Vance Isn't Hiding His Hawkishness on Iran

If we didn’t know who was speaking, we could be forgiven for thinking that we were listening to Tom Cotton or Lindsey Graham.

The new Republican VP nominee J.D. Vance was quick to rattle the saber against Iran this week:

“The most important part of the Trump doctrine of foreign policy is you don’t commit America’s troops unless you really have to, but when you do, you punch and you punch hard,” said Vance, a former US Marine.

“If you’re going to punch the Iranians, you punch them hard,” he said, asserting that Trump had done just that when he ordered the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s elite Quds Force, in early 2020.

It isn’t news that Vance is an Iran hawk, but it is notable that this bit of hardline posturing about Iran is one the first things he did after becoming the vice presidential nominee. Like Trump, Vance has some quite hawkish views, as I detail in my latest column, and he isn’t hiding them. He also said, “A lot of people recognize that we need to do something with Iran, but not these weak little bombing runs.” If we didn’t know who was speaking, we could be forgiven for thinking that we were listening to Tom Cotton or Lindsey Graham.

Vance’s remarks raise a few questions: why do “we need to do something with Iran,” and how could it possibly be in the American interest to do more than “weak little bombing runs” against them? If the little bombing runs are unacceptably weak, how big of a bombing campaign would Vance like to see? How many American and Iranian lives should be put at risk in the name of “doing something” with Iran? Why should the U.S. be “punching” Iran in the first place? What does any of this have to do with the security of the United States? I doubt Vance has good answers for any of these questions.

There are many serious flaws with Biden’s policies in the Middle East that should be criticized and opposed, but all that Vance can come up with is to accuse him absurdly of weakness and surrender. He faults Biden for prolonging the war in Gaza not because the U.S. has been supplying weapons to keep it going but because Biden has supposedly not been supporting Israel enough. Once again, the hawkish reflex to hit a Democratic president for insufficient militarism wins out even when that president has been stubbornly enabling war crimes and genocide.

Even when he talks about bringing the war in Gaza to an end, he says that it needs to end so that Israel and Washington’s Arab clients can get back to the business of opposing Iran. He doesn’t attack Biden for the insane pursuit of a Saudi security pact or for getting the U.S. into a pointless war in Yemen. Instead, he bashes Biden for failing to do more to “weaken Iran.”

The Soleimani assassination is a good test of someone’s foreign policy judgment. Politicians that think that the assassination was a good idea and necessary confirm that they have terrible judgment and shouldn’t be trusted to make good policy decisions. Those that recognize that it was a pointless and reckless escalation even if it didn’t lead to a major war are much more likely to be prudent and wise in other situations as well. Vance has shown us which camp he is in.

The senator claims that the assassination “actually brought peace,” which would come as news to the dozens of U.S. troops injured in the retaliatory strike that followed and to all the troops that have come under attack in Iraq and Syria in the years since then. If the assassination “brought peace,” why have the U.S. and local militias been engaged in tit-for-tat strikes for the last four and a half years? Trump’s decision to order the assassination was extremely dangerous, and we don’t appreciate the extent to which sheer luck prevented that crisis from turning into a larger conflict. Anyone that looks at that near-miss and praises the decision to strike shouldn’t be anywhere near the White House.

Trump’s record in the Middle East was awful, and Vance is trying to spin it into something that the U.S. should repeat. The Iran obsession in Trump’s first term nearly got the U.S. into another unnecessary Middle Eastern war. If Trump and Vance win, the U.S. and Iran will very likely be on a collision course again.