Two weeks ago, JD Vance told the Washington Post there was “no chance” the United States would get into a drawn-out war in the Middle East. Two days later, we were in one. Now, Politico is reporting he was a skeptic of the whole operation. If true, this would make him both the most powerful man to oppose this war—and the least effective.
WAHHHH, JD.
Carnegie’s Matt Duss raises the right question about the leak: Is this Vance covering himself, or does it indicate Trump is wavering? Both can be true.
Vance knows he can’t put too much distance between Trump and himself — a human parasite doesn’t have that kind of independent standing and never will. So the leak does double duty: it’s a hedge for Vance’s career and a signal that the war’s architects are looking for an exit they haven’t found yet. The man who was sent out to sell the unsellable is now quietly telling reporters he never bought it. Again…
WAHHHH, JD.
This is the sentence that should follow every JD Vance statement about Iran for the rest of his career: he opposed the war, then argued to go big and go fast, then fell silent while American service members died, then went on Fox News and told Jesse Watters the mission is different from Iraq because the president “has clearly defined what he wants to accomplish.” The president has defined the goal as Iran committing “long-term to never trying to rebuild a nuclear capability.
And here’s the big reveal — the moment the whole lie collapses on itself, and reveals JD’s nuts in a vice.
When Netanyahu, Lindsey Graham, and Stephen Miller say Iran was on the verge of a nuclear weapon, they are making a claim experts have spent weeks methodically dismantling. Trump said Iran was two weeks away. But Iran's main enrichment facilities had been largely destroyed in strikes a year ago, and there is no evidence that enrichment had meaningfully resumed. Iran cannot have been two weeks from a bomb it no longer had the centrifuges to build. It's a joke, and even if it weren't, a country that knows Israel has hundreds of nuclear warheads pointed at it isn't building a bomb to use. It's building a bomb so this exact thing stops happening to it. Because it tried peaceful controls on its nuclear program, and Trump punished them for it.
But here’s what makes this all specifically, structurally incoherent: we went to war because Iran was willing to give up the bombs it never had.
The Omani foreign minister flew to Washington the day before the strikes to announce that Iran had agreed to zero stockpiling of enriched uranium and offered full IAEA verification — a deal that went further than anything Obama achieved. Twelve hours later, the bombs fell. As economist Michael Hudson wrote, the attack was launched because the negotiations were succeeding. A peacefully verified Iran was more upsetting to the actual strategic objective than a nuclear Iran would have been — less useful to Netanyahu, less profitable for Putin, less dramatic for the men who need enemies more than they need solutions. But to whom exactly does a nuclear-free Iran represent a threat? We’ll get back to that.
The bombing during mid-breakthrough negotiations was not a miscalculation. It was the strategy, or close enough to it that the distinction barely matters. It was to risk a world war rather than accept a deal that would have made the Obama agreement look like a model.
And now the regime can’t stop confessing that war for war’s sake was the goal again every time it tries to justify the war. When Vance or Rubio is pushed on the nuclear question, they stop claiming Iran was about to detonate something. They shift. Vance’s version: Iran was “committed to getting on that brink of a nuclear weapon.” Not at the brink. Committed to eventually reaching the brink. By Vance’s own logic, Iran didn’t have a nuclear weapon. It didn’t even have the capability. The demand — Iran must commit “long-term to never trying to rebuild a nuclear capability” — is the confession of the absurdity behind this pose. You cannot monitor that. You cannot verify that. Especially when you bomb the country every time it tries to negotiate with you. The terms keep changing as an admission that they don’t think America can handle the truth.
So what is the truth? Who does this disaster benefit? The question any “America First” person would ask, if they meant it. Bibi Netanyahu finally has the war he’s been promising for thirty years — and the one he needs to transmute the worst security failure in Israeli history into a personal political lifeline, keeping himself out of court and in power for as long as the emergency lasts. Whether that logic holds is another question entirely. Whether it should be America’s problem is the one nobody in this administration is asking, at least in those words. Maybe in the WAHHHH?
And Vladimir Putin is watching Iran’s Hormuz chokehold deliver him a fiscal windfall — the kind of oil price shock that relieves the main strain on his war machine — while Ukraine sees less material U.S. support, almost certainly by design. As Casey Michel notes, Putin wins on oil revenue and on Ukraine getting defunded, but there’s a limit: Moscow could only offer Iran intelligence and targeting data after all those years of Iranian military aid, and another dictator-ally just got obliterated with potentially more to come. He’s a winner in the way Trump is a winner — up on points in ways that keep costing him, and his people, everything else.
The men who ran on “America First” still gave Putin two of the three things he needed most, for free, by bombing a country that was mid-negotiation. And what have they gained America, except the blood of Iranian schoolgirls on our hands, 13 Americans dead so far, and the prospect of $200 barrels of oil?
The WSJ is reporting that before the first bomb fell, Trump’s own Joint Chiefs told him an attack could prompt Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz. He did it anyway.
For whom and why? Prompted by vengeance? Unmoored by world-historical character flaws? Driven by a compulsion to make the TV say nice things about him? Or just played by the two authoritarians he most admires and aligns with, who both happen to have a ton of inside information on him and his team?
Vance is telling us, without saying the words. Whatever it is, it’s got little-to-nothing to do with what’s good for America.
Yesterday in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, Vance spent twenty minutes at a rally not mentioning the war before briefly noting that Iran “can never have a nuclear weapon” — a simple, simple principle, he called it, as if the simplicity of the slogan explains the complexity of the coffins. When asked directly what advice he gave the president, he said he couldn’t tell us, partly because he didn’t want to go to prison. Not national security. Prison. The man who opposed this war, then sold it, is now refusing to account for it on the grounds that his own administration might prosecute him for honesty. It’s a ridiculous dance by a ridiculous man who knows his plot to pretend he was a different kind of Republican has now been demolished by Trump’s having made an irreversible mistake that even George W. Bush was smart enough to avoid.
Your energy bills go up, Putin gets his “jackpot” as sanctions are eased, and Vance is at the podium saying he doesn’t like high oil prices either.
Trump knew the risks going in. And so did Vance. The question JD hasn’t answered — and nobody’s made him answer — is who exactly he thought this was supposed to benefit, because he knew from the outset it wasn’t America.
Now, countries are starting to engage directly with Iran — India, Turkey — because the war has no visible exit, and someone has to fill the vacuum. That’s what “impossible to enforce” looks like in the real world: your allies stop waiting for you to figure it out.
So you have to ask: What was the point domestically?
Even JD can see this destroys any chance Trump improves his image before November. The New York Times is now reporting that some officials are deeply pessimistic about the lack of any real endgame strategy — and are “careful not to express that directly to the president, who has repeatedly declared that the military operation is a complete success.” Trump’s guys’ fear of telling Trump the truth about our current disaster — or the shoes he buys them — is its own diagnosis.
I don’t want to get too conspiratorial here, because there is no coherent conspiracy that can survive more than a few minutes inside Trump’s brain. As Andy Craig noted, this is a personalist regime built on a man who is not merely ignorant and malign but genuinely non compos mentis. Pretending he’s capable of holding public office and giving orders at all is a kind of mass delusion. But the Phoenix New Times has documented that Project 2025’s Border Security Workgroup spent months in 2024 plotting how to deploy the military on U.S. soil — in all 50 states, in perpetuity — using the Insurrection Act as the mechanism and immigration as the pretext. A foreign war that craters the economy and justifies emergency powers isn’t a bug in that plan. It’s the missing piece.
The biggest leaps your mind makes — this is all for someone else or to avoid the Epstein Files or present pretext for the dictatorship we know he’s going to try to claim over our elections — all make more sense than any argument the regime is making.
And JD can’t help but confirm those suspicions, possibly showing Trump an escape hatch or just subtly hedging like a professional billionaire lickspittle must.
In 2023, right after he won a Senate seat and immediately began sucking toes on his way to the Republican presidential ticket, JD Vance wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed praising Trump because the then ex-president “won’t recklessly send Americans to fight overseas.”
Now more than a dozen Americans are dead so far. To stabilize the oil markets cratered by a war America started, the U.S. quietly lifted sanctions on Russian oil — directly funding the war machine Putin is running in Ukraine. America First delivered Putin two gifts with one bomb. All paid for by American taxpayers who, overwhelmingly, don’t see the point of this shit.
The CIA told Trump before the first bomb fell that killing Khamenei could produce equally hard-line successors. Iran now has a new supreme leader who may or may not be able to show his face in public, vowing to keep the Strait closed. Trump has invited Iran’s soccer team to the World Cup while bombing their country. Vance attended the dignified transfer at Dover. And somewhere in a Politico report, his people are quietly whispering that he tried to stop it.
WAHHHH, JD.
Your weasley ways exist to evade and entrap. And now all they can do is tell us what you’ve known from the outset.
This war is unwinnable, at least to the American people, without a massive world war-style mobilization or, possibly, nuclear weapons, which would only mean everyone loses. And it’s unwinnable because it’s not being fought for us. So JD should tell us exactly whom it’s being fought for. Why not? He seems to want to talk.
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This is the first time I’ve read something from this essayist and I’ll be telling friends it’s a MUST READ.
One outstanding essay does not a paid subscription warrant however. That will depend on consistent output of this caliber and it’s a VERY crowded field.
Fabulous analysis