Vance Says Bombing Iran Is Different From Other ‘Dumb’ Presidents’ Military Actions
Over the weekend, the U.S. bombed three nuclear facilities in Iran. “The strikes were a spectacular military success” President Donald Trump said Saturday night. “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.” Officials later had to walk back Trump’s victory lap, admitting it was as yet unclear how much of Iran’s stockpile may still remain.
But regardless of how it shakes out, the whole affair conflicts with the anti-war posture Trump rode into office on, especially for Vice President J.D. Vance.
“We are not at war with Iran. We are at war with Iran’s nuclear program,” Vance told both NBC’s Kristen Welker and ABC’s Jonathan Karl. To anybody who lived through the interminable war on terror—fought not just against a country or a terrorist group but against the concept of terror itself—Vance’s explanation feels like a distinction without a difference.
Indeed, despite Trump’s all-caps exclamation after the bombing that “NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE,” Iran has since retaliated.
“We’re incredibly grateful and proud of the American Air Force pilots who did an incredible job last night,” Vance told Welker on Sunday. “It’s really an incredible operation, a testament to the power of the American military, and I think it shows what can happen when you have that great American military in the hands of capable presidential leadership.”
This is an awkward position for Trump, who said after he was reelected in November, “I’m not going to start wars, I’m going to stop wars.”
But it’s also awkward for Vance, an Iraq War veteran who has long praised Trump’s opposition to American aggression. Endorsing his 2024 reelection bid, Vance praised Trump for “start[ing] no wars” in his first term; even when he openly opposed Trump for president, Vance noted his appeal on foreign policy, writing in 2016 that while Trump “is unfit for our nation’s highest office…to those voters furious at politicians who sent their children to fight and bleed and die in Iraq, he tells them what no major Republican politician in a decade has said—that the war was a terrible mistake imposed on the country by an incompetent president.”
This was markedly different from the tone Vance struck this weekend. “I certainly empathize with Americans who are exhausted after 25 years of foreign entanglements in the Middle East,” Vanc
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