J.D. Vance Can Lead a Post-Israel America

Politics

J.D. Vance Can Lead a Post-Israel America

As the right fragments, the vice president enters the spotlight.

(Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

A Republican civil war broke out in the days and weeks leading up to this Tuesday’s “Blue-bath,” the election night triumph by the Democrats.

American conservatives are in a knife fight for the future of the MAGA movement. Despite the nationalist turn of American conservatism over the past decade, the civil war centers around a foreign nation: Israel.

Young conservatives and MAGA luminaries like Steve Bannon have grown sharply critical of Washington’s unbalanced and costly relationship with the Jewish state. In reaction, Israel and its American supporters have sought to shore up the “special relationship” by ostracizing Israel-critical voices. Their latest target: Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, who recently expressed support for Tucker Carlson, MAGA’s most prominent critic of Israel.

Pro-Israel conservatives may rack up wins in the short term, but ultimately, seismic shifts in public opinion across the political spectrum all but ensure that Washington will, in the next several years, end its policy of lavish, unconditional, and multifaceted support for Jerusalem. In the meantime, however, this development is proving more divisive on the right than the left—and at a moment when Republicans control all three branches of the federal government.

Luckily for Republicans, one politician who can strike a balance between these factions and finesse the transition to what I call a “post-Israel” GOP is the party’s presumptive nominee for president in 2028: Vice President J.D. Vance. 

That’s not to say that doing so will be easy, but Vance is off to a good start. He’s rebranding as a new kind of Republican, one who sees Israel as just another foreign country—not a “special” ally uniquely deserving of ceaseless American aid—but who also remains a friend of Jewish Americans concerned about antisemitism. Vance will need to refine this message to maintain broad support as the clash over Israel intensifies.

As the vice president surely noticed, that clash reached new levels of intensity after Roberts, a friend of Vance, posted a video statement last Thursday defending Carlson from attacks over an interview with Nick Fuentes, the right-wing extremist and alternative-media Wunderkind. During the interview, Carlson challenged Fuentes’s antisemitic views but also found common ground on Israel. Roberts, in the statement, not only backed Carlson but opposed “canceling” Fuentes, who has faced deplatforming on social media, life-disrupting harassment, and even attempted assassination.

The fallout was dramatic and the pushback more ferocious than Roberts likely anticipated, with several pro-Israel voices condemning him and Carlson for amplifying Fuentes’s white-identitarian ideology. But an even bigger battle was underway. As John Daniel Davidson of the Federalist writes, neoconservatives saw an opportunity to tie antiwar conservatism to antisemitism and wage a proxy fight against Vance ahead of 2028.

Though President Donald Trump has succeeded since 2016 in turning the GOP into a broadly populist party, the American right suddenly looks like an untenable coalition comprising the country’s loudest pro-Israel and anti-Israel voices. You might think the GOP could set aside differences over a small foreign nation and focus instead on restricting immigration, restoring law and order, and reducing the cost of living—the issues that matter most to ordinary Republican voters—but various factors make that difficult.

Most importantly, Trump’s America-First brand of conservatism was always bound to engender opposition to Israel, an ostensible client that sometimes pushes around its superpower patron via the influence of its American lobby. As liberals have turned against Israel en masse, the lobby has resorted to heavy-handed tactics to maintain Republican support, unwittingly bolstering the impression that it exerts undue influence on American politics.

Among the rising stars of the Republican Party, Vance—and only Vance—has the credibility, popularity, and political talent to navigate these stormy waters, bridging the GOP’s generational divide and leading the country into a new phase of its relationship with Israel. 

Vance is the clear favorite of a growing faction on the right that favors realism and restraint in foreign policy, a faction generally hostile toward Israel. Yet Vance’s pro-restraint views have long accommodated sympathy for the Jewish state, which should assure pro-Israel Republicans that he’s someone they can work with. 

Vance will have no difficulty convincing Jewish Americans that he’s not a secret “Groyper,” the odd name for followers of Fuentes. During one recent rant, Fuentes slandered the vice president as “a fat, gay race traitor who married a jeet.” (Vance’s wife, Usha, is of Indian extraction, and “jeet” is an anti-Indian slur.) 

Moreover, as conservative and centrist pro-Israel donors fret over the rise to power of far-left Democrats like Zohran Mamdani, who won New York City’s mayoral election on Tuesday, Vance and the Republican Party will appear to them as the lesser of two evils in a 2028 presidential campaign. Vance leads 2028 primary polling by large margins, and unless that changes, the risk–reward calculus of backing his Republican opponents will be unfavorable. And since a large Israel-critical faction now exists on the American right, the lobby cannot reasonably expect to win every factional battle in a Vance-led GOP.

Vance should use this unprecedented political leeway to reposition himself on Israel, lest he lose any chance of winning disaffected young voters back to the GOP. He will need to not only calibrate his rhetoric but revise his preferred policies. In 2024, during a talk cosponsored by The American Conservative and the pro-restraint Quincy Institute, Vance put a pro-Israel spin on MAGA conservatism, a move that would meet deep skepticism on the campaign trail. 

Vance argued then that Israel helps the U.S. counter Iran in the Middle East and that its defense-technology innovation “actually give us missile-defense parity.” But this June, Israel sabotaged Trump’s nuclear diplomacy with Tehran, launching a surprise attack on Iran that, by drawing Washington into conflict, precipitated a rapid depletion of America’s stockpile of missile interceptors. 

Vance also highlighted the religious affinity between Christians and Jews, but growing awareness of Israelis’ mistreatment of Christians in the Holy Land mitigates the effectiveness of this rhetorical device at generating support for Israel.

These days, Vance clearly perceives a need to align more closely on Israel with America-First principles. Two weeks ago, he condemned a vote by the Israeli parliament supporting annexation of the Palestinian West Bank, a policy the Trump administration opposes. Last week, at a Turning Point USA conference, Vance deftly fielded critical questions from young conservatives about the Israel lobby, the relation between Judaism and Christianity, and Israel’s war in Gaza.

“Israel,” Vance said, “sometimes they have similar interests to the United States, and we’re going to work with them in that case, sometimes they don’t have similar interests to the United States.” Acknowledging divergences of interest between the two countries is key, but young conservatives will expect credible pledges to cut U.S. aid to Israel or condition that aid on behavior that serves American interests.

Vance could also do more to assuage Jewish Americans’ concerns about rising antisemitism. As several critics noted, he didn’t push back after a student claimed, about Israelis and implicitly all Jews, that “not only does their religion not agree with ours, but also openly supports the prosecution [sic] of ours.” Vance was right not to get preachy, but when drawing a distinction between Israel and the U.S., he should also maintain national unity between Jew and Gentile in America.

On Israel and U.S. foreign policy, Vance contains within himself the tensions currently rising among conservatives. While ideological purists may see that as evidence of inauthenticity and untrustworthiness, such tensions can, if handled carefully, make Vance broadly palatable to a fragmented American right. 

And for those purists, whether pro- or anti-Israel, who nevertheless hope for a different candidate in 2028, let me reply with a pithy quote from my esteemed colleague and friend Jude Russo: “If not Vance, who?”

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