Matt Kroenig: Hi, Emma! Greetings from Florence, Italy! I am here in a hardship post, teaching my annual Machiavelli class for Georgetown.
Emma Ashford: You know, some of us have to stay in the D.C. swamp every summer. It’s not very Prince-ly of you to rub it in.
MK: Well, if it is any consolation, it is 93 degrees Fahrenheit here. Fortunately, there is plenty of gelato to cool us off.
Anything happening back in the United States?
EA: Not much. The NATO circus has finally left town after a 75th anniversary summit dominated by discussions about how President Joe Biden is older than the alliance and showing it. A sitting U.S. senator—the former chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—was convicted of taking shady foreign bribes. It’s the Republican National Convention this week in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and we now have a vice presidential candidate on the Republican side who once compared former President Donald Trump to Hitler. Oh, and Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt on Saturday night. So a pretty normal news week for 2024, all things considered.
MK: There is much to discuss indeed. Perhaps we should start with the assassination attempt. This was a truly historic event. The last time there was a serious assassination attempt in the United States at this level was the shooting of then-President Ronald Reagan more than 40 years ago. It also recalls the time former President Theodore Roosevelt was shot in the chest while giving a speech on the campaign trail in 1912. Like Roosevelt, Trump survived the attack and was back campaigning almost immediately.
There are two things that stick out to me. First, I am struck by the shocking failure of the Secret Service and local police forces. How could a 20-year-old, apparently acting alone and without any specialized training, come within an inch of killing a former (and possibly future) president of the United States? I am sympathetic to those advancing conspiracy theories in this case. They are wrong, of course; if one is unsure whether something is the result of incompetence or conspiracy, incompetence is always the safer bet. But in this case, the staggering level of incompetence just doesn’t make much sense.
Second, this is one of a string of events strengthening Trump’s reelection prospects. There was Biden’s poor debate performance. Then Trump survives an assassination attempt and emerges bloody and vowing to fight, with campaign photographs too gripping to have been dreamed up on Madison Avenue. Then the charges against him in the classified documents case are thrown out. It is a remarkable string of good fortune.
EA: Yeah, his odds are looking pretty good. But I want to stick with the assassination for now, because this is also part of a growing pattern. The data is pretty hard to parse, but globally, we appear to be in a period of higher levels of political violence. Just in the last few years, we’ve had the killing of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the shooting—and narrow survival—of Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico, and the stabbing of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil during his election campaign, all of those by political opponents.
Here in the United States, there have been foiled kidnapping and murder plots against Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and the shootings of U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise in 2017 and U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords back in 2011.
Political violence is usually the result of societal identity-based tensions and a sense that the political system isn’t responsive to the needs of citizens; I worry that is exactly what we’re seeing play out here.
MK: There does seem to be a worrying trend of increasing political violence in consolidated democracies. I would like to see a systematic scholarly analysis of the data. Is the violence really increasing, or does it just seem that way? Is it really worse than the 1960s, for example, when the United States experienced the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Sen. Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. in the span of five years, and there was widespread rioting, including at the 1968 Democratic National Convention?
And you might be right that political violence in general is the result of social tensions and ineffective institutions unable to address them, but that does not seem to describe what happened on Saturday night. This seemed to be more characteristic of long-standing patterns of gun violence in the United States: a misguided and socially isolated young man, with easy access to firearms—the classic “school shooter” profile.
EA: The University of Chicago has a program on political violence in the United States, and its data does show a clear uptick in the last few years. It’s not worse than the 1960s, but it’s comparable to it, or to other prior periods of political violence in U.S. history. I’ll be curious to see if more emerges about this shooter, because thus far, we have no indications about his motivation.
That said, prior presidential assassins were motivated by such diverse—and uniformly crazy—factors as being unable to get a U.S. government job, Confederate ideology, and wanting to impress the actress Jodie Foster.
Often, it’s not the specific ideological motivation that matters as much as the permissive climate that is worrying. And between all the incidents we’ve already mentioned and the Jan. 6 riot, I think it’s pretty clear why politicians immediately tried to bring the temperature down this weekend. The president even gave an Oval Office speech trying to prevent further violence! None of this is comforting, and I don’t see the broader political dynamics involved changing anytime soon.
MK: Yes, politicians are trying to bring the temperature down. Biden apologized for a past comment saying that it was “time to put Trump in the bull’s-eye.” And Trump said that he would rewrite parts of his convention speech to send a message of political unity.
EA: Certainly, the political rhetoric is not helpful. This is another one of those cases where both sides are bad, though Trump is certainly worse. But the day I see Trump make a speech genuinely emphasizing political unity—for more than 20 minutes—is the day I will eat my hat. I don’t think the man is capable of such a thing.
MK: Speaking of Trump’s speech, I assume you have been following the convention? What do you make of it so far, including Trump’s choice for running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance?
EA: It’s an interesting pick. Vice presidential picks are usually not that interesting from a policy point of view, since they tend to get sidelined in most administrations. But here, we have Trump picking a much younger candidate—exactly half his age, in fact, a full 39 years younger—who shares many of his own views on issues like foreign policy, immigration, and trade. Perhaps not coincidentally, these are the areas where traditional mainstream Republicans probably disagreed most with Trump himself. One could certainly see this pick as Trump—or others within the party—trying to lock in some of the policy shifts of the last eight years and shape the future of the party.
What about you? Are you despairing yet? The ticket does not seem like your cup of tea.
MK: Well, you are right that some are despairing. FP has reported, for example, that European diplomats are worried. There were also stories that big Republican donors were trying to push Trump to reassure moderate and independent voters by selecting someone like Sen. Marco Rubio or North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum.
But I think the despair is misplaced.
As I wrote in my recent book on GOP foreign policy, I think the party is united around most big policy issues. The mainstream of the party, not just Trump and Vance, think we need to have stronger border security and tariffs against China in an attempt to bring about freer and fairer trade, for example.
EA: True on some issues, certainly. It’s absurd to describe Vance as an “isolationist” the way some have been—lazily using the term as a slur. He’s hawkish on China and on the border. He’s even hawkish on Iran, though not to the extent of the neoconservatives who still want U.S.-Iran war.
But then there’s Europe, and particularly Ukraine. Vance is not isolationist, but he has expressed support for U.S. retrenchment in Europe and backing away from the war in Ukraine. You can’t really say the party is united on those.
MK: That is true. The biggest divide within the party has been on Ukraine. You have some, like former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, criticizing Biden for not doing enough. Others, like Vance, have been critical of aid to Ukraine. He has argued, for example, that Ukraine is a corrupt partner, and that the United States simply lacks the defense industrial capacity to produce munitions for Ukraine and to meet all of its other global commitments.
Trump is somewhere in the middle. On one hand, he says he wants to stop the killing and that he will end the war in 24 hours. Many read this (I think incorrectly) as evidence that he will cut a bad deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin and sell out Ukraine. On the other hand, he provided political cover to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson to send more aid to Ukraine and has also threatened to tell Putin that if he doesn’t “make a deal … we’re going to give [Ukraine] more than they ever got, if we have to.”
So, in short, I think his strategy is to use America’s leverage (specifically, the threat to Putin to provide, and to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to withhold, more U.S. military aid to Kyiv) in order to force negotiations and bring the war to a swift conclusion in a way that preserves Ukraine as a sovereign state but that falls short of helping Ukraine win back all of its territory. It is a reasonable approach, and probably where the current Biden strategy will also end up. But Trump seeks to get there quickly, not after fighting a proxy war for “as long as it takes.”
EA: So the exact policy approach that myself and others have been advocating for at least a year, and which many in Washington have castigated for “selling out Ukraine”?
MK: I would note that I have also advocated for a strategy along these lines since January of this year. I had previously argued for a strategy of military victory, but then the Biden White House dawdled for more than two years, giving Russia time to dig in, so I no longer think total victory is realistic.
EA: Well, I’m glad to see the Republican Party—and you, in particular—finally listened to me, but you can’t deny that this approach has been highly unpopular among D.C. foreign-policy elites to this point.
Vance is also quite clear on the question of European burden-sharing, correctly in my view. He went to the Munich Security Conference this year as a senator to try to pierce the bubble of European security discussions, where few will actually admit that America may need to do less in Europe going forward.
Again, I think the party is moving in the right direction. But it’s undoubtedly a shift from Republican foreign policy as we have known it over the last few decades. Of course, there are still Trump’s sometimes completely random musings: Just this week, he suggested that Taiwan should pay the United States to defend it! So who knows?
MK: Well, Republicans from Eisenhower to Bob Gates to Trump have long demanded that Europeans do more for their defense, and they are right. I think the real debate within the party now is whether Europe should do that largely on its own or under the guidance of continued U.S. leadership. I think the latter approach is more practical.
But, returning to Vance, his talent and biography are impressive and undeniable. He is a former Marine, a Yale Law grad, a bestselling author, a former venture capitalist, and a U.S. senator. Not bad for someone who has not yet reached their 40th birthday.
EA: Yeah, speaking for all the not-quite-40-year-olds out there, Sen. Vance, please cut it out. You’re making us look bad.
MK: Finally, we need to put this pick in context as it relates to foreign policy. As you know, the vice president doesn’t have much formal influence in the foreign-policy process. Vice President Kamala Harris’s influence over Biden’s foreign policy has been negligible. If Trump wins, therefore, his key foreign-policy cabinet appointments will have much greater sway than Vance over a Trump 2.0 administration’s foreign policy.
EA: It’s possible. But how many cabinet officials did Trump have in his first term? He had so many national security advisors that you’d need a fairly large minibus to fit them all. Maybe that would be different in a Trump 2.0 administration—or maybe it would be a similar chaotic mess.
But we’d better start trying to figure it out. Unless something changes in the polls, it’s looking increasingly likely that this Trump-Vance ticket will win in November, with foreign-policy implications for the whole world.
MK: And if and when that happens, we will be there to debate it.
It’s getting hot over here. I think I could use another gelato—or a negroni. Until next time?
EA: Arrivederci.
The post Will an Assassination Attempt and VP Announcement Help Trump Win? appeared first on Foreign Policy.
