Vice President JD Vance's recent comments about the Russian invasion of Ukraine prove he is just as captured by Vladimir Putin's propaganda as his boss, according to former Republican strategist-turned-Lincoln Project co-founder Rick Wilson's scathing analysis.
Wilson, one of the most outspoken former Republicans fighting against Trump, on Monday compared Vance to Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who infamously tried to prevent World War II by making a preemptive peace deal with Adolf Hitler.
In his NBC interview circuit over the weekend, Vance insisted that Ukraine will have to pursue a deal with Russia for the conflict to end, saying “This is how wars ultimately get settled. If you go back to World War II, if you go back to every major conflict in human history, they all end with some kind of negotiation.”
In this, wrote Wilson, "what he’s really saying is that America should push Ukraine to cut a deal with Vladimir Putin. He’s soft-selling a Russian military dismantling and the concomitant genocide of Ukraine. He’s auditioning for the Neville Chamberlain fan club. And he’s advertising, loudly, that he neither understands history nor the stakes of the present fight."
Besides that, Wilson wrote, Vance is simply wrong that "all" wars end in a bilateral negotiation of some kind. Sometimes wars end in total surrender and even the dissolution of entire countries — including the very war Vance used as an example.
"World War II did not end in a negotiation. We did not allow the Nazis to continue to govern a few of their seized territories. We did not allow Imperial Japan to hold Manchuria or the Philippines," wrote Wilson. "It ended when the Allies marched across Europe, bombed Germany flat, and forced an unconditional surrender in 1945. It ended when the United States island-hopped across the Pacific, sank the Japanese fleet, unleashed wholesale killing machines in the form of United State Marines and the U.S. Army Air Corps, firebombed the Japanese homeland to cinders, and when the message wasn’t getting through, we invented a portable sun and nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki."
This comes as Vance is also facing criticism for his defense of the Trump-controlled FBI's sudden raid on a political critic.