WaPo | Vance has taken a ton of heat recently for claiming, “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other.” In that appearance, Vance added that “Mexican fentanyl” is a much bigger problem, describing the southern border as a “total war zone.”
What's happening in Ukraine has nothing to do with our national security, but it is distracting our idiot "leaders" from focusing on the things that actually do matter to our national security, like securing the border & stopping the flow of Fentanyl that's killing American kids. https://t.co/a6bAaRxSH7
— J.D. Vance (@JDVance1) February 22, 2022
Buried underneath this smarmy formulation is a real argument, and it’s a repulsive one. There’s a reason Vance and others keep linking our border to that of Ukraine: Drawing this connection treats immigration to the United States as a species of invasion on a par with what Russia is threatening.
Russia has just declared that two separatist regions in Ukraine are independent and sent in troops to them, a move that the United Nations has condemned as a violation of international law and Ukrainian sovereignty.
Yet Vance’s ugly suggestion is that immigration to the United States and this Russian invasion are somehow vaguely comparable threats to national sovereignty, and that only the former one should occupy our attention.
Of course, what Vance really objects to is that Biden has undone a few of Trump’s immigration policies. We’re now letting in migrant kids whereas Trump tried to keep them out, and Biden is trying to end Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy.
That has created serious logistical challenges with no easy answers, to be sure. But it’s hardly a severe blow to our national sovereignty, and at any rate, it’s better than Trump’s alternative, which produced a humanitarian catastrophe. Vance views that catastrophe as successful policy.
But the deeper point of Vance’s formulation connecting the U.S. and Ukrainian borders is this: In that version of populist nationalism, the United States should dramatically retreat on any and all international obligations, both in maintaining the liberal international order and in letting in legal immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees.
These are two sides of the same coin. David Rothkopf, a foreign policy expert, author and commentator, notes that both represent similar retreats on the very idea of having an international order at all.
“A central tenet of Trumpism was to seek the end of the international order,” Rothkopf told me. “But this isn’t just Trumpism. It’s also Putinism.”
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