By Idrees Kahloon
Thursday, March 05, 2026
If J. D. Vance promised one thing during the 2024
presidential campaign, it was that America would not enter into a war with Iran
of the kind that is currently raging. “America doesn’t have to constantly
police every region of the world,” Vance told the
comedian Tim Dillon on his podcast. He continued: “Our interest, I think very
much, is in not going to war with Iran. It would be a huge distraction of
resources. It would be massively expensive to our country.” In another podcast
interview, with Shawn
Ryan, in September 2024, Vance even said that a war between Israel and Iran
was in fact “the most likely and most dangerous scenario” for provoking World
War III.
These arguments look farcical now that President Trump
has chosen—months after bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities and pronouncing its
enrichment efforts “completely and totally obliterated”—to join Israel in
launching a war on the Islamic Republic. The ensuing conflagration now involves
a dozen countries in the Middle East. Trump says that he will do “whatever
it takes” militarily and that
“wars can be fought ‘forever.’” Vance’s X account, normally hyperactive, went
silent in the days after bombs began falling on Saturday morning. The vice
president was not at Mar-a-Lago with Trump as he oversaw the attack. The
administration instead released a photo of
him running a secondary meeting at the White House, flanked by a can of Diet
Mountain Dew and a sullen-looking Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national
intelligence.
Vance entered the White House as a man full of
ideas—about a more modest place for the United States in world affairs; a new,
worker-friendly version of Republican economics; and aggressive, Teddy
Roosevelt–style regulation of Big Business. Yet Iran is just the latest example
of a noticeable trend: Within the Trump administration, Vance’s opinions seem
to matter less and less.
On foreign affairs, Vance was on the isolationist end of
the MAGA coalition, which now includes people, such as Secretary of State Marco
Rubio, who have previously been fervid advocates of American intervention
abroad. Vance had a coherent, well-articulated theory for his beliefs: America
could not fight on multiple fronts and should not pointlessly expend its scarce
munitions on regional conflicts, such as the war between Russia and Ukraine,
because it was competing with the rising superpower China. Yet, as vice
president, he has been forced to square his stance with the administration’s
January capture of the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro—a raid that Vance defended
as a law-enforcement action rather than an act of war. He has gamely taken up
Trump’s desire to control Greenland,
donning a parka and visiting the island.
In private, Vance seems more consistent with his prior
positions. In Signal chats accidentally disclosed to The
Atlantic last year, he registered his opposition to strikes on Houthi
militants. (After he was overruled, he quickly acquiesced.) His extreme
skepticism of Ukraine’s war effort—as a senator, Vance described Ukrainian
President Volodymyr Zelensky’s lobbying for more U.S. aid as
“grotesque”—initially seemed to gain purchase within the Trump administration.
In an Oval Office meeting with Trump and Zelensky, Vance berated the Ukrainian
president by asking,
“Have you said thank you once?” One of the few close Vance allies
who secured a major administration post, Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s top
policy official, was behind
the decision last summer to suspend arms shipments to Ukraine.
Still, Trump reversed this decision within days. The
president is not just allowing previously
passed American aid packages to go to the Ukrainians; he is also expanding
access through a new program that lets European countries pay for weapons and
transfer them. America is still assisting Ukraine significantly in other ways.
Its intelligence
agencies are providing extensive support; the military is squeezing
Russia’s economy by seizing “shadow fleet” ships that evade U.S. sanctions; the
Trump ally Elon Musk deactivated
Starlink terminals that Russian forces were using to guide drones.
The irony now is that, as Vance feared, American missile
interceptors necessary to deter the Chinese military are being burned
through at an astonishing
rate—just not by the Ukrainians. The Trump administration is using them in
a discretionary war in the Middle East.
***
Vance’s heterodoxy within conservative circles was even
more marked on economic matters. The hillbilly elegist turned venture
capitalist once seemed poised to remake Reaganite Republican dogma. Vance
wanted to boost American fertility rates by expanding the child tax credit,
perhaps to as much as $5,000
per
kid.
He wanted to protect American workers by expanding unionization, breaking up
big tech companies, accelerating antitrust enforcement, raising tariffs, and
implementing an industrial strategy. Aside from tariffs—a decades-long
obsession of Trump’s, anyway—little Vanceism is discernible in the
administration’s actions. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the administration’s
signature legislative achievement, modestly increased child tax credits to
$2,200 per child. It also created special tax-advantaged “Trump accounts” for
children, but these will exist only through 2028—a mere teaser of pronatalist
policy. The pillars of Hungarian-style
family policy, which Vance repeatedly praised, are nowhere near codification in
America. Vance once entertained grand ideas of putting workers on corporate
boards, as in Germany, and letting unions negotiate across an entire industry
at once, as in Scandinavia, rather than company by company. But far from taking
up such proposals, the Trump administration is instead priming the National
Labor Relations Board for rollbacks of prior decisions.
In the Senate, Vance worked with Democrats on legislation
to claw back compensation from bank executives and remove tax breaks for
corporate mergers. But his past antagonism toward corporations is not apparent
in Trump’s policies. Vance’s former policy adviser Gail Slater recently lost
her job as the Justice Department’s head of antitrust enforcement, in an
apparent power struggle with Attorney General Pam Bondi. Roger Alford, a Slater
deputy who was ousted before her, alleged in a speech
last year that “MAGA-in-Name-Only lobbyists and DOJ officials enabling them are
pursuing a different agenda” and are seeking to “enrich themselves as long as
their friends and supplicants are in power.” You seldom hear the slogan “Drain
the swamp” from this administration anymore.
The Trump administration’s embrace of an all-out culture
war, particularly in its aggressive campaign against Ivy League institutions,
does echo some of Vance’s favorite themes. So does its castigation of Europe as
being so enthralled by multiculturalism that it faces, as the 2025 National
Security Strategy put it, “civilizational
erasure.” But these moves are also in line with the views of Stephen
Miller, the president’s deputy chief of staff for policy, who appears to
exercise far more power in the White House.
Vance seemed poised to be a serious policy maker on
artificial intelligence after he delivered a major speech in Paris last year,
in which he argued against “excessive regulation of the AI sector” and pledged
to “safeguard American AI and chip technologies from theft and misuse.” Yet the
Trump administration has gone the other direction by, in December, granting
export licenses of advanced chips to China in exchange for a 25 percent cut of
the proceeds, and last month by trying to hamstring Anthropic, the frontier AI
company, over failed negotiations with the Pentagon. He remains the White
House’s best television surrogate, and is valued for his loyalty. But when
policy views clash in the White House, it is hard to see where Vance is
triumphing.
In some sense, Vance is suffering the typical fate of the
vice president, who is forever on display but seldom listened to. This is a
major comedown from the role he once seemed likely to fill. Vance’s nomination
as vice president was not a concession to the Republican Party of old, but a
promise of the Republican Party to come, of Trumpism after Trump. Instead, he
has receded in importance in the past year, less essential to economic policy
than Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, less influential on immigration than
Miller, less persuasive on foreign affairs than Rubio and the special envoy
Steve Witkoff. That may help explain why, after the Iran strike, Vance ended up
alongside not Trump but Gabbard, who like the vice president seems out of sync
with the administration’s policies. (During her 2020 presidential campaign,
Gabbard sold T-shirts emblazoned with the logo No War With Iran.)
Vance came to public attention as a resounding critic of
Trump who could nonetheless explain his appeal among heartland Americans to
coastal elites. Before his Senate campaign in Ohio in 2022, he emerged as the
personification of national conservatism—the new populism-inflected strain of
thought that was becoming dominant in America and Europe. He angrily rejected
the so-called forever wars of the George W. Bush administration—disillusioned
from his experience as a young soldier deployed to fight them. Reinvention is
obviously possible for a man who has reinvented himself before. But if he seeks
the Republican nomination for president in 2028, he may find himself bound to
an unpopular series of policies that the 2024 version of Vance would oppose.
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