JD Vance Went to Iraq a Believer in Overseas Wars and Came Home a Skeptic

When then-Vice President Dick Cheney flew to an air base in western Iraq in late 2005, one of the Marines eagerly waiting to see him was Cpl. James D. Hamel, a 21-year-old from Ohio who nearly two decades later is the Republican nominee for Cheney’s old job.

Hamel would change his name to JD Vance, attend Yale Law School and win a Senate seat from Ohio before joining Republican nominee Donald Trump’s ticket. But a defining experience of his life was serving as a Marine in Iraq, he says, leaving him disillusioned about the use of American power abroad—and about the politicians who launched the bloody war.

His path from Iraq to the Republican nomination underscores the shift in parts of the party away from use of the military to fight terror groups and stand up democracies overseas, an approach that Vance says put the burden on ordinary Americans, instead of “elites” who ordered the wars.