Vance’s ‘joke’ comparing wife Usha to Asim Munir reveals a profound moral failure

I’d hate to be in JD Vance’s shoes. He is, to lift the title from that excellent Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn film, a ‘dead man walking’. At this point, Joe Biden has a better shot at returning to the White House than Vance has of occupying the Oval Office. Someone should check the odds at Polymarket.

From being Donald Trump’s heir apparent and a MAGA darling, Vance is now being asked to mop the floor and own the mess that his boss has created over the so-called Iran deal. Instead of an MoU, it should be called what it really is, a surrender document signed at Versailles by Trump, the leader of the losing side.

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As the details slowly emerge, the document appears so utterly indefensible and reflective of the humiliation suffered by the United States that Trump has decided to disown his own deal and hang it on Vance’s shoulders, and his cronies such as senator Lindsey Graham are already on the job.

Yes, Vance is that ‘fall guy’. The US VP claims he doesn’t mind being the “fall guy”, and doesn’t care, but what else may he say when Trump himself has made it clear that if the tentative agreement succeeds, it’s his, and if not, then Vance should be blamed for it? For someone who owes his very political career to Trump, Vance is in no position to do what Marco Rubio has done – tactfully create distance between himself and the disastrous interim deal.

The US VP has jumped manfully into the job of trying to sell the MoU to the sceptical public, appearing in multiple television networks, but going by the way the first round of negotiations with Iran went in the talks led by him, one can forgive Vance for trying to land a lame joke and end up with egg on his face.

This context is necessary to understand the subtext behind Vance’s attempt at diplomatic levity that reveals far more than he intended to about his personal moral failings, political desperation and America’s geopolitical blind spot when it comes to Pakistan.

On Sunday at a luxury resort in Switzerland, the venue for the first installment of talks that may throw up a roadmap towards sealing the final deal in 60 days, in presence of Qatari and Pakistani mediators, Vance appeared to suggest in jest that his wife Usha, and Pakistan’s military dictator Asim Munir are among his ‘favourite people’.

“I will say that since (Pakistan’s) field marshal Munir welcomed us with the prime minister (Shehbaz Sharif) in Islamabad, I have joked that I have two very, very important people in my life -- an Indian and a Pakistani. The Indian is my wife, and the Pakistani is field marshal Munir.”

There are quite a few things to be said about this weird attempt at witticism, but what one finds the most revolting is drawing one’s spouse, a non-political person and a mother of his children, into an onerous comparison with a bigoted, murderous, military dictator. I hope Usha gave him a piece of her mind.

It’s not very clear why Vance picked up the reference to India, a country that is neither a party in the war nor the negotiations except to rage bait Trump’s racist MAGA base that has cooled towards him. But to do that against his own wife, who is an American born to Indian immigrant parents and has been subjected to racist vituperation in the past from white nationalist internet trolls and groypers, makes for a special kind of desperation.

Groyper-in-chief Nick Fuentes, a far-right Holocaust denier whom Trump had invited to the White House for dinner, espouses the “great replacement theory” that claims white people are being “systematically replaced” by people of colour through immigration.

“Who is this guy, really? Do we really expect that the guy who has an Indian wife and named their kid Vivek is going to support white identity?”, Fuentes had once said of Vance, then a senator from Ohio.

Vance, who had failed to stand up for his wife when she was racially abused by Trump supporters, was perhaps overcompensating to show his allegiance to the anti-immigration project of white Christian supremacists given his wife’s religious identity as a practising Hindu and Indian heritage. In so doing, he has internalised the bigotry that resurfaced as a lame joke.

In attempting to hyphenate his personal life with an unconvincing geopolitical manoeuvring, possibly because he needs the Trump supporters on his side, Vance missed the polarity between the two individuals he elevated. He equated his America-born Hindu wife, a woman whose pluralistic worldview encouraged his own spiritual discovery and helped him re-engage with his Catholic faith, with a bigoted military dictator who openly espouses Islamist fundamentalism and oversees a state apparatus that enforces religious exclusivity.

This wasn’t a simple gaffe. It reflected Vance’s moral failure. As an American woman of Indian Hindu heritage, Usha Vance embodies a pluralistic tradition. She is also a highly accomplished woman, with a resume that includes degrees from both the University of Cambridge and Yale Law School and clerking for US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and his colleague Brett Kavanaugh.

By the US vice-president’s own admission, Usha’s background and quiet encouragement played a pivotal role in Vance’s intellectual and spiritual journey, ultimately leading to his conversion to Catholicism in 2019. This openness represents the very essence of the divergence between exclusivist and pluralistic worldviews.

Vance contrasts this woman, whom he once called his “greatest blessing”, with a slimy dictator who rules by proxy, and has amassed unprecedented power in a country where the military routinely subverts democratic institutions. Under Munir, the Pakistani military establishment has overseen a relentless crackdown on and erasure of political opposition, engineering the incarceration of former prime minister Imran Khan, the nation’s most popular political figure, to ensure a puppet civilian government.

The contrast is even more troubling than it appears. A son of an imam who received early religious education at a local madrassa unlike many of his predecessors from elite backgrounds, Munir is the first Pakistani army chief to hold the title of ‘Hafiz-e-Quran’. His fundamentalist worldview blends theocratic ideology with an aggressive military doctrine, and he has institutionalized Islamist supremacy.

Munir frequently invokes the ‘Two-Nation’ theory. In April last year, addressing a gathering of Pakistanis based abroad, Munir had declared that Hindus and Muslims are entirely distinct in “religion, customs, traditions, thoughts, and ambitions” and stressed on Islam’s incompatibility with Hinduism.

Munir had said Pakistanis abroad were the “country’s ambassadors” and must not forget that they belong to a “superior ideology and culture”… that is the “foundation of the two-nation theory that was laid.” The Pahalgam terror attack was launched less than a week after that address.

To compare a woman who facilitated an interfaith journey of self-discovery to a general who presides over an institution that views its faith as incompatible with the rights of others, and a murderous general who masterminded one of the most heinous terror attacks on civilians in history, is a tragic false equivalence.

As Ajay Bisaria writes in ORF, Munir “invokes the two-nation theory — that Hindus and Muslims constitute separate civilizations — but unlike Jinnah, who used it as a political tool within a specific historical context, Munir presents it as absolute truth, despite the idea being tossed in the Bay of Bengal in 1971. He reinterprets Jinnah’s metaphor of Kashmir as Pakistan’s “jugular vein” as divine mandate, sustaining a perpetual confrontation with India… He revives the framework of a mullah-military alliance, an army supported by clerics. Under his doctrine, the military defends not the borders but the ideological frontiers.”

Vance’s flattery of Munir doesn’t stop there. Revealing that he had been talking to Munir more than “anybody else”, he said, “I would not be here without his statesmanship. He is, of course, a great military leader, but I think he’s shown himself to be a great diplomat. And, of course, he’s an amazing leader.”

There is some irony, of course, in a Pakistani army chief presiding over a thorough pasting by India during Operation Sindoor and picking up accolades from his American patrons, but Vance’s comments hint at a deeper delusion.

His comments are symptomatic of a deeply ingrained American geopolitical pathology. For decades, the US has suffered from a persistent blind spot regarding Pakistan, driven by an addiction to short-term transactional diplomacy at the expense of long-term strategic coherence, and military chiefs that may cut through the noise of public opinion or democratic accountability have always enjoyed privileged relationship with the Americans. Money flowed, so did diplomatic brownie points.

Whenever Washington requires an immediate logistical fix or a diplomatic off-ramp in West Asia or South Asia, it inevitably turns to the Pakistani military. During the Cold War, Pakistan was a bulwark against Soviet expansion. During the War on Terror, it was the staging ground for operations in Afghanistan even as the cunning Rawalpindi khakis actively harboured the very insurgents American forces were fighting. As the conflict in West Asia fragments global energy security and reshapes great-power competition, the US once again finds itself relying on Islamabad to act as an interlocutor with Tehran.

Vance’s lavish praise for Munir’s “statesmanship” encapsulates this dynamic. It is a transactional embrace that validates a military dictator as a global statesman, because he is useful in ways an Indian leader, a representative of its people, cannot be.

(The views expressed in this piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)