JD Vance can't escape the Iran war

JD Vance can’t escape the Iran war
The more the vice president tries to distance himself from the conflict, the further he gets sucked in

By Amanda Marcotte
Senior Writer
Published April 27, 2026 6:45AM (EDT)


(Salon) With everything going wrong in Donald Trump‘s presidency these days, he is still the master at one thing: making sure that no one who pledges fealty to him will escape with their dignity intact. As vice president, JD Vance receives regular reminders of this, including an especially brutal one delivered on Tuesday. His plane was standing ready to fly to Islamabad, Pakistan, to lead the administration’s peace negotiations with Iran. But instead of taking off, Vance was made to wait hours while his boss dawdled, before eventually extending a deadline for Iran to offer a proposal to end the war that Trump impetuously started in late February in partnership with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The vice president didn’t even want to be there, a feeling he has apparently made clear through anonymous leaks from either himself or his associates to journalists, which haver resulted in flattering stories alleging that the vice president tried to talk Trump out of launching a war on Iran. These accounts are likely true enough, but not because Vance has some noble objection to needless killing. At 41, the vice president has enough wits about him to see what was very obvious, something the Trump has refused to see: that this war would be a political debacle for the administration — and for Vance’s future plans to run for president.

Vance’s efforts to discreetly paint himself as opposed to the war, though, are backfiring. The more the Iran war drags on, the more the vice president finds himself getting sucked into the quagmire at the risk of becoming as much the face of the fiasco as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth or even Trump himself. As Parker Molloy pointed out in his Present Age newsletter, anonymous sources chattering to Beltway reporters about Vance’s rumored opposition to the war can’t drown out what the vice president is saying in public and to the cameras — that he is very pro-war.

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Vance may not fully understand it yet, but on Iran, he is stuck. There was never any evidence he could manage any kind of peace negotiation, especially one as delicate as this. He called it quits less than a day after his first effort, even though, as many commentators pointed out, international diplomacy is a time-consuming process. Barack Obama’s administration was able to obtain a nuclear deal with Iran, which Trump tore up in a resentful snit in 2018. With far more seasoned and talented negotiators working, it still took the former president two years of talks to get it done. .....................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/04/27/jd-vance-cant-escape-the-iran-war/