Vance's anti-war posture collides with his more hawkish views on Iran
Vance's anti-war posture collides with his more hawkish views on Iran
Henry J. GomezTue, March 3, 2026 at 11:39 PM UTC
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Vice President JD Vance’s role in selling a war in Iran is, on one hand, an uncomfortable position for an Iraq War veteran who rose to political prominence as an anti-interventionist.
The fact that President Donald Trump had started no wars in his first term underpinned the early endorsement Vance offered him in his 2024 White House bid. And an old Merle Haggard song — complete with the lyric “Let’s get out of Iraq and back on the track” — played as Vance arrived for the second night of that year’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
But Vance has also consistently held a more hawkish position on Iran, asserting that the U.S. must be prepared to prevent it from developing or deploying nuclear weapons. And while Trump and members of his administration have offered varying justifications for starting a war without congressional approval, Vance has zeroed in narrowly on Iran’s nuclear capabilities.
“What the president determined is he didn’t want to just ... keep the country safe from an Iranian nuclear weapon for the first three, four years of his second term. He wanted to make sure that Iran could never have a nuclear weapon, and that would require, fundamentally, a change in mindset from the Iranian regime,” Vance said Monday night in an interview on Fox News.
“So he saw that the Iranian regime was weakened, he knew that they were committed to getting on that brink of a nuclear weapon, and he decided to take action because he felt that was necessary in order to protect the nation’s security,” he added.
Vance reinforced the message later that night in an X post that included a clip of the interview.
“President Trump will not get the United States into a years-long conflict with no clear objective,” he wrote. “Iran can never be allowed to obtain a nuclear weapon. That is the goal of this operation and President Trump will see it through to completion.”
Behind the scenes in the days leading up to the war, Vance made his reservations about kinetic action in Iran known, a person familiar with his thinking told NBC News. Once it became clear a decision had been made to engage militarily, Vance shifted his focus to limiting casualties and advocated to move quickly on a strike, fearing that the longer the U.S. waited, the likelier it was that plans could leak in the media, making it likelier that Iran would pre-emptively attack U.S. troops in the Middle East.
So far, six U.S. service members have been killed in the operation, which Trump has said could last four or five weeks — or longer.
The war and his obligations as Trump’s vice president to defend it could complicate Vance’s political future in a Republican Party that has less of an appetite for foreign intervention than it did during the days of President George W. Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Vance is seen as a likely candidate for president in 2028, when Trump is term-limited.
Vance’s public message has in some instances mirrored statements he has made since before his debut as Trump’s running mate more than 18 months ago. Speaking with Fox News’ Sean Hannity at the Republican convention, Vance held up Trump’s first-term drone attack that killed Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani as an example of smart leadership.
“A lot of people recognize that we need to do something with Iran, but not these weak little bombing runs,” Vance said. “If you’re going to punch the Iranians, you punch them hard. And that’s what he did when he took out Soleimani.”
Days earlier, on a show hosted by Morgan Ortagus, a foreign policy operative who has served Trump as a deputy special presidential envoy to the Middle East, Vance acknowledged his reputation for advocating “restraint in foreign policy.” But he also called for an “aggressive” approach to stifle Iran’s nuclear capabilities.
“I think war often leads to unintended consequences, but preventing Iran from getting a bomb — really, really important,” Vance said.
Vance was more dovish in the days before the 2024 election, when he was asked by comedian and podcaster Tim Dillon how a new Trump administration would handle a potentially “massive Mideast war.”
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“Obviously, you know, Israel has the right to defend itself, but America’s interest is sometimes going to be distinct,” Vance responded. “Like, sometimes we’re going to have overlapping interests, and sometimes we’re going to have distinct interests. And our interest, I think very much, is in not going to war with Iran, right? It would be a huge distraction of resources. It would be massively expensive to our country.”
But Vance also emphasized his concern about Iran’s nuclear program.
“I don’t want Iran to get a nuclear weapon, and I think we should be, like, very strongly encouraging the Iranians and using all the influence that we have to encourage them to not have a nuclear weapon,” he told Dillon.
Expounding on his thinking, Vance added: “I’m not saying we stick ourselves into the Middle East and start a war here, but like we recognize, OK, Israelis [and] Gulf Arab states don’t like Iran, so let the Israelis and the Gulf Arab states provide the counterbalance to Iran. America doesn’t have to constantly police every region of the world.”
Even so, after becoming vice president, Vance, speaking last year at the Munich Leaders Conference in Washington, described Iran’s nuclear program as a tipping point.
“We really think that if the Iran domino falls, you’re going to see nuclear proliferation all over the Middle East,” he said. “That’s very bad for us. It’s very bad for our friends. And it’s something that we don’t think can happen.”
The next month, Trump ordered airstrikes on nuclear enrichment sites in Iran.
“We’re not at war with Iran,” Vance said in an interview the next day on NBC News’ “Meet the Press.” “We’re at war with Iran’s nuclear program.”
In the same interview, Vance tried to reassure those who, like him, might be skeptical of such Middle East incursions.
“I certainly empathize with Americans who are exhausted after 25 years of foreign entanglements in the Middle East,” he said. “I understand the concern, but the difference is that back then, we had dumb presidents, and now we have a president who actually knows how to accomplish America’s national security objectives.”
Since then, Vance has also voiced his belief that any military engagement in Iran will be short-term.
“The idea that we’re going to be in a Middle Eastern war for years with no end in sight — there is no chance that will happen,” he said in an interview with The Washington Post last week, less than two days before the war began.
Vance reiterated that belief Monday night on Fox News. Asked by host Jesse Watters about parallels to the long and costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Vance asserted that Trump had a clearer mission than his predecessors.
“I said this before the conflict started, I’ll repeat it again — there’s just no way that Donald Trump is going to allow this country to get into a multiyear conflict with no clear end in sight and no clear objective,” he said.
“What is different about President Trump, and it’s frankly different about both Republicans and Democrats of the past, is that he’s not going to let his country go to war unless there’s a clearly defined objective. He’s defined that objective: It’s Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon and has to commit long-term to never trying to rebuild the nuclear capability. It’s pretty clear. It’s pretty simple. And I think that means that we’re not going to get into the problems that we’ve had with Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Source: “AOL Breaking”
