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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.
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 he could to keep it from getting worse.
So began a steady supply of stories fed to the press, especially the New York Times, the most influential news outlet in the country, with behind-the-scenes scoops about Vance’s private fretting and noble attempts to limit the damage. It’s a bit reminiscent of those stories from Trump’s first term about how Ivanka and Jared were secretly working to moderate the president’s worst impulses.
In March, we learned that Vance “pushed for moving quickly to minimize casualties, avert leaks to the news media, and prevent Iran from preemptively attacking troops in the Middle East.”
Wise counsel indeed!
In April, the Times told its readers, “Mr. Vance warned Mr. Trump that a war against Iran could cause regional chaos and untold numbers of casualties. It could also break apart Mr. Trump’s political coalition and would be seen as a betrayal by many voters who had bought into the promise of no new wars.”
So prescient.
When Vance was sent to Pakistan to negotiate an end to the war and left in a huff after one day, the Times wrote that “the man inside Mr. Trump’s inner circle most opposed to the war” sadly couldn’t find a way to end it, mostly because of the Iranians’ intransigence.
Then last week, the Times was given another scoop: a detailed account of how Vance has reached out to military commanders around the world, getting detailed information about the state of the conflict — just the kind of information-seeking that Trump can’t be bothered with.
“Mr. Vance came away from some of his conversations with deep concerns about the overall strategy and the prospects for success,” the paper reports.
Add it all up, and what becomes clear is that Vance has been assiduously painting a picture, through the news media in general but especially the Times, of an official who saw everything clearly before it happened, just the kind of strategic and insightful thinker we’d be blessed to have making decisions from the Oval Office.
Doomed to fail
To be fair to Vance, he confronts the same problem faced by every vice president who aspires to take his boss’s place. The position of VP has almost no formal authority, and his job is to support and advocate for whatever the president does. He’ll be tainted by the president’s mistakes, but won’t be given credit for the president’s accomplishments.
The only vice president in the last half-century who didn’t subsequently run for president was Dick Cheney — and most of the others failed. The job just makes you look smaller, as you spend four or eight years standing in the shadow of the man making the decisions. The problem is so acute that in 2000, Al Gore felt the need to say in his convention speech, “I stand here tonight as my own man” in an attempt to counter the presumption that he was someone else’s.
At the time, Bill Clinton’s approval rating was a healthy 62 percent, yet Gore still lost. That points to another problem Vance will have. The only VPs who won election in the last hundred years had served highly popular presidents: Richard Nixon with Dwight Eisenhower, George HW Bush with Ronald Reagan, and Joe Biden with Barack Obama. JD Vance, on the other hand, is going to face an electorate that loathes the president he served.
But before he gets to the general election, he’ll have to navigate a tricky primary campaign. Trump will not only still be president, he’ll do everything in his power to ensure that the Republican candidates display their loyalty to him at every turn. Should they criticize him or his decisions, he’ll lash out at them — and he’ll still have a hold over the Republican base, even if that hold is not as firm as it once was. Vance will be competing for Trump’s endorsement with a boatload of other candidates, and he may withhold it as long as possible so they keep genuflecting before him.
Even if the Iran war is over by the time campaigning begins, it will still be seen by many in the base as not just an unmitigated disaster but a betrayal of Trump’s promise to stay out of foreign entanglements — something Vance himself cited as one of the key reasons he moved from Trump opponent to Trump superfan.
“My entire adult lifetime has been shaped by presidents who threw America into unwise wars and failed to win them,” he wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed as a newly-minted senator in January 2023, but the brilliant Donald Trump had kept his promise to the MAGA base not to repeat that mistake. The op-ed was titled “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars.”
While some MAGA voters (and some conservative media figures) are saying they feel betrayed by Trump’s reversal on whether going to war in the Middle East is a splendid idea, none of Vance’s potential primary opponents will have opposed the war, so they’ll all carry at least some taint. His bigger problem will be with the general electorate. Not only was the Iran war the least popular war in the history of polling at its outset, the proportion of the public now saying they approve of it stands at around 35 percent (and some polls show it even lower). Approval of the Iraq War, our contemporary model for military disasters the public turned against, never got that low.
Yet even if Vance can convince voters he was an Iran war skeptic from the beginning, that only means he was too weak and ineffectual to do anything about it. “Don’t blame me, I tried and failed” isn’t exactly a message that will portray him as a strong leader.
At last week’s midterm Republican convention, Vance made one of the keynote speeches, an address saturated with racist dogwhistles and nasty attacks on Democrats, whom he called “the party that despises America.”
Among the party elite, it apparently went over like gangbusters.
“I think if you polled that [convention] room, 90, 95 percent of the room is behind JD. He’s the heir apparent,” one conservative activist told Politico.
Maybe so. But have you ever seen one of those videos of a car that got booted, and the driver decides to just give it a shot to drive away anyway? Inevitably, the boot tears up their car as they lumber slowly down the road. That’s what the Iran war is going to do to JD Vance’s campaign in 2028.
That’s it for today
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Thanks for reading.
Just the Iran War? Vance - ALL the lickspittle Red Caps - will be stained for decades with the stink of Trump. The antisemitism won’t do it … and he has no charisma … the chopper golf lessons won’t be forgotten either.
I know JDVance was elected Senator in Ohio.
I’m from Ohio. A red state in every sense. Ignorance, racism&a willingness to look the other way in epic corruption, that is Ohio. OH chose Vance over Sherrod Brown which demonstrates the level of stupidity in OH.
I’m making an excuse for the least charismatic person ever being elected being elected. JD aside changing his name 3 times demonstrates some level of questions regarding his mental stability. He also represents the world oligarchy.
I kept saying Trump wouldn’t be elected, so what do I know, but Vance is uniquely bizarre&a terrible fit in a representative democracy.