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.
For example, when we try to speak in terms of American morals and values to the Islamic world, or even to Russia, that might make us feel good about ourselves, like we have done the moral thing. But in countries where the rule of law is seen very differently, or where clan and tribal loyalties form much of people’s notions of morality, the projection of American moral messaging is perceived as off-putting and sometimes even disrespectful. It bears clarifying that realism is not necessarily relativistic, seeing all forms of morality as equally valid. Realism simply sees that trying to frame international problems in terms of American morals and values is a waste of energy, and counterproductive.
In a later post, Vance clarified his perspective:
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsSo much of American diplomacy has become pure performance–an obsession with *saying* this or that.
— JD Vance (@JDVance) February 25, 2025
The reason the failed establishment hates President Donald J. Trump is because he chooses his words carefully and, more importantly, is much more focused on *doing*.
In other words, when we find the Trump administration’s brash and self-interested approach to international relations upsetting, it is probably because we are accustomed to softer approaches that are performative and ineffective. Personally, I am sympathetic to this view to a degree. It is hard to overstate how TV shows like the West Wing and Madame Secretary have affected American understanding of politics, offering visions of how dignified public service advances American goodness and universal values of justice and fairness in the world. This is the idealist approach to geopolitics, that sees diplomacy and the projecting of American influence as a values-driven means for making the world a better place. In the idealist view, communicating our values is every bit as important as advancing our strategic interests. The American president is the leader of the free world, and therefore ought to behave on the world stage in ways that reflect dignity and moral credibility.
The obvious problem is that when we lift the lid and peek under the publicly-dignified facade of American international relations, we find countless horror stories of corruption, waste, and global interference. This has been a stark lesson of the Trump administration’s recent opening of USAID to public scrutiny.
Further, in Vance’s view, our tendencies to emphasize appearances and public etiquette are not ultimately helpful: what matters is what works. Who cares if the process is ugly, a vomit-inducing roller coaster ride of wild public statements? At the end of the day, all we should care about are results.
This question of what (and who) we care about deserves more discussion, in light of a widely-discussed 2019 study in the journal Nature that mapped differences between how conservatives and liberals extend their moral concern in the world. The study showed that the boundaries of conservatives’ moral concern are closer to the individual’s immediate context: self, family, friends, community, and nation. By contrast, the moral concern of liberals extends out to other nations, and even inanimate objects in nature:
With this in mind, Vance’s 2022 statement that “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other” makes more sense, even if in light of the human impact of the war there, Vance’s statement comes across as morally upsetting. But a realist worldview that frankly acknowledges limitations and tradeoffs in “caring” will always sound jarring to those of us who imagine ourselves to be capable of extending unlimited care to the whole world. In a recent article I noted that empathy tends to have an honesty problem, and our refusal to acknowledge the selective scope of our care in the world seems to be a manifestation of that. When we truly perceive the vastness of suffering in the world, we can shut down emotionally under a wave of compassion fatigue, or we can make judgments about where to focus our emotional energy- in other words, where to care. And it is true that a lack of caring focus is not the same as callous indifference in places like Ukraine, but for actual Ukrainians in early 2025, I am not sure the distinction matters.
It is important to understand that just as in international relations, moral reasoning has stances of realism and idealism. The world is full of moral problems: exploitation, aggression, corruption, and more. And for Christians who understand that all of humanity are God’s children, deserving of our love, it might seem that the more expansive liberal allocation of moral concern is more reflective of Christian morality. After all, if God so loved the world (John 3:16) and is no respecter of persons (Romans 2:11), then why would Christians focus our moral concerns so narrowly on our immediate context?
The answer is that Christian moral reasoning does not lend itself to these kinds of simple judgments. In the Gospel of John chapter 6, we see a stark example of how Christian morality conflicts with most people’s moral instincts. There we read that following the miracle of the loaves and fishes, people followed Jesus and asked him to continue the miracle in perpetuity: “…Lord, evermore give us this bread” (v. 34). After all, knowing how many people in the world suffer from hunger, if you or I had the ability to produce endless food and solve hunger in the world once and for all, wouldn’t that be the moral thing to do? And yet, Jesus declined to do so, explaining that “I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever…” (v.51). Jesus’ decision not to do something that would seem obviously moral (solve the people’s hunger forever) was the product of balancing moral and spiritual imperatives. In light of his decision and the conversation that followed, we are told that “From that time many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him” (v. 66).
Likewise, in the gospel of Mark chapter 14, we read of the anointing of Jesus at Bethany. Mark tells us that Jesus’s disciples responded with indignation, as the moral thing would have been to sell the ointment and give it to the poor. Again, this seems morally obvious. Yet, Jesus responded “…Let her alone; why trouble ye her? she hath wrought a good work on me. For ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good: but me ye have not always” (v. 6-7). This is another example where Christian morality subverts our sense of what is morally straightforward.
More examples can be cited, but suffice it to say that Christian morality recognizes that moral judgments involve hard choices between good things. Christian moral reasoning sees dimensions of morality beyond our superficial reflexive notions of what seems best.
In recent years, the ideological left has been seduced by a concept called Modern Monetary Theory, which holds that for the United States, government deficits are not important. If there are needs in the population, that only indicates that not enough money is being supplied and therefore the government should print more. This is an academic fantasy of zero tradeoffs, of endless loaves and fishes for everyone. Under the Biden administration, the Southern border of the U.S. was open to a degree that allowed for an astonishing inflow of people, following democrats’ political lurch to the left on immigration. This is just another manifestation of a “compassion” that is sometimes even phrased in Christian terms, but which refuses to recognize real tradeoffs and human impacts of policy.
In response to these excesses of the left, the Trump administration has implemented orders and policies that reflect the hard reality of scarcity in government resources. One of the most difficult areas of change has been in our policy toward Ukraine, who is now fighting a defense war against an irredentist aggressor. Russia has been openly aggressive toward the U.S. in recent years as well, stealing state and corporate secrets and creating chaos in our public square by flooding social media with bot messaging that inflames our discourse. Russia has a rival vision for the world, “multipolarity,” best articulated by Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin. Dugin is sometimes referred to as “Putin’s Rasputin” to convey his influence over the Kremlin, and Dugin envisions a vast expansion of Russian political and religious control over the world:
The Biden administration’s response to Ukraine was a supportive but cautious supplying of aid for the country’s defense, but at the end of Biden’s term the result was massive loss of life and no decisive end to the conflict in sight. The Biden administration’s messaging on the war was lofty and value-laden, but as J.D. Vance has argued, lofty messaging does not always deliver results. Sometimes we do face choices between courses of action that feel morally validating, versus courses of action that in fact create a moral outcome.
This tension between values and results boiled over in the February 28 meeting at the white house between President Zelensky of Ukraine and U.S. President Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance. Zelensky showed up to the meeting wearing ordinary clothes of a wartime president, and conservative commentator Brian Glenn immediately berated Zelensky’s choice of clothing, signaling that this meeting was not a friendly environment. When Zelensky challenged Trump and Vance on their inability to recognize the deceptive and amoral nature of Putin’s regime, his remarks were met with defensiveness and escalation until the meeting boiled over and any hope of a timely agreement between our countries fell apart.
Among commentators on the right who have spent years steeped in Kremlin narratives of the world, the meeting was framed as a triumph of Trump standing up to the left. But for another substantial segment of conservative-leaning voters, the meeting was a depressing view into how far we have fallen. American presidents used to speak in moral terms about how the world should work, and they used to offer moral clarity on events beyond our borders. They used to know that even the most die hard political realist must care about things that happen on other continents even for purely self-interested reasons, because our world is so interconnected in so many ways that dominos of geopolitics and finance falling anywhere in the world eventually tip over dominoes in the American heartland. Anyone attempting to Make America Great Again is unlikely to succeed if they are not also bringing about greatness in the rest of the world.
And yet, the Trump administration steadfastly refuses to pronounce the most obvious of moral judgments, that Russia is the aggressor in its war with Ukraine. This refusal to articulate a basic moral judgment is disheartening to many people on the right who see America’s greatness as inextricably tied to America’s moral role in the world. Yet, it can be helpful to slow down and see that there may be method to this decision: J.D. Vance has spoken repeatedly of the promise of diplomacy in resolving the war in Ukraine, and it may be that there are valid diplomatic reasons for holding cards of moral messaging close to the chest. Of course if this is the case, then it would have been helpful for that to be communicated to President Zelensky long before he came to the U.S. and his bewilderment – or maybe diplomatic cluelessness – led to an embarrassing public debacle. Hopefully the Trump administration is making an honest assessment of what could have been done differently in planning and communications, to make sure this doesn’t happen again.
In the meantime, as commentators from the left to the right-of-center condemn J.D. Vance in particular, calling him an “opportunist,” a “lapdog,” or otherwise morally deficient, I suggest that the Christian approach would be to do our best to assume good intentions and also be aware of his personal context. Underneath the public persona that Vance carries as part of his political activity, there is a human being. And in Christian understanding, a child of God. In his memoir Hillbilly Elegy, Vance’s formative years are shown to be a tornado of impulsive people acting and reacting to impulses. His grandmother’s Christian faith is described as personal, but never really transcendent in a way that would show J.D. what it means to move beyond reflexive responses to life’s challenges. His recent conversion to Catholicism certainly does offer the promise of transcendent experiences of faith, but even then, his exercise of public Christian morality takes place in an administration that is painfully realist in character, seeing choices not in terms of values or morals but in terms of “deals” and “cards.”
J.D. Vance, more than most public figures, knows the awful power of entropy in families and communities. Whatever his tactical decisions around communications in a time of diplomacy, we can hope that he sees clearly the forces of entropy emanating from the world’s conflict zones and potential conflict zones. We can hope that even in his most realist-leaning moments, he can see how those forces of entropy negatively affect the well-being of everyone in the world, including Americans. And finally, we can pray that his faith is allowing him to transcend to some degree the turmoil that his office has inherited.
But realistically, some things are not really possible to transcend. Trump’s decision to shut off intelligence sharing with Ukraine appears to have emboldened Russia in its campaign of murder in Ukraine, and lives are being lost that could have been saved. Knowing that Ukraine has recommitted to signing a minerals agreement with the U.S. and has also committed to submit to U.S. leadership in a move toward peace, there is no realist justification for emboldening Russia, who we know will impose greater leverage for a cease-fire as a result. And while it is true that Ukraine might have been able to avoid this situation with different behavior at the White House, it is also true that Ukraine is not the moral compass of the United States, and amoral decisions toward Ukraine’s vulnerable population have an impact on our national soul. Trying to rationalize our cruelty will rot the inner moral resources – Christian or other – of anyone who attempts to do so.
And this is why I sincerely pray for J.D. Vance and a few other members of our current administration who I believe carry some degree of Christian moral reasoning. I hope they can see how “these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone” is a core principle in Christian morality that encourages the integration and exercise of multiple stances of morality. This can be tremendously difficult, and I don’t think we should always expect him to thread these moral needles perfectly. Vance’s critics tend to behave with denunciation and sneering, refusing to see that right now he carries a burden of navigating some of the most complex moral commitments imaginable. But seeing clearly the weight and complexity of his burden, I suggest he deserves our prayers.