Allysia Finley’s column this week says out loud what much of the pro-Israel right keeps muttering under its breath: that Donald Trump and JD Vance have drifted onto ground the anti-Israel left has occupied for years, and that the vice president is the one steering. Her framing is sharp, but it stops short of the harder conclusion. This is not a foreign-policy disagreement. It is a character study.
From @WSJOpinion: Donald Trump and JD Vance echo the anti-Israel Left. The vice president seems to be trying to curry favor with Tucker Carlson for a presidential campaign, writes Allysia Finley.
— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) June 23, 2026
Vance belongs to a new political generation for whom conviction is not a compass but a market position—something to test, hedge, and discard the moment the polling shifts. These are not ideologues. Ideologues at least believe something inconvenient. This is a class of operators for whom the only fixed point is their own continued relevance, and every alliance, every enemy, every stated principle is negotiable against it. They go with the flow. They betray friends and make peace with adversaries on the same afternoon, and they call it courage.
Consider the Carlson question, because it is the cleanest tell. Tucker Carlson has spent two years reinventing himself as the American right’s loudest critic of Israel, describing Netanyahu as an enemy of Western civilization, recycling the language of “genocide,” and giving a standing platform to figures whose antisemitism is not even coded. Asked to condemn any of it, Vance has chosen the posture of studied neutrality—the careful refusal to offend a man who commands an audience the vice president would very much like to inherit in 2028. Neutrality, here, is not prudence. It is a price quote. Carlson has the listeners; Vance wants them; the cost of acquisition is silence on the smearing of a democratic ally. He has decided to pay it.
When the silence becomes untenable, the grift dresses itself as realism. Vance has framed his coolness toward Israel as hard-nosed national interest—support extends only insofar as the relationship serves Washington, and not an inch further. It is a tidy formulation, because it lets abandonment masquerade as maturity. But “we’ll stand with you only while it’s convenient” is not a foreign policy. It is the thing you say to a partner you are already preparing to leave, and everyone in the room understands it as such. When Israeli officials objected to the administration’s handling of the Iran negotiations, Vance’s instinct was not reassurance but warning—a public reminder that they should think twice before criticizing the most powerful ally they have left. Allies do not talk to allies that way. Patrons talk to clients that way, and grifters talk to anyone they no longer need.
The pattern repeats across every file. Make peace with the adversary—soften the demands on Tehran, declare the mission accomplished, pocket the headline before the ink is dry. Side with the fringe—keep the Owens-Fuentes wing warm because its energy is real and its votes are countable. Reach for the cheap insult when a principled position would cost something. Each move is individually defensible if you squint. Together they describe a man with no fixed loyalties at all, only a running tally of which constituency is ascendant this month.
What makes this generation distinct is not that it is cynical—politics has always rewarded cynicism—but that it has dispensed with the pretense that principle exists as a constraint. The old hypocrite at least paid tribute to virtue by faking it. The new operator does not bother. He treats the betrayal of an ally and the courting of an extremist as ordinary instruments, no more freighted than a media buy. Anything to stay in the game. Anything to be the last man standing when the music stops.
The test of a principle has never been whether you hold it when it is popular. It is whether you hold it when it costs you the room. On Israel, on the company he keeps, on the enemies he is suddenly willing to flatter, Vance is demonstrating in real time that there is no principle he will not trade for the right audience. A conservative movement that lets its most ambitious figure audition for the voters who excuse strongmen and slander democracies is not rediscovering “America First.” It is discovering its own anti-Israel left—and handing it the keys.
That is the part Finley’s column gestures at but politeness keeps her from naming. The drift is not an accident of strategy. It is the strategy. And the men executing it would betray any of us with exactly the same untroubled smile.