There is a coherent worldview behind the vice president’s foreign policy and that is exactly the problem. J.D. Vance does not stumble into the outcomes he produces. He believes in them. He sees a tripartite world with America secured in its own hemisphere, Russia dominant across its near abroad and China supreme in Asia. He appears willing to trade away 70 years of American primacy to build it. The retreat is the design.

Start with Iran. Vance made himself the public face of a memorandum of understanding that reopens the Strait of Hormuz toll-free, lifts the naval blockade and dangles sanctions relief, frozen assets and a reconstruction fund before the regime we had just spent months bombing. He told CBS the $300 billion fund would be “funded by the Gulf coalition,” volunteering the wealth of allies who were never asked. Our Secretary of State had to contradict him publicly, insisting no such request had been made by allies.

Israel, which fought beside us, struggled even to obtain the text. Gulf officials privately complained they were sidelined and that the deal does nothing about Iran’s missiles. We went to war to weaken Tehran. Vance is selling the settlement that finances its recovery and calling capitulation a peace. Also, Iran says it will charge a “fee” to ships, making the nation richer with no restrictions on funding terrorism.

Now Turkey. This week, Vance announced the administration is “confirming” that Ankara has met the legal conditions to receive F-35s. This is the same Ankara expelled from the program in 2019 for buying Russian S-400 air defenses; it still has not surrendered. Rubio, again, says the law forbids it. No certification has gone to Congress. Yet the transfers march forward, including the engines for Turkey’s homegrown stealth fighter. We are handing our most advanced military aviation to an increasingly Islamist government whose president muses about Israel’s destruction and whom our own president called a candidate to side with Iran. Vance is the man waving it through.

Then Ukraine. Vance has dismissed the fight over Ukrainian territory as “haggling over a few square kilometers” — 6,000 of them, in fact, including the fortress belt that shields the country from the next invasion. He has said he is “particularly proud” that the administration ended American support for Kyiv. The pressure has fallen on the victim to cede land that the aggressor could not conquer. The message to Moscow is unmistakable: the lines you cannot win on the battlefield, Washington will help you draw at the table. It is the oldest lesson of the last century, unlearned, i.e., reward an aggressor’s appetite and you do not satisfy it, you whet it.

Three theaters have one pattern. In each, an American adversary ends up stronger, and an American ally ends up weaker, more isolated and less certain of our word. This is not the absent-minded drift of a distracted government. It is the consistent application of a thesis Vance has stated plainly for years: that the world is multipolar, that resources are scarce, that allies must fend for themselves and that America should pull back to what he deems vital and let the other great powers run their own neighborhoods.

The trouble is what that thesis costs. American leadership was never charity. It was the cheapest insurance policy in history. We maintain a forward presence that keeps the sea lanes open, the rivals contained and the wars small. Trade it away, and you do not get a tidy multipolar balance. You get a world where Iran rebuilds, Turkey drifts, Russia digests, China watches and every ally concludes the American guarantee is a wasting asset to be hedged against. Isolation does not make us safer. It makes us smaller and it makes the people who wish us harm bolder.

Vance is not hiding the project. He is executing it in plain sight, theater by theater, asking us to mistake retreat for prudence. We should decline. American global leadership was earned by men who understood that the alternative to it is not peace but a vacuum. That vacuum is always filled by someone worse. The vice president is busy manufacturing that vacuum. The least the rest of us can do is refuse to call it statesmanship.

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