Haunted by his record, JD Vance tries and fails to put a spin on the war in Iran - MS NOW

When it comes to foreign interventionism, Donald Trump’s team features a variety of prominent skeptics, but none of them has gone further than JD Vance. Indeed, as MS NOW summarized over the weekend, the incumbent vice president has “built his political identity in part on rejecting what he characterized as decades of failed American interventionism in the Middle East.”

It was Vance who wrote a 2023 op-ed for The Wall Street Journal touting Trump as a Republican who hasn’t “started any wars” and “won’t recklessly send Americans to fight overseas.” It was also Vance who told voters, about a week before Election Day 2024, “Our interest very much is in not going to war with Iran. It would be a huge distraction of resources. It would be massively expensive to our country.”

A year and a half later, the administration that Vance ostensibly helps lead went to war in Iran. Trump launched the conflict from his glorified country club in Florida, though the vice president did not join him, and the Ohio Republican had very little to say once the bombs started dropping. (A Politico report described him as having been “conspicuously quiet.”)

It seemed plausible to think that Vance was taking some time to digest the developments and figure out a way to defend a military operation that, by all appearances, he should oppose and had said wouldn’t happen. If that was the case, Americans saw the fruits of those efforts on Monday night, when the vice president sat down with Fox News’ Jesse Watters to present his best pitch.

It was a rather brief interview. Vance said the ongoing mission in Iran is different from other recent wars in the Middle East because “the president has clearly defined what he wants to accomplish.” Given that Trump has done no such thing, I was left wondering whether Vance was referring to some other president.

But there was another part of the interview that stood out as especially notable.

As the interview got underway, the vice president made the case that the administration had “eliminated” Iran’s ability to build a nuclear weapon last summer but that Trump was “looking for the long haul” and decided to launch an offensive anyway.