For JD Vance, foreign policy starts at home

Vice presidential candidate JD Vance draws on his Rust Belt upbringing and experience as an Iraq war veteran to embdy the Republican's shifting stances on foreign policy.

When JD Vance released his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” in 2016, which charted an impoverished Rust Belt upbringing and rise through the Marines and Yale Law School, it caught the eye of Donald Trump. In it, the Iraq veteran describes his hometown’s worldview in the early 21st century.

“Nothing united us with the core fabric of American society,” he wrote. “We felt trapped in two seemingly unwinnable wars, in which a disproportionate share of the fighters came from our neighborhood, and in an economy that failed to deliver the most basic promise of the American Dream — a steady wage.”

Now, Vance is Trump’s running mate ahead of November’s election and the Republicans are polling well. Meanwhile, the U.S. is involved in two different wars, in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip (albeit with no boots on the ground), and anyone asking what the Ohio senator’s nomination means for America’s place in the world, if the GOP wins, might start in the communities of Vance’s youth.

“The guiding stars of his political alignment are economic populism, a degree of isolationism and a focus on the ‘forgotten man’ in U.S. politics,” said Clayton Allen, U.S. director at the political risk consultancy Eurasia Group.

Ideological lodestars like a rejection of free-market orthodoxy — once a central plank of the GOP economic policies — hostility toward immigration and most foreign entanglements, plus a healthy dose of social conservatism. Vance, embodying this combination, makes him the most visible advocate of a movement known as the New Right, currently ascendant in the Republican Party.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/jd-vance-foreign-policy-new-right-rcna164869

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