{"id":186704,"date":"2026-07-01T21:51:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-01T21:51:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/186704\/"},"modified":"2026-07-01T21:51:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-01T21:51:10","slug":"jd-vance-defends-iran-war-in-speech-to-military-members","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/186704\/","title":{"rendered":"JD Vance Defends Iran War in Speech to Military Members"},"content":{"rendered":"

Vice President JD Vance, who has been criticized for championing the U.S. war against Iran despite his history<\/a> of staunchly opposing foreign interventionism, on Wednesday defended President Trump\u2019s effort to unwind the war through negotiation.<\/p>\n

\u201cToday, as I sit here, there are people in this country who want you to just keep going and keep going,\u201d Mr. Vance told a gathering of active-duty military members at Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach, excoriating those who had tried to \u201cattack the president of the United States for using the leverage that you gave him to engage in negotiation.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd why do we engage in negotiation?\u201d he added. \u201cBecause of you. It\u2019s not out of weakness, but it\u2019s out of strength.\u201d<\/p>\n

Before becoming vice president, Mr. Vance, a former Marine who deployed to Iraq as a military journalist, was a fierce opponent of the United States\u2019 \u201cforever wars\u201d who criticized the country\u2019s leaders for embroiling the military in long overseas conflicts with shifting objectives. As vice president, he has struggled to reconcile that stance with Mr. Trump\u2019s increasingly interventionist tendencies, particularly as he has been asked to defend the president\u2019s decision to attack Iran to the public and at the negotiating table, where talks have failed to yield a final peace deal thus far.<\/p>\n

The Trump administration has been roundly criticized by Democrats for launching strikes against Iran that quickly escalated into a war. The president\u2019s approach has also been scorned by hawkish Republicans, who have complained that the emerging terms of the peace deal have been too lenient on Iran, and that they do not do enough to preclude Iran from developing nuclear weapons.<\/p>\n

Mr. Vance has offered various rationales to explain his defense of the Iran war, which he argues is not an ideological shift. He has said that he always believed Iran should not have a nuclear weapon. He has argued that the Trump administration pursued and achieved \u201cclear objectives\u201d in Iran, a talking point he repeated on Wednesday. Those objectives include dismantling Iran\u2019s nuclear program, crippling the military and destroying the defense industrial base \u2014 though U.S. intelligence suggests<\/a> that Iran\u2019s military was not nearly as affected as the administration has portrayed.<\/p>\n

On Wednesday, Mr. Vance drew on his experience in Iraq to support his contention that Mr. Trump was using the military to help him negotiate a durable peace in Iran.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere were people who learned the lesson that we could never use the military again, but that\u2019s not the right lesson,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere were also people who learned a different lesson, an equally wrong lesson, that the solution to the problems that we had in the early 2000s was to ask you to do more and more and more and more without giving you a clearly defined objective,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

But while Mr. Vance cheered the military for carrying out Mr. Trump\u2019s orders to attack military and nuclear interests in Iran, he did not offer any timeline for a final cessation of hostilities \u2014 and with it, the end of deployments.<\/p>\n

Instead, the vice president appeared to acknowledge that Mr. Trump had asked more of the military than his predecessors, whom Mr. Vance built his political career on criticizing.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou guys have done more in the last 18 months. The president of the United States has asked you to do more than I think any group of service members has ever been asked to do,\u201d Mr. Vance said. \u201cAnd yet you\u2019ve done it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Vice President JD Vance, who has been criticized for championing the U.S. war against Iran despite his history…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":186705,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3],"tags":[5483,34,28198,7582,4062,25779,1257],"class_list":["post-186704","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-iran","tag-defense-and-military-forces","tag-iran","tag-j-d","tag-united-states-defense-and-military-forces","tag-united-states-international-relations","tag-united-states-politics-and-government","tag-vance"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116846938230033853","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186704","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186704"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186704\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/186705"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186704"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186704"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186704"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}