Vice President Vance’s putting pressure on Israel, in an effort to secure Jerusalem’s acquiescence in the American-Iranian peace deal, is no way to treat an ally. Mr. Vance suggests that Israeli compliance is owed because “two-thirds of the defensive weapons that have protected your homeland have been built by American hands and paid for by American tax dollars.” If this kind of hectoring sounds familiar, it’s because Mr. Vance had the same message for Ukraine.“Have you said thank you once?” Mr. Vance asked President Volodymyr Zelensky when, in February 2025, the Ukrainian leader visited the Oval Office. Mr. Vance’s ire could have been prompted in part by Mr. Zelensky having campaigned on the hustings in 2024 for President Biden. The vice president urged Mr. Zelensky to “offer some words of appreciation for the United States of America and the president who’s trying to save your country.” The Oval Office imbroglio with Mr. Zelensky was followed by a push by the White House for Ukraine to accept unfavorable peace terms in its war with Russia and a cutoff in American military aid. All the more reason to note the similar lingo Mr. Vance used on Thursday about the Jewish state. “Donald J. Trump is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment in time,” is how Mr. Vance put it. The vice president added, in response to reports of concerns at Jerusalem over the terms of the nascent peace deal with Iran, that if he were “in the cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world.” Do Mr. Vance’s remarks, particularly his emphasis on the extent of American military assistance to Israel, amount to a threat to our Mideast ally? Mr. Vance said, too, that “the problem for Israel is not Donald J. Trump.” Mr. Vance asserted that “anybody in Israel who thinks their biggest problem is the president of the United States needs to wake up and smell the reality of the situation that country is in.” That’s akin to Mr. Vance’s insistence in 2024 that Ukraine accept “the reality on the ground,” which in his view was that Kyiv “needs more matériel than the United States can provide.”Mr. Vance at the time saw “no viable plan for the Ukrainians to win this war” and urged Kyiv to accept a brokered peace. That counsel of defeatism was, to a degree, echoed by President Trump when he told Mr. Zelensky that “you don’t have the cards right now.” To Kyiv’s credit, the Ukrainians refused to yield to Russian aggression and, aided in part by European funds, have held the line. Their innovative drone tactics even have the Kremlin on the defensive.Ukraine’s tenacity can be seen as a reproach to Mr. Vance’s strategic second-guessing of Israel. Mr. Vance gripes that Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah is disruptive. When “we seem to be right on the cusp of a major breakthrough,” he says, then “there’s a major explosion that goes off in a civilian population center in Beirut.” Of Mr. Vance’s comments, Brian Kilmeade of Fox News put it well when he quipped: “I wish he would be that tough with Iran.”
