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JD Vance will never escape the albatross of the Iran War
No matter how many stories he feeds the Times about all his doubts.
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Vice President JD Vance would very much like you to know that he has been opposed to the war in Iran from the beginning.
In public he may act the loyal underling, repeating the administration’s lame talking points and insisting that the war is going great — or alternatively, that it isn’t a war at all (“I wouldn’t call it a war”) so what are we getting all hot and bothered about?
At the same time, Vance has been waging a not-so-subtle campaign to make it clear that when it comes to one of the worst decisions Donald Trump and his administration made, the vice president’s hands are clean.
But even if we grant that the reports Vance and his allies have fed to the news media about his misgivings are basically true — and there isn’t much reason to believe otherwise — it will not be so easy for him to evade the taint of this disaster when he runs for president in 2028. Which is what this is really all about.
Opposed from the beginning — sort of
After the war began in February, behind-the-scenes reporting indicated that if nothing else, Vance had at least some glimmers of doubt about the adventure the administration was about to embark on.
According to one lengthy New York Times account with six bylines, Vance “appeared to personally lean against military attacks,” but helped convince Trump that if he was going to start a war, the amount of force deployed should be big and decisive from the outset. If that description of the deliberations is accurate, it shows that like everyone else in the administration, Vance underestimated the Iranian regime’s ability to absorb punishment with their resolve intact.
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There’s also no indication that Vance understood that Iran would shut down the Strait of Hormuz, with dire consequences — which any expert in this area could have told him had he bothered to ask. Or at the very least, like Trump himself, Vance didn’t take the possibility seriously enough.
In sum, his slight misgivings were hardly evidence of a brilliant strategic mind at work.
But as the war dragged on, the regime steadfastly refused to surrender, the shutdown of Hormuz touched off a global energy crisis, American weapons stockpiles depleted, Trump’s insistence that victory had already been won grew more and more ridiculous, and it became clear that this war was spectacularly unpopular, Vance confronted a dilemma. The war was going to be neither a glorious triumph nor a quickly forgotten jaunt to the Middle East and back. So when he makes his inevitable run for the White House in 2028, what does he want voters to think about when they think about JD Vance and the Iran war?
The answer, it seems, is this: While he did his duty as vice president, Vance was always against the war, and did everything