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Vice President JD Vance is one the most vocal anti-interventionists in President Donald Trump's inner circle — which makes watching him try to come up with arguments to justify Trump's airstrikes on nuclear sites in Iran this weekend such a tragicomic spectacle.
“I certainly empathize with Americans who are exhausted after 25 years of foreign entanglements in the Middle East,” Vance told NBC's Kristen Welker on "Meet the Press" on Sunday. “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.”
Trump has created a scenario which by its very nature opens up the possibility of a sustained war with Iran.
“This is not going to be some long drawn-out thing," he added.
But what evidence do we have of Trump's exceptional powers of judgment and wisdom relative to his predecessors?
Is it that Trump shirks intelligence briefings? Is it his decision to surround himself with loyalists who labor to confirm his instincts, instead of experts who counsel him based on facts? Is it his manic reversals (and then reversals of his reversals) of his own policies, and inability to explain why he's doing what he's doing? Is it his transparent disinterest in policy details? His fixation on the presidency as reducible to optics and stagecraft? Is it that he turns to the propagandistic Fox News — which is largely enthusiastic about strikes on Iran — for advice on how to run the country?
These are, of course, the kinds of qualities that should make the public extremely skeptical that Trump will exercise discipline and careful long-term analysis as he appraises the escalating situation with Iran. Case in point: the same day Vance said that Trump was only pursuing targeted strikes against Iran's nuclear program, the president implied on social media that pursuing regime change in Iran was possibly on the table.
But in some respects Trump's intellect is beside the point. Because he has created a scenario which by its very nature opens up the possibility of a sustained war with Iran.
NBC News reports that "In the days before Trump gave the final order for the attack on the nuclear sites, Iran sent a private message to the president that it would respond to such a move by unleashing terrorist attacks on U.S. soil carried out by sleeper cells operating inside the country, according to two U.S. officials and a person with knowledge of the threat." If such an attack were to actually happen, there is little doubt that Trump could feel compelled to respond.
On Monday, Iran launched missile attacks on a U.S. military base in Qatar, which could in turn precipitate another round of tit-for-tat with the U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Sunday, before the attack, that the U.S. would “act swiftly and decisively when our people, our partners or our interests are threatened.” In other words, Trump has set in motion a face-off that could conceivably spiral into a full-fledged war on Iran.
Vance says this time will be different because Trump is not a "dumb" president. A wise president would know that we wouldn't have to have been contemplating this entire scenario if Trump had not taken the extreme step of striking Iran in the first place.