Vice President JD Vance has taken on the GOP with his stance on Russia and Ukraine, opening up a new battle within the Republican party.
Vance is at odds with the Republican establishment as the administration pushes forward a peace deal that critics have questioned, Salon's Sophia Tesfaye wrote in an opinion piece published Wednesday.
Vance is facing "following fierce backlash from within his own party to a plan, backed by the administration, to end Russia’s war of aggression as it approaches its fourth year," Tesfaye wrote. And Congressional Republicans are now "openly revolting against the Trump-backed plan."
“Putin has spent the entire year trying to play President Trump for a fool,” former Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said in a statement last week. “If Administration officials are more concerned with appeasing Putin than securing real peace, then the President ought to find new advisors.”
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), who is planning to retire, argued that McConnell should have been more clear and warned the administration might be "making Putin feel like he has a win here.”
"While the resistance to the administration is strongest in the Senate, some House Republicans have also sounded warnings," Tesfaye wrote.
Vance's view and proposal was counter to what Republicans expected — calling on Ukraine to reduce its military size, giving Russia control over land it doesn't already have, including areas of Luhansk, Donetsk and Crimea.
"The plan reflects more than the reported diplomatic gamble by top Trump advisers Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff flying high off a negotiated settlement to Israel’s war in Gaza," Tesfaye explained. "It reveals the rise of a new GOP foreign policy worldview, one in which Vance is a central architect. And nothing illustrates that better than the man Trump has deployed as his lead emissary in the negotiations: Army Secretary Daniel P. Driscoll."
Driscoll was Vance's Yale Law School classmate and said the vice president "has turned a global security crisis into a proving ground for his emerging political machine."
McConnell's criticism of President Donald Trump's decisions over the conflict isn't just about the president — it's "threatening Vance’s ascendancy."
"Sending someone so closely tied to Vance — and effectively bypassing the administration’s official Ukraine envoy, Keith Kellogg, who is considered broadly sympathetic to Kyiv and who, perhaps tellingly, will leave his post in January — signals the degree to which the peace framework is aligned with Vance’s worldview. As Army Secretary, Driscoll has already worked closely with the White House on domestic deployments of National Guard troops. Now he is shaping the contours of a major global conflict," Tesfaye added.