By David A. Graham
Thursday, April 30, 2026
Staying in Donald Trump’s good graces while also
protecting your own political future requires supreme political agility, and
most people who try end up failing at both. Just ask Mike
Pence, Mike Pompeo, Paul Ryan, and any number of other faded GOP stars—if
you can find them. Vice President Vance hasn’t mastered this balance either.
Earlier this week, The
Atlantic reported that during private meetings, Vance “has repeatedly
questioned the Defense Department’s depiction of the war in Iran and whether
the Pentagon has understated what appears to be the drastic depletion of U.S.
missile stockpiles.” Vance’s inquiries echo concerns from some others inside
the administration, as well as voices in Congress and elsewhere, who warn about
American military readiness.
Public figures occasionally deliver what’s known as a
“non-denial denial,” in which they try to throw cold water on a claim without
actually saying it’s false, but yesterday on Will Cain’s Fox News show, the
vice president delivered something that might be entirely new: a
confirmation-denial. Vance called The Atlantic’s reporting false and
then pivoted instantly to verifying that it was true.
“Most of these reports I ignore. This one I actually read
because it ascribed views to me and things that I had allegedly said that I am
just 100 percent certain that I have never said,” Vance stated. “Now to
answer your question, Will, of course I am concerned about our readiness,
because that is my job to be concerned.” He added: “It’s of course my job to
ask these questions.”
(Vance has a hot-and-cold relationship with The
Atlantic. On Fox News he said, “Don’t believe everything you read,
especially in papers like The Atlantic.” But he knows full well that
this is a magazine, not a newspaper. After all, he pitched an article
here in July 2016. In the essay, he portrayed himself as a thinker who could
stand up to Trump’s demagoguery—so perhaps he has a point about not believing everything
you read in The Atlantic.)
This is Vance’s latest attempt to stake out a sustainable
position on the war in Iran. He hasn’t succeeded yet. Although the vice
president has displayed a great deal of ideological flexibility during his
career, one of the few consistencies has been his opposition to foreign
military interventions. At the start of the campaign against Iran two months
ago, Vance made himself scarce, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio appeared
often with Trump. When the vice president eventually emerged, it was to give
tepid defenses of the war. Trump even acknowledged that Vance was “maybe less
enthusiastic” about it than other advisers. That’s one reason that Iran
specifically requested
Vance as an interlocutor for negotiations, in which Tehran has so far obtained
a cease-fire without relinquishing control of the Strait of Hormuz or giving up
its nuclear program.
In asking questions about munitions, Vance is trying to
quietly shape the war. (He’s right to say that a prudent vice president should
be raising issues such as the adequacy of missile stores.) And if he wants to
have a future in politics after Trump leaves office, he needs to maintain his
long-held political identity as an anti-war politician, and would be wise to
keep some distance from this deeply unpopular war, which threatens to torpedo
the global economy, leave Iran’s regime in a stronger strategic position, and
set back American interests in the region for years or decades. But Vance has
to do those things in a way that maintains his publicly sycophantic stance
toward Trump and echoes the president’s bombastic attacks on the press.
This would challenge even a skilled communicator, and
Vance—as he demonstrated once more yesterday—is not one of those.
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