Every four years, Armenian communities across the United States and the globe go through the same tiresome ritual: sizing up candidates, looking for the one who might finally understand what we are asking for. Most of the time, the answer is polite indifference. This cycle appears different – different enough that we are standing behind J.D. Vance before he has even entered the race, for we do not need a press release to know where we stand. That conviction is why we launched Armenians for Vance, an independent initiative built on one idea: in J.D. Vance we have found something more valuable than a potential ally – a partner willing to have an honest conversation about the things that matter to us and to build an entirely new international order.
While this is not a transactional endorsement, it is not blind loyalty either. It is a statement of readiness: that we are prepared to take responsibility for what comes next, to help build something new – not by asking for a seat at someone else’s table, but by building, and defending, one of our own. And it is a recognition that, in J.D. Vance, our interests and his instincts run in the same direction – on sovereignty, on faith, on the stubborn value of knowing where you come from, and on what a fairer world order should look like.
Why Vance
Vance has not spent his career reinventing himself to fit the room. From Middletown, Ohio to the Senate to the vice presidency, he has held to a consistent and recognizable set of convictions – conservative, realist, no interest in imposing establishment’s blueprint on other people’s sovereignty, skeptical of forever wars. For a people that has watched powerful friends turn fair-weather more than once, that kind of steadiness is worth something to us.
That same steadiness carries over into his faith – a constant for Vance, not something switched on for the cameras. He talks about his Christianity in public, without the usual hedging politicians reach for. That matters hugely to a people whose national identity has been bound up with the Armenian Apostolic Church for over seventeen centuries. Armenia was the first nation on earth to adopt Christianity as its state religion, long before most of the countries that now surround it on the map even existed.
Then there are roots. This is where we recognize each other. Vance has never papered over where he comes from – the Scots-Irish, Appalachian inheritance of Ulster Celts who carried clan loyalty, a deep suspicion of distant power and plain stubbornness across the Atlantic and into the hills of Kentucky and Ohio. We would not mistake that instinct for anything else. Appalachia became a new home for his people, but they never let go of the Mourne Mountains of Ulster they came from. The Armenian world refuses to give up on Ararat, either – visible from Yerevan, sitting on the wrong side of a border we do not control, and woven into nearly everything we build, write, or create. Armenian highland is what keeps Armenian families from Glendale to Watertown lighting candles for ancestors who never set foot in America, and naming their kids after villages that do not appear on any map anymore. We believe that kind of historical memory – the same conviction at the heart of the Christian idea of remembrance – is exactly what makes America exceptional, and what makes any nation built on it hard to break.
Crucially, J.D. Vance thinks, speaks, and acts in terms of the state – standing above narrow interests, personal ambition, and party loyalty. Just like his prominent Celtic predecessors – McKinley, who staked his presidency on economic sovereignty, absorbing real political cost for a sacrifice he knew would not pay off during his own term, and Jackson, who chose to empower ordinary Americans over the entrenched political establishment of his day – Vance distrusts unaccountable financial and corporate power, and draws his coalition from people Washington had long written off. We are a state-centered people too, maybe more than most – after centuries of lost and coveted statehood, and decades spent rebuilding one, sovereignty is not an abstraction for Armenians. It is the entire point, and the pledge, of our collective existence.
Artsakh’s ethnic cleansing in 2023, the nine-month-long blockade that preceded it, the existential pressure from Baku that has not let up since – this is what happens to an ancient, rooted, Christian people when sovereignty stops being taken seriously by the world around them. 150,000 people did not lose their churches, their villages, and their homes to an abstraction; they lost them because too many powers chose the comfort of looking away over the harder work of defending them, favoring narrow interests over an ancient Christian nation’s survival. That is exactly why a leader who treats sovereignty as non-negotiable – his own country’s, and by conviction rather than convenience, everyone else’s too – matters so much to us. A principle that stops at the border is not much of a principle.
Vance does not need to know that history by heart for us to trust he would take it seriously. He has already shown he will say uncomfortable things to anyone when it counts: a leader who will not flatter Moscow, Ankara, or Baku just to keep things smooth is a leader who can actually be straight with the global Armenian world.
Why the Armenian World
We deem the Armenian world a partner worth building with. For millennia, we have turned the fault line between East and West into a bridge – and the world could use a lot more of that instinct right now. We support the Armenian Church and the national, conservative values it kept alive through Genocide, dispersion, and exile, often when nothing else survived. And we are done making peace with bad faith from our neighbors: we want an Armenia that stands as its own independent, established nation – not a Russian satellite, not a Turkish colony wearing a different flag. We are a state-centered people, and we look for the same thing in the leaders we back: people who will not trade away sovereignty, secure borders, or values for anything.
We are not showing up empty-handed, either. Armenian-Americans have a concentrated, engaged electorate in states that actually decide elections – California, Florida, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, among others. We have churches, cultural organizations, and civic institutions in nearly every state in the country, and opinion leaders whose reach runs into the millions domestically and globally. We have built real businesses, done serious academic work, and earned recognizable names in American media. And underneath all of that sits something harder to manufacture: one of the oldest continuous civilizations on earth, a distinct Christian culture handed down for two thousand years, and more practice than almost anyone at turning civilizations, countries, and peoples who share no language, no faith, and no history of cooperation into partners who build trade routes, alliances, and institutions that actually last.
We are not asking J.D. Vance to become Armenia’s advocate. We are endorsing him for who he already is – a state-minded realist who understands that small, ancient nations with barbaric enemies need honest partners, not patrons.