JD Vance Is Caught Between a War and a Hard Place

Vice President JD Vance already had a perilously thin tightrope to walk. 

As the 2028 frontrunner, he has three years to figure out how to stay in complete lockstep with President Trump (anything less is heresy) while also somehow carving out his own lane —  particularly if the administration continues its popularity nosedive. 

It’s a habitual problem for vice presidents young enough to harbor Oval Office ambitions — look at former VP Kamala Harris — and a uniquely potent one for the vice president serving Trump, a president who will brook no defiance, even in the name of political strategy. (President Biden reportedly brooked no distancing either, and look how that turned out.) 

Vance, a chameleon, has found his beliefs to be fungible enough that he now serves alongside a man he once likened to Adolf Hitler. But Trump’s new war presents an especially vexing political problem.

Vance has for years positioned himself as a strident anti-interventionist. He initially endorsed Trump in 2023 with a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “Trump’s best foreign policy? Not starting any wars.” He’s gone on the record repeatedly about the folly of war with Iran, specifically. “Our interest, I think very much, is in not going to war with Iran,” he said on a podcast in 2024. “It would be a huge distraction of resources. It would be massively expensive to our country.”  

Critically, such a stance would differentiate him from the much more blob-ish Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is also known to have 2028 aspirations. 

That distinction is disintegrating now that Vance has been ordered to dance to the war drums of the second Trump administration. He’s had to spend down his anti-war capital as the administration has gotten progressively more entangled in foreign violence. 

Amid strikes on Venezuelan boats in September, Vance tweeted: “Killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military.”

In January, after the United States captured Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro, he wrote: “Maduro has multiple indictments in the United States for narcoterrorism. You don’t get to avoid justice for drug trafficking in the United States because you live in a palace in Caracas.” 

Arguably, neither of those attacks, nor the strikes on Iran last June, looked exactly like the forever wars Vance had premised his political career on opposing. But Trump’s new war has him in much hotter water, as the administration has prepped the public for a prolonged conflict, and even previewed the possibility of American boots on the ground. 

Trump posted on Truth Social this week that the U.S. had an endless stockpile of weapons. “Wars can be fought ‘forever,’” he wrote, “and very successfully, using just these supplies.” 

Vance has been remarkably quiet since Trump began the war, particularly on his usually very active Twitter account. He did, though, go on Fox News Monday night to try to justify it, arguing that the crusade was launched specifically to avert the imminent threat of a nuclear Iran. 

“President Trump will not get the United States into a years-long conflict with no clear objective,” he wrote in a Tweet accompanying a clip from the interview. “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.⁩”

Amid his general opposition to foreign intervention, Vance does have a track record of opposing letting Iran develop nuclear weapons. But Trump has made that line of defense muddy for him too, saying last Saturday that the U.S. had “obliterated the regime’s nuclear program” in its strikes last summer. (In March 2025, the U.S. Intelligence Agency had assessed that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon.)

Multiple lawmakers given classified briefings on the rationale for the war have said publicly that Iran presented no imminent threat. Rubio said, and has attempted to walk back, that the real concern was a retaliatory Iranian strike after Israel struck first.

Vance has been left to subtly distance himself from the war effort, leaving breadcrumbs like the Twitter silence while the non-interventionist wing of the MAGA movement, which he once sought to lead, seethes.

During the initial strikes themselves, he was notably absent from Mar-a-Lago where Trump and Rubio had set up a makeshift command center. He was at the kids’ table in the White House with Tulsi Gabbard, the increasingly sidelined Director of National Intelligence who also once made her bones on outspoken opposition to wars. Believe it or not, she was hawking “No War With Iran” t-shirts as recently as 2020.

Pro-Vance spin has been appearing across a wide swath of articles about the war, all including the same details about his initial opposition to the war, but conviction that if there had to be strikes, they be big and fast.  

And in the latest unusual move by the media-happy Vice President, he bowed out of a CBS town hall scheduled for next week, where he likely would have been asked about his shifting positions. The network’s PR tweeted that it “has been postponed by the vice president due to the war.”