Vice President JD Vance has launched a desperate spin campaign after White House sources said the one-time isolationist had pushed for a “go big” war in Iran.
He also opposed limited strikes during a tense Situation Room meeting, an explosive report said. Sources close to Vance rushed to try to downplay the disclosure from White House sources that he had advocated for the “go big and go fast” strategy. Instead, the Vance sources claimed that he had really opposed the war in private.
The frantic spinning underlines the political risk to Vance of an open-ended combat war that has already cost six American lives and wounded many more servicemembers. Vance was a one-time enlisted Marine who rose on the back of the GI Bill and speaking out against the forever wars. He repeatedly warned in public against going into Iran.
But now he has been faced with a detailed New York Times report that he advised Trump to “go big and go fast” on Iran, and has been reduced to having “sources” offer a version of events in which he was “personally opposed” to the policy but thought that if it had to be done, it should be done quickly.
His defense echoes that of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and also suggests that he lost a vital political argument.
Among those offering airtime to his defense was the MAGA-curious CBS News, which said, “A source familiar with the Vice President’s thinking before the strikes on Iran tells @CBSNews that while the Vice President was personally against the strikes, if the strikes were to happen, he argued that the operation should ‘go big’ and ‘go fast.’”
The Daily Beast has reached out for comment; Vance’s spokesperson declined to comment to CBS News and to the Times.
Prior to the meeting, Trump was reportedly eyeing a plan on launching a smaller strike and would only launch a larger strike months later if Iran failed to halt its nuclear aspirations.
Ultimately, the president opted to commence “major combat operations” in conjunction with Israeli forces that saw Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei killed along with dozens of senior Iranian officials over the weekend.
In the end, according to the Times, Vance’s reasoning seemed to “resonate.”
Vance maintained a low profile immediately following the strikes, leading to speculation that his silence was a result of his opposition to foreign intervention in Iran; historically an advocate of anti-interventionism, he had previously said in October 2024, “Our interest, I think very much is not going to war with Iran.”
In addition, sources said that Vance’s reticence about the conflict was seen by Trump as a sign of disloyalty, while conservatives who shared Vance’s skepticism for foreign intervention have described the situation as “pretty bad for Vance.”
“He had to perform the dutiful task of being the subordinate and trying to convince people like us that this was actually in good hands—and that’s a tough pill to swallow,” the leader of a prominent conservative nonprofit told Politico on Monday.
Politico also spoke to Republicans who were alarmed by the fact that Vance had not posted on X since Saturday’s strikes, with one House GOP official telling the outlet, “People are really fixated that Vance has not tweeted. It’s kind of a huge problem.”
However, on Monday night, the vice president broke his silence with an appearance on Fox News’ Jesse Watters Primetime.
On the same day, his X account lit up with a series of reposts of the official White House and Rapid Response 47 accounts, including 12 reposts on the subject of Iran on Monday alone, five of which were clips from his interview with Watters.
In his interview with Watters, he said that the president’s ultimate goal was to secure a long-term commitment from Iran that it would never build a nuclear weapon.
“And after months, really almost a year, of painstaking diplomacy, what the president determined is he didn’t want to just keep the country safe from an Iranian nuclear weapon for the first three, four years of his second term,” Vance told Watters, “He wanted to make sure that Iran could never have a nuclear weapon.”
“That would require fundamentally a change in mindset from the Iranian regime. So he saw the Iranian regime was weakened. He knew they were committed to getting on the brink of a nuclear weapon. And he decided to take action because he felt that was necessary in order to protect the nation’s security.”
When asked by Watters what the plan was going forward, Vance said, “I’m not going to reveal classified information here on air, but the president of the United States knows what we’re able to do. He knows that we have much greater capacity to inflict damage on the Iranian nuclear program, but also on various missiles that threaten our troops, as you’ve seen. They’ve been launching those at our troops for much of the past three days.”
“I think the president has made it very clear that the United States has a lot of optionality here. We could go for a little bit longer. We could go for a lot longer. I think the president just wants to make it clear to the Iranians and to the world he is not going to rest until he accomplishes his objective of ensuring Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon.”
Watters also asked Vance about concerns that Iran will turn into another protracted war like Iraq or Afghanistan. “There’s just no way that Donald Trump is going to allow this country to get into a multi-year conflict with no clear end in sight, and no clear objective,” Vance responded.
“What is different about President Trump—and it’s frankly different about both Republicans and Democrats of the past—is that he’s not gonna let his country go to war unless there’s a clearly defined objective,” Vance continued.
“He’s defined that objective as, Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon and has to commit long-term to never trying to rebuild a nuclear capability. It’s pretty clear, it’s pretty simple, and I think that means we’re not going to get into the problems we had with Iraq and Afghanistan.”
