When populism isn't popular

Yet for all of Vance’s populist complaints about the elite foreign-policy consensus, it has been obvious since the first days of Russia’s war in Ukraine that his real problem is not donors but the overwhelming majority of Republican voters. A Quinnipiac poll in late February found that 80 percent of Republicans believed Biden had not been tough enough on Russia, while only 2 percent of Republicans believed Biden had been “too tough.” After the war began, Missouri GOP senator Josh Hawley — a hero of the populist “New Right” who has endorsed Vance — immediately started to sound more like the late John McCain than Vance in his statements on Russia. And when the House of Representatives voted on a resolution calling for the United States to “deliver additional and immediate defensive security assistance to help Ukraine,” it passed by the wildly lopsided margin of 426–3…

Strictly in terms of electoral politics, it is not clear what Vance thought he would gain by leaving Ohio in order to attend a small gathering of activists dedicated to promoting foreign-policy views that currently represent the tiniest fringe of the Republican electorate. But he lingered at the conference for hours, and for a guy who claimed he doesn’t care “what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” he sure did have a lot to say about the conflict.

Vance spoke about Ukraine but offered little in terms of a substantive critique of America’s policy. “I happen to think that Russia should not have gone into Ukraine,” he said. “So, fine, morally condemn it all you want, but at the end of the day our foreign policy needs to be a little bit more sophisticated than the guy in Russia is good and the — sorry, the guy in Russia is bad and the guy in Ukraine is good.”