When the man a heartbeat away from the presidency insists World War II ended in “talks,” you’re not hearing policy—you’re hearing the white noise of someone hopelessly out of his depth.
It is a truth universally ignored by dolts in high office that one should at least know the basics of the subject one pontificates upon. Enter Vice President J.D. Vance, the Appalachian Horatio Alger knock-off, who appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press to offer the profound observation that “every war in human history has ended in negotiation.” He even had the temerity to cite the First and Second World Wars as examples, proving he is both wrong and unimaginative—a lethal cocktail for someone sitting one fainting heartbeat away from the presidency.
To repeat the obvious, loudly enough that even the staffers propping him up might hear: wars end when one side defeats the other, or when one side is too exhausted to continue. Yes, there may follow a treaty, a document signed by diplomats wearing silk ties and double-breasted suits, but the real conclusion of hostilities is the collapse of one combatant’s will or capacity to fight.
World War I did not “end in negotiation.” It ended when German generals, faced with mutiny and collapse, demanded that politicians sue for peace while Allied troops stood on German soil. It was not a negotiation; it was a capitulation disguised as armistice terms. And World War II? Vance’s claim that it “ended in negotiation” would be news to the residents of Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, whose obliteration was not followed by negotiation but by surrender, unconditional and abject. Hitler’s corpse in a Berlin bunker and the Emperor’s recorded voice conceding defeat were not footnotes in a legal settlement; they were the very essence of what ending a war looks like.
The danger of such boneheaded revisionism is not merely academic. It informs policy. When Vance insists that all wars must be resolved by “talks,” he betrays a grotesque indifference to the lessons learned by the very nations he now attempts to lecture. The Baltic states, Finland, and Poland—who live with the Russian boot an inch from their throats—do not luxuriate in such idiotic abstractions. They know Moscow does not negotiate in good faith, only in bad time. They remember the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, that exquisite piece of “negotiation” which partitioned Eastern Europe between two totalitarian regimes.
The very fact that Vance deploys the word “negotiation” as if it were a magic solvent—capable of dissolving the brutality of conquest, genocide, and totalitarian expansion—shows his profound unfitness. It is as though he believes history is a polite dinner party, where monstrous crimes can be wrapped up with coffee and petits fours. One suspects he has confused Diplomacy, the board game, with actual diplomacy, the tragic theater of human blood and ruin.
And yet, what makes this farce obscene is not just Vance’s ignorance but the way it cloaks cowardice. To call for negotiation where resistance is demanded is to abandon those who rely on you. To insist that Ukrainians, or Balts, or anyone else face down Russian aggression by “talking it out” is to grant Vladimir Putin precisely what he wants: time, territory, and tribute.
It is the coward’s way out, the intellectual equivalent of waving a white flag before the battle has begun.
The republic has had its share of second-rate men elevated to high office. But rarely has it had one so eager to parade his ignorance as wisdom. J.D. Vance may style himself a tribune of the common man, but his performance is that of the court jester—except the joke, as always, is on us.
