Vice President JD Vance told graduates at the United States Naval Academy on Friday that they are embarking on a mission in a “new and very dangerous era for our country” as adversaries such as China and Russia are “determined to beat us in every single domain.”
Speaking in Annapolis, Vance said the Trump administration has “reversed course” in U.S. foreign policy as there will be “no more undefined missions” and “no more open-ended conflicts.”
“We’re turning to a strategy grounded in realism and protecting our core national interests. Now, this doesn’t mean that we ignore threats. But it means that we approach them with discipline and that when we send you to war, we do it with a very specific set of goals in mind,” Vance said.
“In the wake of the Cold War, America enjoyed a mostly unchallenged command of the commons — airspace, sea, space, and cyberspace. But the era of uncontested U.S. dominance is over. Today we face serious threats in China, Russia, and other nations determined to beat us in every single domain,” he added.
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“You will be leaders of men and women in our armed forces,” Vance said. “So while President Trump and I congratulate you on this incredible achievement, I also thought it would be appropriate to tell you a bit about how the president and I think of your mission in this new and very dangerous era for our country.”
The vice president said past U.S. administrations carried out a “long experiment in our foreign policy that traded national defense and the maintenance of our alliances for nation-building and meddling in foreign countries’ affairs, even when those foreign countries have very little to do with core American interests.”
“Following the collapse of the Soviet Union… for a brief time, we were a superpower without any fear. Nor did we believe any foreign nation could possibly rise to compete with the United States of America,” he continued.
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“And so our leaders traded hard power for soft power. We stopped making things, everything from cars to computers to the weapons of war, like the ships that guard our waters and the weapons that you will use in the future. Why did we do that? Well too many of us believed that economic integration would naturally lead to peace by making countries like the People’s Republic of China more like the United States,” Vance said. “Over time, we were told that the world would converge toward a uniform set of bland, secular universal ideals regardless of culture or country. And those that didn’t want to converge, our policymakers would it make it their goal to force them by any means necessary.”
“So instead of devoting our energies to the rise of… competitors like China, our leaders pursued what they assumed would be easy jobs for the world’s preeminent superpower. How hard could it be to build new democracies in the Middle East? Well almost impossibly hard, it turns out, and unbelievably costly,” Vance told the graduates.
Vance said, “We must be, all of us, not just smarter,” but now “we got to make sure that [when] we send our troops to war, we do it with the right tools.”
“We can no longer assume our engagements will come without cost. That’s why the Trump administration is investing in innovation, rewarding risk-takers at the Department of Defense and streamlining weapons acquisitions for the new century,” he said during his speech.
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