Does Vice President J.D. Vance “Realize that this is Madness”?

Ukraine vs. Russia: "C'mon guys"

US Vice President J.D. Vance. © Getty Images

Vice President of the United States J.D. Vance has some impressive credentials for a 40-year-old good ol’ country boy:

After graduating from high school, Vance elected to join the Marines. He is a decorated US Marine Corps veteran, serving in Iraq as a military journalist. He was then a 2009 summa cum laude graduate of Ohio State University with a BA in political science and philosophy.

Then, after graduating from law school, Vance worked for Republican senator John Cornyn. He spent a year as a law clerk for Judge David Bunning of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky before working as a corporate lawyer for two years. He then made a quantum leap by becoming a venture capitalist in San Francisco, serving as a principal at Peter Thiel’s firm, Mithril Capital.

In 2016, Vance published his now famous autobiography, Hillbilly Elegy, soon made into a feature film by Ron Howard. Riding on a wave of money from Peter Thiel and other technocrats, Vance went into politics and was elected US senator from Ohio in 2022. Two years later he was elected Vice President of the US on Donald J. Trump’s presidential ticket.

Gee, that was fast. You can read more of the details here. Speculation is that Vance was designated for future greatness at Ohio State, a major Deep State recruiting ground. At least he was not a Rhodes Scholar, like some Jake Sullivans we know.

I personally have found J.D. to be a refreshing presence in his vice presidential role by looking and sounding intelligent in his apparent assignment as President Trump’s back-up and interpreter in dealing with various “woke” European political figures, like Starmer, Macron, and the German leadership.

As reported by The Guardian:

The US vice-president, JD Vance, has launched a brutal ideological assault on Europe, accusing its leaders of suppressing free speech, failing to halt illegal migration and running in fear from voters’ true beliefs.

In a chastising speech on Friday that openly questioned whether current European values warranted defense by the US, he painted a picture of European politics infected by media censorship, cancelled elections, and political correctness.

Arguing that the true threat to Europe stemmed not from external actors such as Russia or China, but Europe’s own internal retreat from some of its “most fundamental values,” he repeatedly questioned whether the US and Europe any longer had a shared agenda. “What I worry about is the threat from within,” Vance said.

Vance also helped Trump dish it out to Ukraine’s President Vladimir Zelensky during Trump’s celebrated May 8 Oval Office take-down of the “Green Goblin,” (ref: Alex Christoforou), after which Zelensky fled Washington, chastised by Trump for his alleged disrespect.

We are now in a situation where Trump has been making overtures to Russian President Vladimir Putin to come to the negotiating table, along with Ukraine, to end the war, now in its fourth year. Trump wants the negotiations to begin with an unconditional cease-fire, which Putin has rejected on the grounds that Ukraine will use the hiatus to rearm. Putin sees the cease-fire proposal as a repetition of previous failed negotiations—Minsk I and II and Istanbul 2022—where Russia agreed to talk in good faith to representatives from the other side which had no intention of a faithful fulfillment of terms.

Russia has presented the US with its own list of demands, which Zelensky refuses to countenance, leading to threats by Trump to walk away and leave Ukraine—and its European backers—to their fate.

Now enter J.D. Vance, who is refusing to back Zelensky’s position. But what is he offering as an alternative, and is he taking any responsibility for the fact that the US brought about the conflict in Ukraine in the first place? From a May 8 article on rt.com:

Washington wants to move away from the “obsession” with a 30-day ceasefire proposed by Ukraine, US Vice President J.D. Vance has said. The US is more interested in shaping a durable peace agreement with Moscow, he told a Munich Leaders Meeting on Wednesday.

Ukraine had floated a one-month ceasefire as a counter to Russia’s 72-hour truce proposal to mark the 80th anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany.

However, Moscow has rejected Kiev’s plan, arguing that Ukrainian troops, which have been on the back foot for months, would use it to regroup and strengthen their military posture.

Vance stressed that the US remains interested in a “long-term settlement” of the conflict rather than a short-term one. “We've tried to move beyond the obsession with the 30-day ceasefire and more on the what would the long-term settlement look like? And we've tried to consistently advance the ball,” the vice president said.

Vance also noted that the US has deemed Moscow’s initial negotiation proposals as excessive. “Certainly, the first peace offer that the Russians put on the table, our reaction to it was you’re asking for too much,” he said. “But this is how negotiations unfold.”

Vance added that US President Donald Trump is prepared to abandon negotiations if there is no progress, urging Moscow and Kiev to engage in diplomacy. “We would like both the Russians and the Ukrainians to actually agree on some basic guidelines for sitting down and talking to one another.”

Here is the problem though:

It’s the US which has been the principal driver in pushing NATO to the borders of Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. This was after the promise made by US Secretary of State James Baker III to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not advance “one inch eastward” after Soviet agreement to allow the reunification of Germany in 1990. This pledge was violated by successive presidents from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush to Barack Obama to Donald J. Trump.

The West had plans that the next two countries to join NATO would be Ukraine and Georgia. This would place US nuclear-armed missiles within minutes of Moscow and would drive wedges deep into the Russian heartland. When Russia under Putin said “nyet,” the US, along with Britain, enlisted Ukrainian partisans to overthrow the neutralist government of President Viktor Yakunovych in 2014.

The US then set up a junta in Kyiv to govern Ukraine, which resulted in the secession of the Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts and a referendum in Crimea to join Russia. War ensued and has not yet stopped, with Russia invading in its Special Military Operation in February 2022.

Of course J.D. Vance knows all this. He also knows that the host of Western sanctions against Russia promulgated by the US, Britain, and the EU have backfired, with Russia’s economy actually being strengthened, and that Russia is winning the war against Ukraine, despite the hundreds of billions of dollars and massive amounts of weapons supplied to Ukraine in its losing cause.

The underlying motive of the West has clearly been to defeat Russia in what is now a major war, cause regime change against Putin in Moscow, and break up Russia into its constituent parts for the purpose of permanent Western hegemony over this nuclear-armed state.

Doesn’t J.D. Vance realize that to resolve this major world-shattering crisis requires much more from him, from President Trump, and from the rest of the US government than these peevish statements that if the two sides don’t negotiate the US will simply walk away?

Doesn’t J.D. Vance realize this is madness? That it is just a continuation of World War II? That it’s time for someone to take responsibility for bringing real peace to Europe and hence to the world?

Not that Russia has entirely clean hands as Putin and his colleagues like to pretend. The people of Europe remember very well the brutal rule of Russian-controlled communist dictatorships over Eastern and Central Europe from the end of World War II until 1991. The Baltic states remember this well, as do Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Moldova, Romania, and Bulgaria.

Ukraine specifically remembers Stalin’s Holomodor of 1932-1933, when millions of Ukrainians were deliberately starved to death in order to implement what became the Stalinist nightmare of collective farming. Ukraine remembers the millions put to death by Hitler’s SS and by Stalin’s own secret police. Ukraine has few happy memories to fall back on in trying to build its own national identity.

And does it really do any good for Russia use its Victory Day parade to constantly rub it into Germany what a great job the Russians did in killing millions of Germans sent to the front to die almost a century ago?

Russia too must do its part to bring peace if it really wants to reintegrate with Europe at some point in the future. This can’t be done by gloating over the past.

All this should bring home to J.D. Vance what a monumental job faces the US if it is really sincere about bringing peace to Europe. What the US should now do is make its own pledge that if peace can be found in Ukraine, the US will disband NATO and take steps for a new era of harmony and positive reconstruction across all of Europe. Then the US should establish normal diplomatic relations and leave Europe to forge its own future.

The US first sent armies to Europe in 1917 to bail the British out in its fight with Germany. The US sent armies to fight for Britain again starting in 1942, armies which have never left. After the start of the Cold War, instigated largely by Winston Churchill, the US turned those armies around to face the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union dissolved, the US violated its pledges and set off on another grand military adventure aimed at dissolving and destroying Russia.

All this must now stop. Instead, the US should look to saving itself from its own past century of failures to become a truly well-functioning modern society.

I say to Vice President J.D. Vance: We all know, sir, that you are not stupid. We also say that it’s time for you—and your boss, President Trump—to seize the moment and begin to accomplish what now needs to be done for peace on earth and good will to men. When you have accomplished this in Europe, you can do the same in the Middle East and elsewhere.

How about it sir?

Richard C. Cook is a retired U.S. federal analyst with extensive experience across various government agencies, including the U.S. Civil Service Commission, FDA, the Carter White House, NASA, and the U.S. Treasury. He is a graduate of the College of William and Mary. As a whistleblower at the time of the Challenger disaster, he exposed the flawed O-ring joints that destroyed the Space Shuttle, documenting his story in the book “Challenger Revealed.” After serving at Treasury, he became a vocal critic of the private finance-controlled monetary system, detailing his concerns in “We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform.” He served as an adviser to the American Monetary Institute and worked with Congressman Dennis Kucinich to advocate for replacing the Federal Reserve with a genuine national currency. See his new book, Our Country, Then and Now, Clarity Press, 2023. Also see his Three Sages Substack and his American Geopolitical Institute articles at https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/category/agi/.

“Every human enterprise must serve life, must seek to enrich existence on earth, lest man become enslaved where he seeks to establish his dominion!” Bô Yin Râ (Joseph Anton Schneiderfranken, 1876-1943), translation by Posthumus Projects Amsterdam, 2014. Also download the Kober Press edition of The Book on the Living God here.