Vice President J.D. Vance tried to thread the needle.
“Sometimes we’re going to have overlapping interests,” Ohio’s junior Republican senator said of the United States and Israel, “and sometimes we are going to have distinct interests.” But in that interview on The Tim Dillon Show during the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump’s running mate stressed, “our interest very much is in not going to war with Iran.” Such a conflict, Vance concluded, would be “massively expensive” and “a huge distraction.”
Six months into the second Trump presidency, and the lines between an ally’s war and an American conflict have blurred. The United States seems poised to take military action against Iran, a move that could test the political coalition that made Trump president.
President Trump blurred those lines in a series of social media posts Tuesday. “We know exactly where” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is hiding, he wrote, before clarifying that the U.S. had no plans to kill the supreme leader of Iran, “at least for now.” Trump also boasted that “we now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran,” seeming to take some ownership of the Israeli strikes that have leveled Tehran. He called for the “unconditional surrender” of the nation that the U.S. is not yet at war with.
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