CNN
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When President Donald Trump ordered a military strike in January 2020 that killed Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, JD Vance was on the sidelines — and skeptical.
“Just as the past two American presidencies have been bogged down in the Middle East in various ways, this conflict risks escalating in a way that makes America focus on the Middle East for yet another few years — maybe another 10 years — even as the Chinese grow in military might and economic power,” Vance, then a venture capitalist and author, said on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, which had opened with a banner warning “America is lurching toward a war with Iran.”
Fast forward five years, and now-Vice President Vance has become one of the most vocal backers of Trump’s decision to bomb three nuclear facilities, seeking to destroy Tehran’s nuclear program — and he was in the room where the decision was made.
“We’re not at war with Iran. We’re at war with Iran’s nuclear program,” Vance said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” the day after the Iran strike. “This is not going to be some long, drawn-out thing.”
Vance’s evolution on US military intervention in Iran is reflective of both the administration’s rationale behind last month’s strikes — that military action was needed to act to stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and that a limited bombing campaign would not snowball into boots on the ground — as well as Vance’s position inside the second Trump administration as someone who can appeal to both the realist and hawkish wings of the GOP.
Among White House officials and sources close to the administration, Vance has a pivotal seat at the table. While Trump will make the ultimate decision on any administration policy, the sources said, he often seeks a wide range of viewpoints. Vance is seen as someone who will always give his honest assessment to Trump, when asked, on any issue.
“Sometimes when you see weird relationships between the president and the vice president, it’s because their agendas or worldview isn’t really aligned,” said Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt, who served alongside Vance and is close to the administration. “There’s just no daylight between what President Trump wants to do and how JD Vance views the world, too.”
Vance’s performance as a key diplomat and top surrogate selling Trump’s foreign policy is one of multiple signs the 40-year-old onetime Marine and senator has carved out a sizable role in the second Trump administration. Last week, Vance was on Capitol Hill lobbying for Trump’s giant tax and spending cuts package, casting the tie-breaking vote for the measure in the Senate and holding the last meeting with GOP holdout Sen. Lisa Murkowski before she backed the bill.
A source familiar with Vance’s thinking said the vice president has always viewed his job — particularly as it relates to foreign policy — as assisting the president with honest advice, noting that Vance has a very clear understanding that there is only one principal.
“He is somebody who views it as part of his job to go out and sell whatever it is the administration is pushing at a given time, including with foreign policy,” the source said.
People close to Vance told CNN that while the vice president remains a foreign policy realist and skeptic of US military involvement overseas, shaped in part by his service in the Iraq War, Vance has long warned that the US must take military action if needed to prevent Iran from obtain a nuclear weapon. His support of Trump’s military strikes is reflective of the threat, they argued — not any change in ideology or worldview.
“He has always come from a realist foreign policy perspective,” a source close to Vance said. “Despite what people have said, he is not an isolationist, and he has always been the most hawkish on Iran.”
So far, Trump’s bet on quickly getting in and out of Iran has paid off. While the full extent of the destruction of Iran’s nuclear program is still being determined, Tehran responded to the US attack with a symbolic retaliation firing missiles at a US airbase in Qatar. Trump subsequently pushed Israel and Iran to agree to a ceasefire, and now he’s hoping to parlay that progress with Iran into a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
But the concern that could soon confront both Trump and Vance, national security experts say, is the US will face another decision on military action against Iran’s nuclear program in the not-too-distant future. Last week, Iran suspended cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN’s nuclear watchdog, and the IAEA’s director said that Tehran could restart enriching uranium “in a matter of months.”
In addition, Netanyahu has signaled that Israel could pursue further military action or even regime change in Iran, said Justin Logan, director of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute.
“Their public messaging is we’ve put this problem to bed for a while. And I don’t think it’s asleep,” Logan said of the Trump administration and Iran. “Everything we know about Benjamin Netanyahu should lead us to conclude he’s not going to let this go.”
For veteran Republican foreign policy hawks like Sen. Mitch McConnell, the former GOP Senate leader, Trump’s decision to strike Iran represented a move away from Vance’s isolationist-leaning wing of the party. McConnell took a dig at Vance in an interview with Politico while he praised Trump for taking action against Iran.
“He’s got some pretty rabid isolationists over at DoD — you could argue the vice president is in that group,” McConnell said. “None of those people who’ve read history.”
But to Vance, the administration’s military action amounted to what he’s termed “the Trump doctrine.”
“No. 1, you articulate a clear American interest, and that’s in this case, that Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon,” Vance said at an Ohio GOP political fundraiser last month. “No. 2, you try to aggressively, diplomatically solve that problem. And No. 3, when you can’t solve it diplomatically, you use overwhelming military power to solve it, and then you get the hell out of there before it ever becomes a protracted conflict.”
Vance was elected to the Senate in 2022 on a platform that included opposition to additional US aid to Ukraine, at a time when most of the GOP backed giving Kyiv more funding. Vance argued — then and now — that US foreign policy should refocus attention away from Europe and the Middle East and toward the threat posed by China in Asia.
Vance quickly became a thorn in the side of McConnell, then the GOP Senate leader, such as when Congress struggled to approve additional Ukraine aid.
Vance endorsed Trump in 2023 with an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal lauding Trump because he “started no wars” while in office. Vance has typically been allied with the more isolationist wing of the party, including Trump allies like Steve Bannon and Carlson (though Carlson’s aversion to US military action in Iran before the US strikes prompted Trump to lash out on social media).
When Trump picked Vance as his running mate, it marked a continued shift of the Republican Party’s skepticism toward continued funding for Ukraine’s war against Russia. It was a triumph for the Trump-focused faction of the party aligned with conservative think tanks like the Claremont Institute.
Across several wide-ranging interviews last year, Vance laid out his thinking about a potential conflict with Iran, arguing both that the US must take steps to stop Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon but also that American and Israeli interests might not be aligned on conflict with Iran.
He also had come around on Trump’s 2020 military action against Soleimani.
“If you’re going to punch the Iranians, you punch it hard. And that’s what he did when he took out Soleimani,” Vance told Fox News’ Sean Hannity at the GOP convention. “By the way that action, people said that it would lead to broader war — it actually brought peace. It actually checked the Iranians.”
In an interview last summer with Morgan Ortagus, now an adviser to special envoy Steve Witkoff, Vance said of stopping Iran’s nuclear ambitions: “I think we have to be really willing to go very far to prevent the Iranians from taking that final step, and if, God forbid, they get there then I think you have to be willing to take some extreme steps.”
Appearing in October on a podcast with Tim Dillon, a comedian who helped Trump reach young men in the election, Vance was asked about how the US would handle a war between Israel and Iran.
“Israel has the right to defend itself,” Vance responded. “But America’s interest is sometimes going to be distinct. Sometimes we’re going to have overlapping interests, and sometimes we’re going to have distinct interests. And 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.”
It didn’t take Vance long after being sworn in as vice president to make his presence heard on the world stage.
At the Munich Security Conference in February, Vance went after European allies in a blistering speech, telling them that the biggest threat to their security was “from within,” not China and Russia.
Later that month, Vance stoked Trump’s anger toward Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during a tense Oval Office meeting, when the vice president criticized the Ukrainian leader for not being sufficiently thankful to Trump.
Vance was also involved in foreign policy decisions behind the scenes. In the now-infamous Signal text chain among top Trump officials, Vance argued against taking military action against the Houthis, who were targeting shipping lanes in the Red Sea.
“I think we are making a mistake,” Vance wrote. “The strongest reason to do this is, as POTUS said, to send a message. But I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now.”
“I just hate bailing out Europe again,” Vance later added.
A European diplomat told CNN that Vance’s Munich speech was viewed in diplomatic circles as mostly performative. But his comments in the Signal chain served as a wakeup call to US allies — that Vance’s rhetoric wasn’t just political messaging but how he truly viewed the world.
“Vance really does seem to be trying to build a new Republican foreign policy orientation and identity that marries together a lot of what Trump is doing, but also with these more slightly restrained characteristics,” said Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center.
Ashford said part of Vance’s influence lies with being able to focus Trump on certain issues, like pushing NATO countries to spend more on defense. “Last time, (Trump) kind of wanted to do it. It wasn’t a priority,” she said. “It is a priority with Vance and that’s seemed to play its way out.”
In the lead-up to the US military strikes in Iran last month, Israel’s own military attacks on Iran sparked a divide among pro-Trump factions of the GOP.
As Trump weighed whether to launch strikes against Iran, Vance wrote a lengthy post on X — a platform he uses frequently as vice president — urging skeptics to give Trump the benefit of the doubt, arguing he’s “earned some trust on this issue.”
Behind the scenes, Vance also worked to quell allies concerned about the potential of a deeper conflict in the Middle East, assuring them that if the United States went through with the strikes, it would only be to destroy the nuclear facilities — not an attempt to try to use American force to topple the regime.
After the US hit the three nuclear facilities, Vance repeated a similar sentiment on “Meet the Press,” saying that he could relate to those wary of military action in the Middle East — but asserting that Trump would not make the same mistakes as prior presidents.
“I certainly empathize with Americans who are exhausted after 25 years of foreign entanglements in the Middle East,” Vance said. “I understand the concern, but the difference is that back then, we had dumb presidents, and now we have a president who actually knows how to accomplish America’s national security objectives.”
Schmitt argued Vance and Trump were getting the balance right under tough circumstances.
“There were a lot of calls in Washington to draw us further into (a Middle East conflict), and President Trump and Vice President Vance were very smart and showed a lot of restraint in doing what needed to be done to obliterate the nuclear program but not get entangled in foreign war,” Schmitt said. “And I’m not sure you’ve seen that from either party in years past.”
CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski and Phil Mattingly contributed to this report.
