In February 2022, shortly after Russia launched its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance was quoted as saying to an interviewer that “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.” At the time, Vance was running to become a U.S. senator from Ohio. As a regular citizen then, he could perhaps be forgiven for that careless statement.

What is worrying is that Vance’s attitude has not changed since he became a senator. He has continued to make cavalier remarks about the war. Earlier this year, he voted against the long-delayed U.S. aid package for Ukraine. Even Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a staunch conservative himself, has been irked by Vance’s statements on Ukraine, characterizing them as “garbage.”

In his recent article, Dalibor Rohac, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, expressed his own bafflement at Vance’s positions on Ukraine. Rohac made reference to the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. Under that agreement, Ukraine agreed to give up its nuclear arsenal in exchange for security assurances that the U.S. and its allies would defend it if its territorial integrity and sovereignty were ever threatened by Russia or some other aggressor. Rohac also pointed out that the pact bears the signature of former U.S. President Bill Clinton. “By turning its back on the agreement completely,” says Rohac, “the U.S. government would harm its reputation indelibly.”

Given the close nature of this year’s presidential contest, Vance has a reasonably good chance of becoming vice president of this great nation, starting in January 2025. He would be first in the line of succession to the presidency. It is one thing for someone to hold political views as a regular citizen, or as one of the one hundred members of the U.S. Senate. But the calculus changes quite considerably when that person is either the president or the vice president, since they are directly responsible for executing America’s foreign policy.

It would be quite shocking if someone running for the second-highest office in the land were to claim that they don’t know about the Budapest Memorandum. We should assume that Vance is aware of it. He just doesn’t think we should respect it.

Dictators all over the world are pulling out all the stops in their collective effort to remake the existing world order to one in which authoritarianism would become the dominant form of rule. There is broad consensus across the ideological spectrum, here in the U.S. and within the Western alliance, that the outcome of the war in Ukraine will profoundly shape the global landscape. A Russian victory, most people believe, would embolden tyrants everywhere and endanger America’s national security interests.

With the election less than a month away, the window is fast closing for us to get a clear sense of where our potential next vice president currently stands on this critically important issue. The vice-presidential debate last week presented the best opportunity to find out but unfortunately, the moderators didn’t ask the question. So, we must find a way to make the inquiry ourselves.

Does Senator JD Vance believe that the commitments the U.S. made to Ukraine under the agreement it signed in Budapest in 1994 are worth honoring? If he doesn’t, he should explain why any foreign leader should trust anything he says if he were to become vice president, or president of the free world. As it is, he gives the impression that he wants our great nation to fulfill its promises to the rest of the world only when it feels like it.