Vice President JD Vance served in the Iraq War and came home a sharp critic of foreign military interventions, saying that too often Washington policymakers lose sight of American interests when they entangle themselves in faraway wars.
Now he is defending President Donald Trump’s decision to conduct a daring raid this month in a country closer to home — to depose Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. The White House said that a more pro-U.S. government in Venezuela will stop drug and migrant flows, and open the country’s vast oil reserves to U.S. companies. But there are also major risks that armed conflict in the country could escalate, sucking in the United States and making the venture harder to defend as an “America First” endeavor.
Vance’s defense of Maduro’s seizure appears discordant with his far more skeptical stance toward strikes on the Houthi militia in Yemen — a position revealed in a Signal group chat that was accidentally made public in March. Many prominent advocates of military restraint who have boosted Vance’s foreign policy views in the past now oppose the decision to oust Maduro.
But as the vice president eyes his 2028 presidential prospects while also wanting to appear in lockstep with the president, Vance has claimed no contradiction at all.
Going back to his time in the Senate, Vance has been an advocate for a robust U.S. presence in the Western Hemisphere, co-sponsoring a 2023 resolution reaffirming the Monroe Doctrine, which warns foreign powers against challenging U.S. predominance in the Americas.
Now, he is defending the Venezuela operation as an “America First” decision.
“As a Marine Corps veteran, for my entire lifetime, presidents — and let’s be honest, they were Democrats and Republicans — would send the American military to far-off places,” Vance said Friday at a Venezuela-focused White House event for oil executives. “They would get us involved in these endless quagmires. They would lose hundreds or thousands of American lives. And the American people would get nothing out of these misadventures.
“And now you have an American president who’s empowered the American military to stop the flow of drugs into our country and to ensure that we, as opposed to our adversaries, control one of the great energy reserves that exist anywhere in the entire world. And he did it without losing a single American life in the process,” Vance said.
Even some of Vance’s allies see the vice president struggling to thread the needle as he tries to stand by Trump while not alienating the GOP’s anti-interventionist wing.
“If JD Vance himself were president, would Venezuela have happened? Would we have captured Maduro? To me, without a doubt, the answer is no. I cannot fathom a scenario,” said Ben Freeman, a senior fellow at the Quincy Institute, a Washington-based think tank that has hosted Vance in the past.
Vance is “not interested in militarism,” Freeman said. “He is seeking out diplomacy-first solutions and keeping the U.S. out of foreign adventurism.”
Vance says there is no daylight between himself, Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. But Rubio, a Cuban-American from Florida and another potential 2028 contender, has long advocated for aggressive action in Venezuela as a larger strategy to bolster U.S. ties to Latin America and weaken Cuba’s Communist leaders.
In recent days, Vance has repeatedly felt the need to explain to his followers why the administration decided to go after Maduro.
“I understand the anxiety over the use of military force, but are we just supposed to allow a communist to steal our stuff in our hemisphere and do nothing? Great powers don’t act like that,” Vance wrote on X on Jan. 4, a day after the president announced Maduro’s capture. Trump was at Mar-a-Lago during the raid, surrounded by his senior-most aides — but not the vice president.
Two administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive considerations, said political optics did not play a role in the decision for Vance to stay away from Mar-a-Lago.
For safety reasons, Vance rarely joins Trump outside of Washington. Additionally, officials were worried that a vice-presidential motorcade to Mar-a-Lago the evening of the operation would have tipped off Venezuela. As a result, Vance and other White House officials determined it wasn’t necessary for him to attend the news conference, according to the officials.
Vance and White House officials also said he played a key role in the lead-up to the operation.
In mid-December, Vance and Rubio led a meeting of Trump’s top advisers and Cabinet officials to plan the operation, including the decision to move forward with an economic quarantine using U.S. military vessels to block sanctioned Venezuelan oil shipments, according to a person with knowledge of the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive details.
At the end of the month, Vance also spoke with Qatari intermediaries about whether Maduro was willing to accept any of the United States’ exit offers, the person said. When it was clear Maduro wasn’t prepared to accept the negotiations, Vance and Rubio jointly concluded Maduro was “not a credible interlocutor” and that the U.S. couldn’t conduct business with Venezuela under his leadership, the person said.
As the operation took place, Vance was “on the same systems as the president,” the person said, monitoring it in real time and “on a line watching the operation with the president.” A spokesman has previously said that Vance was monitoring events from elsewhere in Palm Beach and departed Florida before Trump spoke to the media.
Vance has not always been so enthusiastic about taking U.S. military action. He was a sharp voice of dissent in the Signal group chat about strikes on Houthi militants in Yemen threatening shipping traffic in the Red Sea. The Signal chat included Trump’s top national security officials — and the editor of the Atlantic.
“There is a real risk that the public doesn’t understand this or why it’s necessary,” Vance wrote, noting that militants were threatening more European than American trade.
“I am willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself,” he said. “I just hate bailing Europe out again.”
Although Vance never intended for his comments to become public, his sharply independent voice — especially since another top Trump aide on the thread, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, said the president had already made a “clear” decision — jumped out to some.
“The president had decided and Vance was still relitigating,” said Rebecca Lissner, who was former vice president Kamala Harris’s principal deputy national security adviser. “I thought it was really informative about how he operates as the vice president, and how different it is. The fact that instead of JD Vance being the one being like, ‘Guys, the president has decided. We’re moving out,’ he was the one questioning the decision.”
Vice presidents are often faced with thorny questions about how to influence their administration’s policies. Without a clear portfolio, an agency to run or a defined responsibility, the vice president has to own actions without always helping decide them.
That became a struggle for Harris on Gaza policy during the 2024 campaign, when President Joe Biden’s decisions on Israel became unpopular with the Democratic base.
With Trump and Vance, there may be more room for input, Lissner said.
“Trump does like to be presented with options, and that means that there’s space for different people to advocate for different options,” she said.
Vance has leaned into some of the administration’s domestic initiatives with gusto, as was clear last week when he came to the White House briefing room to deliver a sharp defense of the ICE agent who fatally shot a protesterin Minneapolis and announce a new Justice Department initiative to uncover fraud in federal programs.
Allies of Vance say his support for Trump’s foreign policy decisions over the last year should come as no surprise.
“Vance is never going to break with Trump, and he authentically likes him, and he seems to authentically like Rubio,” said Curt Mills, the executive director of the American Conservative, a magazine that formed in opposition to the Iraq War. “He’s a nationalist and a realist, but he’s also the vice president and not the president, so he’s not ultimately the decision-maker.”
Sen. Jim Banks (R-Indiana), a friend of Vance’s, said the two have talked about their time serving overseas — Banks in Afghanistan — and how it shaped their view of the U.S.’s role abroad. He too described Vance’s foreign policy as “rooted in realism,” and that “JD believes that America has a strong role to play around the world.”
“We served in wars that were poorly run and managed by the military leaders of the prior administrations, and we don’t want to see our country send troops to 20-year forever wars with little purpose and fail in the same way that the previous administrations did,” Banks said. “President Trump doesn’t want that either. He ran against that.”
Advocates for Trump’s use of force over the past year said he has been careful about not getting pulled deeply into ongoing conflicts.
The decision not to seek more dramatic change in Venezuela, and instead to work with Maduro’s deputy, Delcy Rodríguez, may be part of that pattern, analysts said — but it also may not work.
“This isn’t about regime change. This definitely does have that harder-nosed realpolitik flavor, and I think that’s why folks like Vance or others find themselves able to at least try and defend this,” said Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at the foreign police think tank the Stimson Center, who has argued for a more restrained approach to the use of military force.
Governmental collapse in Venezuela, a military coup or other unrest could lead to greater migration and larger drug trafficking issues, Ashford said — the opposite of what Vance said he hopes will come.
“If this spirals into something more, it’s going to be much harder to defend,” she said. “For folks like me, I would say that’s the reason you shouldn’t do it in the first place.”
Liz Goodwin and John Hudson contributed to this report.
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