The vice president has doubts about the Yemen war, but will Democrats find the courage to oppose it? The GOP’s fractures offer a chance to push for an anti-interventionist agenda.
Despite the turmoil created by Donald Trump and Elon Musk, Washington, DC, remains a city of blinkered bureaucrats and myopic lawyers, people who easily get easily excited when they notice relatively minor infractions of the rules even as they also ignore major violations of the Constitution and of the principles of basic human decency. The American political elite is strategically persnickety: The focus on punishing the violation of technicalities is a way of avoiding fights about core issues of principle. This was evident in Donald Trump’s first term, when gross and massive corruption (notably Trump’s ties with Arab autocrats) was ignored even as the Mueller investigation and the first impeachment of Trump zeroed in on relatively minor violations of norms.
The current brouhaha over the inclusion of Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg in a group chat planning an attack on Yemen has the same flavor. Planning a war on Signal is a serious security breach—and including the editor of a monthly magazine in the conversation is comically inept.
But all that pales beside the fact that bombing Yemen in order to keep the Suez Canal open is ineffective, illegal, and immoral. Ineffective because the United States has been, off-and-on, unleashing its military might (often with the aid of regional allies such as Saudi Arabia) on the governing Houthi movement of Yemen since 2015 and repeatedly failing to have any effect on its behavior. Illegal, because the war is backed by no congressional authorization (a common although deplorable practice in recent decades of imperial decadence) nor by the United Nations (there is a 2024 Security Council resolution calling on the Houthis to desist from hostilities, but it authorizes no military attack). Immoral, because there is a way to reopen the Suez canal that is nonlethal and in fact would save many civilian lives: force America’s ally Israel to end its onslaught in Gaza.
Representative Rashida Tlaib rightly rebuked her fellow lawmakers for their misplaced focus, observing, “More heat for using a group chat than for the bombing itself.”
Unfortunately, few in Washington, either among Republicans or Democrats, shared Tlaib’s position. Support for bombing Yemen has wide bipartisan appeal, despite the fact that it will not work and is an affront to common sense, law, and morality.
Yet, amid the bipartisan belligerence, there was one small note of dissent from a significant source, made not on the basis of anti-war principle but of nationalism. During the group chat on Signal, Vice President JD Vance raised the point that launching a war to keep the Suez Canal open—a move that mainly benefited American allies in Europe as well as Egypt—violated the spirit of America First that supposedly underwrites Donald Trump’s foreign policy.
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In the group chat, Vance wrote:
I think we are making a mistake.
3 percent of US trade runs through the suez. 40 percent of European trade does. There is a real risk that the public doesn’t understand this or why it’s necessary. The strongest reason to do this is, as POTUS said, to send a message.
I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now. There’s a further risk that we see a moderate to severe spike in oil prices.
I am willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself. But there is a strong argument for delaying this a month, doing the messaging work on why this matters, seeing where the economy is, etc.
It should be clear that, in contrast to an anti-imperialist such as Tlaib, Vance opposes the attack on Yemen as a matter of narrow pragmatism. Vance is unconcerned with effectiveness, legality, or morality. In fact, later in the group chat, when it was announced that an apartment building where a Houthi official went to meet his girlfriend had been bombed—a war crime that obviously led to civilian deaths—Vance responded, “excellent.” Nor is Vance alone in his moral callousness. Jeffrey Goldberg, although a fierce critic of Trump, cavalierly dismissed the killing of civilian Yemenis as a minor part of the story, which he wanted to keep focused on the security breach.
Despite the narrowness of Vance’s demurrals about the Yemen war, they’ve contributed to his growing reputation as an anti-interventionist rebel against the foreign policy consensus. As The Washington Post reports:
Vance is now at the forefront of Republican leaders who view U.S. power differently. Many, like Vance, are wary of anything that could drag Washington into foreign entanglements, even if U.S. jobs could result from European orders of U.S. weaponry.
Beyond the Yemen war, there’s a divide opening up inside the Republican Party on foreign policy. The three main factions are the neoconservative remnent, the prioritizers, and the restrainers. The neoconservative remnant is personified by national security adviser Michael Waltz (who is apparently responsible for including the hawkish Goldberg in the group chat). This group believes in maintaining USA global hegemony on every front, against every foe. The most prominent of the prioritizers is Elbridge Colby, whom Trump has nominated to be undersecretary of defense for policy. Colby believes the United States needs to draw back from the Middle East and Europe to focus on what he sees as the real threat of a rising China. Colby is facing headwinds in the Senate, since his nomination is fiercely opposed by the neoconservatives. The restrainers share the conviction of prioritizers that the United States needs to draw down in the Middle East and Europe, but they don’t believe in military escalation against China. There are reasons to believe that Vance is at heart a restrainer.
Aside from Colby, other nominees who fall into the prioritizer or restrainer camps have faced criticism from the traditional Republican foreign policy elite, often voiced by by The Jewish Insider, a neoconservative leaning publication: notably Dan Caldwell (who is working on the Trump team’s transition in the Defense Department) and Lt. Col. Danny Davis (whose nomination for deputy director of national intelligence was scuttled after establishment GOP criticism).
Not surprisingly, Vance has come to see Jewish Insider as a political foe. Responding to a critical article on Thursday, he tweeted, “This morning, @JoshKraushaar ran a hit piece against me in Jewish Insider, which has become an anti-JD rag.” Vance correctly noted that Jewish Insider wrongly blamed the Houthis for the death of three American service members, a mistake the news outlet later acknowledged and corrected.
For the left, this intramural fight on the right presents both challenges and opportunities. There’s little reason to celebrate Vance’s foreign policy worldview. He may be an anti-interventionist compared to a full-spectrum militarist like Michael Waltz or former secretary of state Mike Pompeo. But like his boss, Vance nurses fantasies of hemispheric domination. It’s not an accident that his wife, Usha Vance, recently went on a mission to Greenland, which the Trump administration hopes to annex. Hilariously, the trip fell far short of expectations because no Greenlanders could be found who wanted to meet the second lady.
But we don’t have to agree with Vance on every issue to find him politically useful. Matt Duss, former foreign policy adviser to Bernie Sanders who is currently vice president of the Center for International Policy, told me that that the left should see the fracturing of the Republican consensus on foreign policy as an opportunity. He pointed out that in Trump’s first term, Sanders was able to work with Republican Senator Mike Lee, a figure of the hard right, on reining in Trump’s Yemen policy.
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Duss notes that Trump’s rise has revealed that “this presumption that the American people support this global military hegemony of the unipolar moment is a mirage.” Trump’s anti-interventionist rhetoric—which he played up during election campaigns—creates an opportunity for liberals and the left to push for a very different foreign policy vision, one that remakes the United States as a responsible partner with other nations and not a permanent global hegemon. If Vance can in private admit that the Yemen war doesn’t serve American interests, shouldn’t many more Democrats take up the anti-war mantle? Trump has cynically exploited anti-interventionist sentiment despite his own belligerence. Still, the fact he won election on that message should be instructive. You can’t let the devil have all the best tunes, nor should Democrats leave the foreign policy debate to Republicans.
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Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editorial Director and Publisher, The Nation
