JD Vance says he doesn't get involved in foreign elections. That is a lovely principle, and it would carry more weight if he had not spent February 2025 in Munich lecturing Europeans on democracy and then meeting the leader of Germany's far-right AfD days before a national vote. It would carry more weight if his boss had not made American financial support for Argentina's bailout hinge, in public, on Javier Milei's party winning. The vice president has not discovered neutrality. He has discovered that this particular endorsement costs him something.
That is the real story. Vance is not defending a principle. He is reading his party. The Republican base he hopes to inherit is no longer reliably pro-Israel, and its younger half, the half that listens to podcasts rather than watches Fox, is openly hostile to the idea that the United States should keep paying for a Middle Eastern government's wars. Vance wants to be president in 2029. So he offers a sentence engineered to mean nothing: neither support nor opposition. A man who wants every faction's vote in 2028 is declining to say what he thinks about the closest American client state on earth. Call it what it is: cowardice with a lawyerly gloss.
Trump, meanwhile, is at least consistent in his corruption of the norm. He is not just endorsing Netanyahu; he has pressed Israel's president to pardon him in his criminal corruption trial. Netanyahu faces charges of bribery and fraud and an International Criminal Court warrant over the Gaza war. The American president is campaigning for a defendant. He calls him a partner for peace, in a region where tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians have been killed and where Netanyahu's coalition has spent years sabotaging any political horizon.
It is fair to say that Democrats have not always kept clean hands. Obama's State Department was accused of letting taxpayer-funded grants flow to groups that ended up working against Netanyahu in 2015, and the Left should say plainly that this was wrong too. Foreign governments, ours included, should not pick winners in other people's elections. If we hold that line against Trump, we have to hold it against our own.
But the harm here is deeper than etiquette. Every time an American president personally endorses an Israeli prime minister, he fuses a durable strategic relationship with the political survival of one man. That is bad for Israelis, half of whom want him gone. It is bad for Americans, who send roughly $3.8 billion a year in military aid and get no vote on how it is used. And it is a trap for the alliance itself: when Netanyahu falls, as every leader eventually does, an American president who bet everything on him leaves the country holding a bill for loyalty to a man rather than a strategy.
The Left has an opening here, and it should not squander it by simply enjoying Republican discomfort. Democrats have been timid on Israel for decades, afraid of a lobby and a donor class, even as their own voters moved decisively against the war in Gaza. The response is not to match Trump's embrace with a mirror-image campaign against Netanyahu. It is to say what Vance won't: American support is for a country, not a candidate, and it comes with conditions. Arms should be tied to adherence to the laws of war, to humanitarian access, and to a real path to ending the occupation. The nuclear Iran question is serious, but it is not a blank check, and it cannot excuse silence about everything else.
Israelis will choose their own government. Americans should choose what we pay for. Trump has made his choice, to treat an indicted ally as a campaign surrogate. Vance has made his, to treat conviction as optional. Democrats should offer the country something better than either: a foreign policy that doesn't depend on who's flattering whom.
