Before he was vice-president, JD Vance was a senate candidate in Ohio making his apathy towards Ukraine known.
"I got to be honest with you, I don't really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another," he said on a right-wing podcast in the lead up to Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Last week, the vice-president was at the centre of an extraordinary clash with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office.
Seated to Donald Trump's left, Vance listened quietly for 40 minutes as the two presidents spoke in front of media.
He then chimed in, the tone flipped and the meeting was derailed. Within a few days, the White House had paused all US aid to Ukraine.
The vice-president used the meeting to accuse the Ukrainian leader of being ungrateful for US support in the war, before Trump joined in.
"It's absolutely unprecedented to have a head of state come to the Oval Office and be berated in such a personal way, much less a head of state of a country currently at war," Ohio State University historian Christopher McKnight Nichols said.
"Any world leader now coming to the White House will have to wonder what treatment they're going to get, they'll have to think am I going to be attacked?
"That is not common in US foreign policy history."
Vance's intervention was the culmination of a years' long campaign he's waged against aid for Ukraine — initially putting him at odds with many in his own party.
Longstanding critic of US aid to Ukraine
As a senator, Vance was a staunch critic of the amount of money and military aid the United States was sending to the warn-torn country.
He wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times in April last year detailing why he had voted against a near $US60 billion ($96 billion) supplemental aid package to Ukraine.
In that piece he said "Ukraine needs more soldiers than it can field … and more material than the United States can provide".
Although he has praised the soldiers fighting on the front line, he has repeatedly attacked the Ukranian government and its leadership.
"Let's not mistake the courage of the Ukranian troops on the ground with the fact they have the most corrupt leadership and corrupt government in Europe and maybe the most corrupt leadership anywhere in the world," he said in a speech to conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation in 2023.
"Ladies and gentlemen get America out of Ukraine … it is a disaster for this country."
[vid]Anti-corruption organisation Transparency International has ranked Ukraine 105 out of the 180 countries in its Corruption Perception Index.
Russia has been placed at 154 on the list, while Australia was number 10.
Last month, Vance shocked European leaders when he went on a blistering attack about free speech, culture wars and the continent's immigration.
He was addressing the Munich Security Conference where many expected him to focus on peace talks with Russia and Ukraine.
Instead, he aired his disdain for several European policies and standpoints.
"The threat I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, it's not China, it's not any other external actor, what I worry about is the threat from within," he said.
"The retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values — values shared by the United States of America."
Not long after Trump paused all military aid to Ukraine, Vance was on Fox News where he continued to criticise Zelenskyy, his European backers and the assistance given to Ukraine.
"A lot of our European friends puff him up," Vance said on Monday evening (local time).
"They say, you know, you're a freedom fighter. You need to keep fighting forever. Well, fighting forever with what? With whose money, with whose ammunition and with whose lives."
An 'empowered' vice-president
In the White House last week, Zelenskyy was expected to sign a rare-earth minerals agreement with the US instead, he left empty-handed before lunch had been served.
"Vice-President Vance was effectively an attack dog for President Trump, which is something you didn't see in the first Trump administration," Professor Nichols said.
"Very often, when a vice-president is present there, they're more like arm candy … its unprecedented that the vice-president would take such a major role in attacking, leaping in, if you did the analysis of the body language it's astonishing.
"It's a clear contrast with Mike Pence, his is an empowered vice-presidency — whatever room to manoeuvre he has he seems to be taking."
Vance has taken a more outward role in foreign policy, which has made clear breaks from historic norms.
In particular, the Trump administration has pushed for European allies to be less reliant on the US.
"There is no doubt that this is about pulling back, retrenchment, a kind of isolationism or unilateralism that determines when, where and how the US will engage," Professor Nichols said.
"It strikes me that he's the sort of forward operating arm of US foreign policy right now in many ways along with Marco Rubio. They're out in the world, while Trump is focused on a wide array of other things.
"This is kind of a reward that he's the foreign policy voice."
The embodiment of Trump's foreign policy
In the same speech in which he attacked Ukraine for corruption back in 2023, Vance gave insight into how he'd formulated his view on foreign policy.
In his final year of high school in 2003, the United States invaded Iraq.
President George W Bush said at the time Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and sent troops in to topple Saddam Hussein's regime as part of the US's 'war on terror' following the September 11 attacks.
The war, which ended in 2011, cost the US trillions of dollars.
Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians were killed, while nearly 4,500 US military personnel died.
"I remember thinking to myself, what we would do in Iraq is transform it from a horrible dictatorship into a flowering democracy and I hate to say that didn't happen," Vance said.
"The American foreign policy establishment has learned zero lessons from what is perhaps the most unforced and catastrophic error in the history of this country."
He used his speech to pivot to the Ukraine war, stating the US must put "cold hard reality" first and not base foreign policy on "moral slogans".
"We are in 2023 faced with an incredible fork in the road … and that fork is about the foreign policy we will choose as a country and whether we will have a foreign policy that ruthlessly and rationally pursues our own interest or whether we have a foreign policy that sends American troops, American blood and treasure to where it simply doesn't belong and will do no good in the process," he said.
Since Trump returned to the White House, his team has taken a starkly different stance towards US involvement in Ukraine compared to the Biden administration.
Trump has praised Russia and its leader Vladimir Putin, wrongly claimed Ukraine started the war, criticised the amount of money the US has sent to the war-torn country and has personally attacked Zelenskyy on several occasions.
No one within the upper ranks of his administration has corrected or condemned his comments.
Professor Nichols believes the vice-president has been playing a crucial role when it comes to foreign policy and views himself as an "American firster".
"He really thinks that prioritising American interests means really scaling back the US's global role," he said.
"As a through line in his life, he does not appear to think that US leadership is contingent on the US being part of major security organisations, having binding commitments to other countries, he's sceptical of aid programs and soft power in many ways."
"It's hard to get a kind of full intellectual framework for what any of the Trump foreign policy looks like but if there were a sort of embodiment of it, I think you'd have to say it's JD Vance for better or worse."
