In recent debates over U.S. involvement in the defense of Ukraine, political observers were treated to a unique spectacle as Vice President J.D. Vance took to social media and offered a spirited defense of the Trump Administration’s approach to the conflict. In an exchange on X with historian Niall Ferguson, Vance used a phrase that many found jarring; he dismissed one of Ferguson’s posts as “moralistic garbage.” In the post that raised Vance’s ire, Ferguson had quoted President George H.W. Bush, who in 1990 offered clear moral condemnation toward Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.
In Vance’s response, he articulated a series of points that inform the Trump administration’s stance of realism toward the conflict in Ukraine. In geopolitics – the study of politics between nations – realism is a stance that tends to create a feeling of moral disgust, because in contrast with idealism, which aspires to a moral vision for the world, realism suggests that there are only cold facts and calculations to consider. In the realist view, decisions are not based on ethical values; there are only competing interests. Realism avoids questions of who is in the right and who is in the wrong. It dismisses any appeal to principles. It sees all claims in terms of self-interest and leverage. To a pure geopolitical realist, any attempt to invoke morals is “moralistic garbage,” because the world doesn’t work according to morals.