Vice President Vance on Friday said that the second Trump administration marks the end of policies geared toward meddling in other nations and against focusing on hard power, while speaking to Naval Academy graduates.
Vance launched into praising President Trump’s Middle East trip last week and bashing the foreign policy decisions of previous presidents in his commencement address at the Naval Academy’s graduation ceremony in Annapolis, Md.
The vice president said Trump’s trip “signified the end of a decades-long approach to foreign policy that I think was a break from the precedent set by our founding fathers.”
“We had a long experiment in our foreign policy that traded national defense and the maintenance of our alliances for nation building and meddling in foreign countries’ affairs,” he added. “Even when those foreign countries had very little to do with poor American interests. What we’re seeing from President Trump is a generational shift in policy with profound implications for the job that each and every one of you will be asked to do.”
Vance argued that after the fall of the Soviet Union, U.S. policy makers didn’t think a foreign nation could rise to compete with the U.S., which led to the country not manufacturing enough goods.
“Our leaders traded hard power for soft power,” he told the crowd. “We stopped making things—everything from cars to computers to the weapons of war, like the ships that guard our waters and the weapons that you will use in the future.”
“Too many of us believed that economic integration will naturally lead to peace by making countries like the People’s Republic of China more like the United States,” the vice president continued, arguing that the American people and servicemembers had to deal with the consequences of those decisions.
A major part of Trump’s trade agenda is geared toward calling on companies to make goods in the U.S., threatening high tariffs if they don’t ramp up production.
The vice president’s remarks to the Naval Academy comes just hours after Trump threatened to hit Apple with 25 percent tariffs if it does not move its manufacturing to the U.S.
Vance’s isolationist approach to foreign policy has been in the spotlight in recent weeks, especially through the controversial Signal Chat uncovered by a top journalist at The Atlantic that showed his hesitance about launching a military strike that Trump has hailed as necessary and successful.
The vice president, a former GOP senator who once opposed Trump and his “Make America Great Again” agenda, appeared in the group chat with his concerns that the message of launching strikes into Yemen on March 15 isn’t consistent with the president’s goals in not wanting to bail out Europe.
