JD Vance drew anger this week after a CBS News town hall in which he appeared to brush off the Iran War’s operational failures in front of the grieving husband of a soldier killed in March. “Though the Iranian drone was the weapon that killed my wife, there were a lot of mistakes and a lot of fundamental failures that led up to that,” Joey Amor, whose wife, Sgt. First Class Nicole Amor, was killed in the strike, told Vance. Amor was referring to a CBS News report that military leadership rejected plans to move troops to safer positions despite intelligence warnings of an attack. “When you talk about failures that were, that we were implicated in… this literally [is] the first time I’ve heard of this,” Vance replied, promising to look into the report. “This is not something I’m going to forget.”
The exchange sparked outrage on X, but Vance’s professed ignorance should surprise no one who has followed the former Ohio senator’s rise, defined by a willingness to say – or leave out – anything in his pursuit of power.
Vance is often cast as a principled restrainer, privately skeptical of the Iran War. In fact, he has spent the past two years building the case for the war he will soon hope to distance himself from. With the 2028 circus set to begin, as it always does, once next month’s midterms are over, it is worth reviewing Vance’s hawkish record and dispelling the notion that he is the sensible peacemaker he and his surrogates will present him as.
In May, 2024, Vance used an address at an event co-hosted by the Quincy Institute and The American Conservative to defend U.S. support for Israel while that foreign government was perpetrating a genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza. “I’m supportive of Israel and their war against Hamas,” Vance told the room, adding that “Israel is one of the most dynamic, certainly on a per capita basis, one of the most dynamic and technologically advanced countries in the world,” citing work done by Israel to “actually give us missile-defense parity” which he said was “a very important national security objective of the United States.” Supporting Israel, Vance said, would serve as a “regional counterweight to Iran,” adding that “the way that we get there in Israel is by combining the Abraham Accords approach with the defeat of Hamas.”
At the RNC convention in July, 2024, Vance helped build the case for War with Iran, telling Fox News that “A lot of people recognize that we need to do something with Iran – but not these weak little bombing runs. If you’re going to punch the Iranians, you punch them hard and that’s what [Trump] did when he took out Soleimani,” praising an aggressive and provocative airstrike which in many ways kicked off a cycle of escalation with Iran. Indeed Trump reportedly feared that his assassination of Soleimani – advocated by Pompeo and Netanyahu – would cause Iran to retaliate against him, causing paranoia and distress which Israel and its lobby would later exploit to convince Trump that Iran had a hand in assassination attempts against the President.
At the October 1, 2024 debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz, Vance told Margaret Brennan that he would support a preemptive strike against Iran because “it is up to Israel” and “we should support our allies wherever they are when they are fighting” what he called “the bad guys.”
When Trump first bombed Iran in June, 2025, JD Vance was deployed to celebrate the U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign, telling Fox News that “Iran is now unable to produce nuclear weapons with the equipment it has because it was destroyed,” adding that “The President pressed the reset button and said: ‘Let’s create long-term peace in the region.’ I think when we look back, we’ll say the 12-day war was an important reset for the entire region.”
And shortly after Trump bombed Iran once again on February 28, 2026, in what would kick off the almost 8 month-long Iran War, JD Vance justified the strikes by suggesting that Iran could deploy nuclear suicide vest attacks in the U.S.
“You talk about people who walk into a crowded supermarket and have a vest on, and they blow up the vest, and a couple of people get killed, and that’s a terrible tragedy,” the Vice President said, adding “What happens when what’s on the vest is not something that can kill a couple of people, but can kill many, many tens of thousands of people? That is the most important American national security objective…you don’t want the worst people in the world to have a nuclear weapon. That’s why the President is doing this.”
Despite his support for the Iran War and Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Vance has been the subject of various attacks from the Israel lobby, who have at times regarded him as insufficiently loyal to their cause. To reassure them, The New York Times reported in April, “behind the scenes, Mr. Vance has worked to win over some of those skeptical” Israel First donors, participating in a fundraising dinner in Austin, Texas at the home of Palantir co-founder and Pro-Israel billionaire Joe Lonsdale, “talk[ing] regularly by phone and text” with Pro-Israel donor Paul Singer, and “develop[ing] a relationship with Miriam Adelson, the widow of the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson who strongly supports Israel and who spent over $100 million to boost Trump’s most recent campaign.”
Further ingratiating himself with the Israel lobby, Vance in March, 2026 claimed that Ilhan Omar – a longstanding enemy of the lobby – committed immigration fraud and promised to “go after her” over it. “We’re trying to figure out,” Vance told podcaster Benny Johnson, “what are the legal remedies now that we know that she’s committed immigration fraud, how do you go after her, how do you investigate her, how do you actually do the thing – how do you build a case necessary to get some justice for the American people?” Last week, the DOJ conducted a pre-dawn raid against Rep. Omar based on those allegations which, as journalist and Constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald points out, “have never had any basis in fact or evidence. Omar has lived in the US for more than 30 years: longer than Melania Trump, or Sebastian Gorka, or Steve Hilton, or countless GOP luminaries. She’s lived in the US since she was 13. She’s been a US citizen for more than 25 years.”
With his Pro-Israel stances and an anti-war record one could only find by using a magnifying glass, it is hard to understand why any of us on the anti-war left and right would ever rally behind JD Vance and difficult to see anyone who does as nothing other than cheap dates.
