Juvenile Diplomacy
A few hours before he and Donald Trump ambushed Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, J. D. Vance was the featured speaker at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in Washington. His address was an uninspiring mishmash, as might be expected on such an occasion: generalities and blandishments, obligatory praise for pro-life protestors and factually challenged statements about their “persecution,” solemn promises to listen to the American people, and a personal story about his seven-year-old son choosing “to be baptized in the Christian faith the week after we won the election.” He also prayed for Pope Francis and called him “a great pastor…a man who can speak the truth of the faith in a very profound way at a moment of great crisis.”
Some of Vance’s other comments were more revealing, at least to me. In recalling the early days of the pandemic, he told the audience that he went to Dick’s Sporting Goods and “bought nine hundred rounds of ammunition, and then I went to Walmart and I bought two bags of rice.” He continued: “I sat at home with my bags of rice and my nine hundred rounds of ammunition and said, ‘All right, we’re just going to wait this thing out.’” Maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that survivalist tendencies underpin Vance’s understanding of ordo amoris—or is it the other way around?—but it seemed an odd detail to bring up in the moment (he could just as easily have mentioned the $93 million he had managed to raise that year for his Peter Thiel–backed venture-capital firm, which might have gone further than bullets and rice). Several times he used the word “litigate,” as when referring to potential disputes with U.S. bishops: “My goal is not to litigate when I’m right and when they’re wrong.” (The word surfaced again during his upbraiding of Zelensky: “It’s disrespectful for you to come to the Oval Office and try to litigate this in front of the American media.”) The vice president also told the gathered that he may not always get things right, but that when he does, he’d appreciate some affirmation—in his words, “your attaboys.”
Vance also expressed dismay at the criticism that cradle Catholics sometimes level against converts like himself. To be sure, those received into the Church later in life are not always welcomed and treated with gentle forbearance as they make their way in the faith. I’d submit, though, that Vance is criticized less for being a convert than for misapplying Catholic teaching to justify a politics at odds with the faith he publicly and rather insistently claims to profess. His stances on migration and his lack of compassion for the most vulnerable among us are the most obvious examples. The issue is not his conversion, but the way Vance falls short as a Christian politician.
“When a political problem can be reduced to a simple question of feeding the hungry or of not feeding them…of harboring the harborless, or of leaving him homeless—there should be no uncertainty as to the Christian position.” Astute readers might recognize the words of Eugene J. McCarthy, from his 1954 Commonweal essay “The Christian in Politics.” More than seventy years on, many of McCarthy’s standards, which he admitted could be difficult to meet, still hold. For example: “Problems…of displaced and expelled peoples, of political refugees and the like are in reality not always reducible to simple choices. As a general rule the inclination of the Christian should be to liberality.”
Other principles are worth noting specifically in the context of the Zelensky episode, the Trump administration’s abandonment of Ukraine and our European allies, and its embrace of Vladimir Putin. “The Christian politician should speak the truth.... He should not resort to the common practice of labeling, which by its falseness violates justice, and by its indignity offends charity.” And notably: “The Christian in politics should shun the devices of the demagogue at all times, but especially in a time when anxiety is great, when tension is high, when uncertainty prevails, and emotion tends to be in the ascendancy.”
These expectations may seem quaint or even naïve amid the global decline of democracy and in a domestic political environment sullied by a decade of Trumpism. Yet they still exert their pull today, within and beyond their Christian context. Yale historian Timothy Snyder, for example, posted a video in which he succinctly identified five specific failures of Trump and Vance’s assault on Zelensky. These included the related failures of hospitality and decency, plain for all to see, and a failure of democracy—something McCarthy might have also noted. Zelensky, Snyder reminds us, was democratically elected by a large majority, represents a country with urgent needs, and should be expected to speak and act on behalf of the Ukrainian people. Trump and Vance gave no credence to this; Vance even dismissed the need for firsthand experience of Ukraine’s suffering. Another failure Snyder cited is that of strategy: Why is the United States siding with Russia, which steals U.S. technology secrets and interferes in our elections, and whose economy is a fraction of the size of Canada’s? The final was the failure to remain independent: nothing Trump and Vance said hadn’t first been said by Putin, which in effect means Putin is guiding our policy.
Of course, ganging up on Zelensky seemed to be the plan going in, and Vance had clearly prepared for it. In addition to repeating Russian talking points, he kowtowed to Trump for his “diplomacy”; he sought to dominate Zelensky with an aggressive physical posture and smug, lawyerly bluster; and he demanded again and again that Zelensky thank the president, as if he were admonishing one of his own children. This bullying also seemed to be, as is so often the case, a desperate play for validation. For all his wealth and power, Vance remains a bundle of insecurities—in many ways not yet a fully formed adult. These insecurities seem to underlie his attempts to live out his religious and political convictions. In the Oval Office encounter, you could see in his face the glow of his hopes being realized: here was the adolescent playing the grown-up—and getting away with it. Here was the affirmation he desired, granted by Trump via a tag-team assault on Zelensky, and by the gleeful reactions of MAGA elites and administration toadies. The United States abandoned its principles and its allies for all the world to see, sundering eighty years of world order and handing Vladimir Putin far more than he could have hoped for. But young J. D. Vance got his “attaboy.”
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