US Vice-President JD Vance. Photo / Oliver Contreras, AFP
In January 2023, JD Vance decided to let bygones be bygones and back the probable Republican presidential nominee.
His pitch to the American people was simple, as he laid out in an article for the Wall Street Journal announcing his endorsement: “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars”.
It was a stark indication of Vance’s own political strategy.
The 41-year-old former US marine, who was deployed to Iraq, had long argued against American intervention abroad, from supplying weapons to Ukraine, to the invasion of Iraq.
“American taxpayer money has continued to flow to Ukraine,” he wrote in the WSJ. “A wiser foreign policy wouldn’t have let such conduct go unnoticed.”
Three years later, sitting in the White House beside the man he once compared to Adolf Hitler, Vance has been notably quiet since the US President chose to launch devastating strikes on Iran, weeks after raiding Venezuela and capturing its president.
As Republicans rushed to praise the strikes Vance, a prolific social media presence, was notably silent for almost 72 hours, aside from reposting official Administration content.
The silence prompted speculation across Washington that there had been a split between Vance and Trump.
“Where the hell is JD Vance? Where is he?” Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former congresswoman, asked on Megyn Kelly’s show last Monday local time.
Vance broke his silence a few hours later on Fox News, defending what he described as a limited strike with specific goals.
“The President has clearly defined what he wants to accomplish,” he said.
“There’s just no way Donald Trump is going to allow this country to get into a multiyear conflict with no clear end in sight and no clear objective.”
It was a characteristically loyal defence of the President, but for Vance it signalled a clear change in tone.
“He has a long record of defending America First and no more wars, and especially in the Middle East,” Professor Matthew Dallek, of George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management, told the Telegraph. “It was core to his identity as he rose up in politics.”
In November 2024, Vance argued explicitly against US military action in Iran.
“Our interest, I think, very much is in not going to war with Iran,” he said on a podcast. “It would be a huge distraction of resources. It would be massively expensive to our country.”
In an April 2024 speech on the senate floor, he cited his own experience serving in Iraq as the basis for his scepticism of interventionism.
“I saw when I went to Iraq that I had been lied to, that the promises of the foreign policy establishment of this country were a complete joke,” he said.
He added that “too many in this chamber have decided that we should police the entire world … The American taxpayer be damned.”
So how did Vance balance his isolationism with his loyalty to his President in the run-up to the latest US military action?
According to insiders, he initially laid out the negative implications of striking Iran. But once he and other top officials came to see the conflict as inevitable, he put up “little resistance”, CNN reported, instead “racing to execute Trump’s wishes rather than trying to change them”.
The New York Times said that once Vance had accepted the US would hit Iran, he wanted to “go big and go fast” in the White House Situation Room.
“He is either changing his mind, evolving with the situation, but also following the leader here,” Mathew Bartlett, a Republican strategist and former Trump appointee to the state department, told the Telegraph.
“There’s no scenario where the Vice-President would ever publicly, and possibly even privately, make a break with the President.
“That is going to continue on, but that does certainly leave questions for the Vice-President’s political future,” he said, adding that “if he’s still having to talk about the war with Iran” by 2028, that is “not something that would bode well”.
Trump told RealClearPolitics during a brief interview that Vance “did not take persuading”.
Defending the war presents a political liability for the heir apparent to Trump’s Make America Great Again dynasty, who is widely considered the front-runner for the next election.
If he makes a bid for the White House in 2028, he will need to argue the case for the war to the American voters, which could prove challenging given the current level of public support.
Nearly 60% of the public disapprove of the US decision to take military action in Iran, according to a recent CNN poll, while just one in four approves of the strikes, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found.
There is a “small and growing” chance that Trump “could tell him not to run and choose Rubio”, Bartlett said.
He points to 2016 when Barack Obama sidelined his vice-president Joe Biden in favour of Hillary Clinton as the successor to his legacy.
Already there are whisperings that Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, could be replacing Vance as the favourite.
After launching the Iran strikes, Trump asked a group of roughly 25 GOP donors if they would support Vance or Rubio. “It was almost unanimous for Marco,” a person in attendance told NBC news. “It was clear, at least that night,” another added.
Other insiders argue that Vance’s silence in those first few hours of the war was simply a sign of his unswerving loyalty to the President.
“I have no knowledge as to what he was thinking in those 72 hours,” concludes Diana Furchtgott-Roth, a fellow at the Energy Policy Research Foundation.
“But it’s a complicated situation, and many people were being told, what is the message right now from the President?”
As Vice-President, she said, “you don’t want to be spouting out any messages if you don’t know what’s going to happen and what the message of the Administration is”.
If the war continues, that loyalty may prove both an asset and a constraint for Vance.
Should he run for president, the anti-interventionist politics he built his career on may have to be reconciled with the conflict he is now helping to defend.
A spokesperson for Vance told the Telegraph: “The premise of this story is ridiculous and false. The Vice-President hasn’t been keeping a low profile.
“He’s attended a dignified transfer at Dover Air Force Base, went on primetime TV after the start of Operation Epic Fury, and delivered a speech in which he discussed the heroic sacrifice of America’s service members.”
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