Is JD Vance Rooting for the Iran War to Fail?
Vance’s opposition may be sincere—since his late conversion to the MAGA cause, he has been one of the loudest anti-intervention voices in the Republican Party—but it is a Machiavellian and surprisingly self-serving move from a wartime sitting vice president. An inveterate fighter, Vance clearly believes that moving quickly against war is a wise long-term bet. So he is doing everything he can, without even saying it himself, to make clear that he opposes the war in Iran, while ostensibly standing behind the president who is overseeing it. And he’s doing it largely to damage the reputation of this president’s secretary of state, his main rival for the party’s nomination in 2028, which would be seriously damaged if Iran turned into an Iraq-like quagmire.
The war may now be popular among the Republican faithful, but Vance is betting that support for it will collapse. His position further helps him assert a position that could prove powerful in the 2028 primaries: that the war was ultimately a costly distraction that prevented the Trump administration from fulfilling its core promises, including on immigration and trade. Vance would essentially argue that true MAGA politics was never attempted and that his election was necessary to finally deliver on the promises Trump campaigned on three times.
The move also fits perfectly with Vance, whose political ambition, opportunism and outright contortionism have proven limitless since his emergence as a public figure a decade ago. He made a bad bet against Trump in 2016, assuming Trump would quickly crash and burn. But it quickly rebounded after Trump’s victory. In less than four years, he established himself not only as a disciple of MAGA, but also as a thought leader who would fill the considerable intellectual void at the center of the presidential movement. He is no longer the neo-Reaganite of his Mountain elegy From a time when he called for cutting social spending in the name of “personal responsibility,” Vance was now an anti-corporate, anti-intervention activist — credentials that led to his being chosen as Trump’s 2024 running mate.
