Recent reporting leaves little doubt: Trump’s vice president thinks that if the war goes badly, it will help him secure the 2028 Republican nomination for president.

By Alex Shephard (TNR)

The Opportunist
Is JD Vance rooting for the Iran War to fail?
Recent reporting leaves little doubt: Trump’s vice president thinks that if the war goes badly, it will help him secure the 2028 Republican nomination for president.

If you want to understand how Donald Trump is managing the Iran war, a glimpse at the president’s recent public statements tells you all you need to know. On Thursday alone, he boasted that the United States and Israel are “totally destroying” Iran, ominously warned the country’s soccer team to stay away from the U.S.-co-hosted 2026 World Cup “for their own life and safety,” and posted a 60-year-old photo of himself in military school uniform—the phony implication being that the president, who infamously avoided the Vietnam draft thanks to “bone spurs,” is deep down a troop.

This is Trump’s take on the “wartime president” trope: self-aggrandizing, a little scary, and utterly embarrassing. He’s the architect of this already disastrous conflict, but he isn’t alone in owning it. Justifying his fake new title as “secretary of war,” Pete Hegseth has tried to outdo his boss with bloodthirsty, sociopathic, and downright stupid public statements. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been more dignified—it would be hard to be less dignified than Hegseth—which has caused his profile to skyrocket: He is now the clear front-runner to succeed Trump with both MAGA powerbrokers and the Republican base.

One person, however, is conspicuously absent from this cheerleading squad: Vice President JD Vance. But he hasn’t been silent, exactly. Instead, as the war has dragged on, he has carefully seeded a message to the press that has steadily grown more aggressive: he’s not a fan of Trump’s war.

Publicly, of course, Vance is doing his best to tow the line. He has attempted to square his long-standing opposition to prolonged conflict in the Middle East by insisting this war is different from the ones waged in Iraq and Afghanistan. “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,” Vance told The Washington Post two days before an Israeli airstrike killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In the intervening days, he has repeated that claim, made a few tepid statements in support of the war, and attended the dignified transfer of the remains of a U.S. service member who died as a result of it.

The real story, however, is what’s playing out behind the scenes. A March 3 New York Times piece about the lead-up to the war captured the vice president trying to have it both ways. Vance, the Times reported, “appeared to personally lean against military attacks” but also “argued that a limited strike was a mistake. If the United States was going to hit Iran, he told the group, it should ‘go big and go fast.’”

It’s not a particularly coherent position—Vance appears to have simultaneously opposed the war and advocated on behalf of waging it aggressively—but it is a revealing one. There is a palpable sense that he wanted to come out against the war but couldn’t because doing so would risk his standing with the president and his base. Instead, Vance staked out a position that he wouldn’t have to shed if he were to come out more strongly against the war later: that it should be big and fast, which is a clever way of saying the U.S. should end it quickly by winning.

One could argue that the U.S. did go big and fast when it hit Iran—and that it didn’t work. After two weeks of devastating airstrikes and targeted assassination, there is no sign that the regime is crumbling, let alone that it is on the brink of granting the “unconditional surrender” Trump has demanded. Instead, there are strong signs that the war will go on for at least a month and perhaps much longer. It is already massively unpopular—though Republican voters back it almost unanimously—and if it continues, it will likely be economically ruinous, especially if the Strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping channel for much of the global oil supply, remains partially or completely closed.

The war is going badly, in other words—which is exactly what Vance planned for. And so, this week, he started to tweak his story. Citing two senior Trump officials, Politico reported on Friday that Vance wasn’t actually torn about striking Iran. He was “skeptical.” Two weeks in, he is not only worried about success but also opposes the war, according to one of those officials. The message couldn’t be clearer: None of this is JD’s fault.

Vance’s opposition may be sincere—ever since his belated conversion to the MAGA cause, he has been one of the loudest anti-intervention voices in the Republican Party—but this is a Machiavellian and astonishingly self-serving manoeuvre for a sitting vice president to take during wartime. An inveterate striver, Vance clearly thinks that coming out against the war early is a savvy long-term bet. So he is doing everything he can, short of saying it himself, to make it clear he opposes the war in Iran, while ostensibly standing behind the president who is overseeing it. And he is doing so in large part to damage the standing of that president’s secretary of state, his principal rival for the party’s 2028 nomination, who would be severely damaged if Iran turns into a Iraq-like quagmire.

The war may be popular among the Republican faithful now, but Vance is gambling that support for it will crumble. His stance, moreover, helps him stake out a position that could prove powerful come the 2028 primaries: that the war was ultimately a costly distraction that prevented the Trump administration from fulfilling its core promises, particularly on immigration and trade. Vance would essentially be arguing that real MAGA policy has never been tried and that his election was necessary to ultimately fulfill the promises that Trump thrice campaigned on.

This move is also completely in character for Vance, whose political ambition, opportunism, and outright contortionism have proved boundless 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 he rebounded quickly after Trump won. In less than four years, he had remade himself as not only a MAGA disciple but also a thought leader who would fill the considerable intellectual vacuum at the centre of the president’s movement. No longer the neo-Reaganite of his Hillbilly Elegy days, when he called for slashing welfare spending in the name of “personal responsibility,” Vance now is an anti-corporate, anti-intervention crusader—credentials that led to his selection as Trump’s running mate in 2024.
But Vance didn’t do all of that just to be vice president. So now he’s making another bet—a bolder, riskier one. He thinks he can not just evade responsibility for the war in Iran but stick it on his rivals without jeopardizing his standing with Trump or his base. The unfolding disaster in Iran—the horrific bombing of an elementary school, 13 dead U.S. service members, the disruption of global maritime trade, and so much more—is just another opportunity for JD Vance to climb further up the ladder of power in America.

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