I'm John Batchel with my colleague Peter Berkowitz, and we're looking at three men who are around the president,

associated with the president, in and out of the White House through the first year of the Trump second term.

Ivan Musk, Dr. Carlson, and now J.D. Vance is an author, a Marine, a Yale school graduate, an entrepreneur, and

enormously, enormously admirable for what he's overcome in his life and achieved the vice

presidency. However, there is this new understanding of J.D. Vance as old-fashioned word isolationism. Is that fair, Peter?

It's, I think, excuse me, I think it's fair to say that J.D. Vance has displayed such tendencies, but it's not exactly old-school isolation for example um duran reports that uh high level

Israelis that he's spoken to have found uh in j d vans a staunch supporter of uh Israel's interests in

the administration um however when it comes to Ukraine, not a few on the right, especially old-fashioned Republicans

have been troubled by what seems to be his support for a negotiated settlement that favors

Russia.

But I suppose the largest, the most general concern about JD Vance has to do with his flirtation with something called post-liberalism.

This flirtation, Duran is not the first to write about this flirtation.

Article in political in 2024 discussed J.D. Vance's great admiration for a University of

Notre Dame professor by the name of Patrick Deneen, who is championed this idea, maybe I should say

ideology of post-liberalism, the central idea of which is that the United States was founded on false

and degrading principles and that any serious politics has to figure out how we can understand

that exhausted tradition and save ourselves from it. Now, the post-liberal critique has implications

for foreign policy because according to the post-liberal critique has implications for foreign policy because according to the

post-liberal critique, American foreign policy, American diplomacy, the security system that the United

States created after World War II, all of it is corrupt and it's corrupt because it contains the seeds of the initial corruption

that are that were sewn into the American founding I know that's heady and theoretical stuff

but it's J.D. Vance himself who has affirmed his enthusiasm for that set of ideas.

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