds a bit like an authoritarian scheme for asserting a kind of socially conservative control over a diverse and fractious country — well, it kind of is. There is a reason that postliberals like Vance openly admired Viktor Orbán’s regime: They saw his state as a model for what the United States should become. And they regarded Trump as the best vehicle for their ambitions to smash the liberal institutions in the US and Europe that they both despised.
Vance, a self-described postliberal, was supposed to drive that vehicle. He focused much of his energy on building a distinctively postliberal foreign policy: one that turned the United States away from the distraction of massive Middle Eastern wars, and toward the allegedly urgent task of spiritual renewal inside the European continent — which is to say, bolstering the far-right parties that share postliberalism’s ideological preoccupations.
This was evident as early as February 2025, when Vance traveled to the Munich Security Conference to deliver a speech upbraiding Europe’s leaders for their alleged persecution of far-right factions. It was most clearly expressed in the 2025 National Security Strategy, written in large part by a Vance aide, that simultaneously calls for a pullback from the Middle East and a policy of soft regime change in Europe.
“We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence,” the strategy declares. “Our broad policy for Europe should prioritize…cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.”
Vance’s efforts this past week, both in Hungary and Iran, reflected this overall vision. Their failures were not accidental, but reflective of the most fundamental problem with his strategy: the “vice” in his title.
How Trump blew up Vance’s project
Donald Trump is, like the postliberals, a right-wing authoritarian. Unlike the postliberals, however, he has zero attachment to any kind of abstract principles. He has a set of gut instincts that point in a particular ideological direction, but can manifest in unpredictable and downright bizarre ways.
In the second term, this has produced a Europe policy that seems laser-targeted to weaken America’s standing on the continent, and a Middle East policy that has grown more and more belligerent over time.
Leading the European far-right would require, at a bare minimum, remaining on good terms with said far-right parties. This seemed like it would be an easy task, but Trump managed to blow it up. His tariffs, and especially his threats to annex Greenland, have made him toxically unpopular on the European continent — forcing far-right parties to distance themselves from their longtime ally in the name of nationalism.
“Our subjugation would be a historic mistake,” Jordan Bardella, a leader of France’s far-right National Rally party, said in a January 2026 response to Trump’s attempts on Greenland.
On the Middle East and military adventurism, it seems Vance just misread Trump from the jump.
While the vice president claims his boss was a dove, it has been clear for his entire career that Trump has deeply hawkish foreign policy instincts. He called for seizing Iranian oil deposits in the 1970s, supported the invasion of Iraq before he was against it, escalated several US wars during his first term, and then bombed Iran’s nuclear program and kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in his second.
Now, these problems are compounding. Few on the European continent support Trump’s Iran war, and NATO allies have refused to provide any formal assistance. That has led Trump to lash out at European countries, which has incited yet another nationalist backlash — forcing a new round of denunciations from the far-right politicians who used to make up his continental fan club. The pushback has included Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni, French National Rally leader Marine Le Pen, and the Alternative for Germany party that Vance had personally defended in Munich.
“The MAGA’s should really stop campaigning internationally because everyone and everything they support loses the elections,” Theo Francken, the conservative defense minister of Belgium, posted on X.
Were Vance currently serving as the junior senator from Ohio, he might be able to mount a principled critique of the president’s record. He could accuse Trump of undermining the “nationalist international” bridging the Euro-American right, or pull a Tucker Carlson and accuse Trump of betraying his base on Iran.
But Vance is vice president, and has taken on responsibilities directly related to these areas. He led the charge on outreach to the far-right, and served as a lead negotiator with Iran. In both areas, he was set up for failure — and, going forward, will have a very tough time distancing himself from Trump in these areas (recall Kamala Harris and Joe Biden in 2024).
In effect, the most promising avatar of postliberal politics in America has been saddled with a record that betrays some of his movement’s core principles. And it’s not clear how he’ll ever escape the baggage.
