The two contenders clashed over Iran’s threat to Israel, tariffs on China, border security, and the health of U.S. democracy.
U.S. vice presidential candidates Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance—running mates of Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, respectively—got their moment in the spotlight on Tuesday night, when they faced off in what is expected to be the final debate ahead of the U.S. presidential election in November.
Harris, the Democratic nominee, was widely considered to have won her debate with Trump, her Republican rival, in early September, but the polls only moved slightly in her favor as a result. Historically, the vice presidential debate hasn’t made a major difference, but with just over a month to go until the election and polls showing Harris and Trump locked in a very tight race, the signals sent from the stage Tuesday still matter.
The debate, hosted by CBS News in New York City, focused largely on domestic issues, including reproductive rights, health care, and gun violence. But the first question of the night was about foreign policy: specifically, U.S. support for Israel amid the escalating conflict in the Middle East. The two candidates also debated issues including China, immigration, and U.S. democracy. However, the other major conflict that Washington is intimately involved in supporting—Ukraine’s war against Russia—received zero mentions by the candidates or the moderators.
Here are the top four foreign-policy takeaways from the debate.
Iran and the Middle East Crisis
With the debate coming mere hours after Iran launched nearly 200 ballistic missiles at Israel—the latest development in a region already facing a spiraling multifront war—it’s no surprise that the debate moderators began the night with a question on the Middle East. Noting Iran’s recent acceleration of its nuclear program, the moderators asked the candidates whether they would support or oppose a “preemptive” Israeli strike on Iran.
Walz did not answer the question directly, instead reiterating Washington’s vital role in defending Israel and countering Iran’s proxies in Lebanon and Gaza. He criticized Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, accusing the former president of “fickle” leadership. And he championed the Biden-Harris administration’s role in helping Israel to successfully deflect both of Iran’s missile attacks this year.
Vance answered more directly, saying, “It is up to Israel what they think they need to do to keep their country safe,” and that the United States should support its allies “wherever they are when they’re fighting the bad guys.” He focused on Trump’s global reputation as a tough leader, arguing that Trump established effective deterrence while in office. He falsely said the Trump administration was the only U.S. presidential term in the past 40 years to not have a war break out. And he accused Iran of receiving more than $100 billion in unfrozen assets to purchase weapons due to the “Harris administration”; last year, U.S. President Joe Biden extended a sanctions waiver to allow Tehran to access up to $10 billion in frozen electricity revenue to purchase nonsanctioned goods.
Regarding wider Middle East tensions, the two candidates spoke briefly. Both acknowledged Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, and Walz went on to reiterate Israel’s right to defend itself, the dire humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and the need for a hostage release deal.
China
Both candidates attacked each other’s approach to China at multiple points throughout the debate.
On the economy, Vance championed the Made in America platform that he and Trump have run on. He hailed Trump for ending the era of free trade with China when he launched his trade war and imposed sweeping tariffs on Beijing. “For the first time in a generation, Donald Trump had the wisdom and the courage to say to that bipartisan consensus, ‘We’re not doing it anymore. We’re bringing American manufacturing back,’” Vance said.
The senator tried to create daylight between Trump’s and Harris’s approaches to trade with China. Trump has proposed hiking tariffs on goods from China up to more than 50 percent; Vance praised Biden for largely keeping Trump’s original tariffs in place but argued that Harris was opposed to tariffs. “It’s the one issue where Harris has run away from Joe Biden’s record,” he said. He also argued earlier in the debate that Biden’s clean energy drive has led to more manufacturing overseas.
When it comes to the broad strokes of U.S. trade policy with China—the need to “derisk” the U.S. economy and bring manufacturing back to the United States—the Harris and Trump tickets largely align, and Walz said as much. However, he fought back on Vance’s charges that a Harris presidency wouldn’t go far enough. “I’m a union guy on this. I’m not a guy who wanted to ship things overseas. … We need to have fair trading partners,” Walz said. Harris was against tariffs during her presidential bid four years ago, but her campaign recently told the New York Times that she supports “targeted and strategic tariffs.” Walz also fired back on Trump’s own trade record, pointing out that the trade deficit with China reached record highs under his presidency.
Walz also supported the administration’s approach to climate change. The Inflation Reduction Act, which gives tax credits and subsidies for clean energy manufacturing in the United States and aims to reduce reliance on China, has created hundreds of thousands of jobs, Walz said.
The governor was put on the defensive when the moderators asked about his long personal history with China. Walz taught in Guangdong province shortly after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and later took his American students to China on more than a dozen trips before going into government.
When asked about past false statements that he had made saying he was in Hong Kong when the Tiananmen protests occurred, Walz became flustered and said he misspoke. But he then went on to repeat that he was “in Hong Kong and China during the democracy protests.” (He arrived in August; the protests took place in the weeks leading up to June 4, 1989.)
Walz took the opportunity to defend his travel to China as an eye-opening and informative experience. “I learned a lot about China. I hear the critiques of this—I would make the case that Donald Trump should have come on one of those trips with us. I guarantee you he wouldn’t be praising Xi Jinping about COVID,” Walz said. Republicans have tried to paint Walz as sympathetic to the Chinese Communist Party because of his travels in China, but Walz has been a consistent critic of the Chinese government and its poor human rights record.
The debate on immigration and U.S. border security initially centered on a Trump-Vance pledge to carry out the largest mass deportation plan in U.S. history. Vance doubled down on that promise, vowing to begin carrying it out by deporting undocumented immigrants who have criminal backgrounds. He also accused Harris—whom Biden tasked with overseeing the administration’s efforts to address the “root causes” of migration, particularly in Latin America—of “letting in fentanyl” to the United States by undoing many of Trump’s executive actions restricting border openings. However, Harris was never put in charge of U.S. border security.
Vance railed at what he said was Harris’s flawed immigration record and pushed for restarting border wall construction. However, the moderators were forced to mute Vance’s mic after he brought up alleged migrants living in Springfield, Ohio, who were granted legal status “at the wave of the Kamala Harris open border wand”—alluding to a false, racist conspiracy theory that both Vance and Trump have spread saying Haitian immigrants in Springfield are eating their neighbors’ pets.
Walz focused on Harris’s efforts to combat fentanyl and criticized Trump’s immigration record, saying that “Mexico didn’t pay a dime” to build the border wall. He falsely said that under Biden-Harris, border crossings went down compared with Trump’s time in office. And he refuted Vance’s false claims that the Democratic nominee is purposefully allowing migrants to enter the country illegally in her role as vice president.
Walz has previously supported immigration reform that offers paths to citizenship for certain undocumented immigrants, such as essential workers, Dreamers, and temporary protected status holders. In March 2023, he signed a law making immigrants of any status in Minnesota eligible to apply for a driver’s license.
The State of U.S. Democracy
One of the most heated moments of the night came at the end of the debate, when the two candidates discussed the health of U.S. democracy and the validity of the 2020 election. Walz repeatedly denounced the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and painted Harris as a champion of democracy at large. “Democracy is bigger than winning an election,” Walz said, warning that Vance would ultimately only serve Trump, not the American people and democracy itself.
When Walz asked Vance if he believes that Trump lost the 2020 election, Vance quickly pivoted away from the question. “That is a damning nonanswer,” the Democratic candidate said.
In response, Vance accused Harris of not protecting freedoms of speech and expression. Citing allegations that the Biden administration pressured social media companies such as Meta to remove COVID-19-related misinformation from their platforms, Vance said Harris “is engaged in censorship at an industrial scale,” without providing concrete examples of in what capacity. He compared Trump’s support for and alleged incitement of the Jan. 6 insurrection—the only time in U.S. history that a candidate tried to overturn the ratified results of a presidential election—to Democrats’ past statements regarding Russian election interference in the 2016 election, when Kremlin-linked proxies purchased Facebook ads to try to tip the vote in favor of Trump against then-Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
Vance did not answer the moderators’ question about whether he would refute a future election determination ratified by all U.S. governors, which experts say would be unconstitutional. Instead, he said all electoral issues should be debated “peacefully.”
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