Vice President JD Vance has a terrific explanation as to how, this time, the United States will totally not get sucked into an endless conflict in the Middle East even though President Donald Trump just bombed Iran because Fox News told him to.
“I simply empathize with Americans who are exhausted after 25 years of foreign entanglements in the Middle East. I understand the concern, but the difference is that back then we had dumb presidents,” Vance told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday.
But not anymore! Now we have the incredibly savvy Trump at the wheel, and his display of peace through strength will surely bring Iran swiftly to its knees.
But, uh-oh! Vance seems to have forgotten that Trump was one of those dumb presidents, with a first term chock-full of missteps and failures in the Middle East. But since Vance was busy being an isolationist back when he was in the Senate, maybe he didn’t notice when Trump withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2018, trashing years of multilateral negotiations that resulted in Iran shipping out 98% of its uranium, eliminating two-thirds of its centrifuges, destroying its plutonium reactor, and agreeing to ongoing inspections.
Trump tore all of that up, saying at the time, "It is clear to me that we cannot prevent an Iranian nuclear bomb under the decaying and rotten structure of the current agreement. The Iran deal is defective at its core. If we do nothing, we know exactly what will happen."
Good thing we got rid of that!
A satellite image of Iran's underground nuclear enrichment site at Fordo following U.S. airstrikes.
Trump’s pulling out of the JCPOA resulted in Iran restarting its nuclear operations, including enriching uranium past the medical grade that was permitted. And after Trump killed Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani in a drone strike in 2020, Iran declared that it would no longer observe any limits on its uranium, meaning that it might be building nuclear bombs.
Vance seems to have forgotten that the strike on Soleimani did not exactly lead to stability or prevent U.S. involvement. We ended up deploying 3,500 troops right after that strike, as tensions increased across the region. Iran also conducted missile strikes on two Iraqi military bases hosting U.S. forces, resulting in more than 100 traumatic brain injuries.
And Vance must have been elsewhere when Trump dropped missiles on Syria only three months into his first term. But you’d think he would have noticed that Trump failed to end the war in Afghanistan. To be fair, Afghanistan is in Central Asia, but Trump's bumbling efforts made it more difficult for President Joe Biden to end the war during his term.
Meanwhile, Vance is doing media hits about how great things are going even though the Trump administration doesn’t seem to know where Iran’s uranium is now.
All of this sure seems dumb, and it sure looks like Trump’s need to look tough is going to drag us into an endless quagmire in the Middle East. Donald the Dove, indeed.
Campaign Action
