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JD Vance had a vision for the world. Trump is wrecking it.

The vice president’s disastrous week reveals that he’s in a trap of his own making.

This past week has been a disaster for Vice President JD Vance. He embarked on two foreign adventures — campaigning for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and leading peace negotiations with Iran — that ended in total failure. Orbán lost by an enormous margin; Iran quit the talks, and President Donald Trump announced a new blockade on the Strait of Hormuz.

These events are not just humiliating for Vance, but reflect a deeper failure of his vision for the world — one that he hoped to advance as vice president, but appears to be crumbling just as he tries to take the MAGA mantle.

When it came to US foreign policy, Vance has had two overarching goals: to turn the United States into a patron of Europe’s far-right parties, and to move away from the kind of military adventurism that had long defined the Republican Party.

How MAGA’s favorite strongman finally lost

In both areas, he is failing spectacularly. European far-right parties across the continent are increasingly distancing themselves from Washington; Trump’s foreign policy has been militaristic since pretty much day one, and has only escalated over time.

And these failures are related. Trump’s foreign policy aggression, on issues ranging from Greenland to Iran, has alienated Europeans en masse. Rather than see him as a kindred spirit, populists increasingly see his nationalist ambitions as in conflict with their own.

“The Trump administration is currently toxic for most far-right parties in Europe,” said Cas Mudde, an expert on the European right at the University of Georgia.

The stakes here are big — not just for Vance’s personally, but the future of the broader right.

Vance, like other would-be successors to Trump, has tried to stake out a distinctive vision for the MAGA movement and its future after the president. His ambitions for a stronger global right are part of that package. But as vice president, Vance has been forced by necessity to defend Trump’s record even when it betrays his own purported core principles. The weekend’s twin disasters showed just how........

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