As Donald Trump’s supporters rushed to praise the US president for his decision to strike Iran over the weekend, one close ally in Washington was notably quiet.
Vice-president JD Vance made no public comment on the military campaign for nearly 72 hours while Republican lawmakers appeared on television and cabinet members took to social media to praise the president’s actions.
It was a conspicuous silence for Vance, a prolific social media user who is one of the president’s staunchest defenders. His relative quiet, apart from a series of reposts from official administration X accounts, attracted attention across Washington, raising questions over whether there was a schism between the president and his second-in-command.
“Where the hell is JD Vance? Where is he?” asked Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former Georgia lawmaker and staunch isolationist who left Congress earlier this year after a falling out with Trump, in an appearance on Megyn Kelly’s talk radio show on Monday morning.
Hours later, Vance broke his silence with a six-minute Fox News interview, defending Trump’s decision-making and insisting the president was not about to lead the US into another prolonged military entanglement in the Middle East.
“The president has clearly defined what he wants to accomplish,” Vance told Fox on Monday night. “There’s just no way Donald Trump is going to allow this country to get into a multiyear conflict with no clear end in sight and no clear objective.”
He later posted a clip from the interview to X with the caption: “Iran can never be allowed to obtain a nuclear weapon. That is the goal of this operation and President Trump will see it through to completion.”
It was a characteristically loyal statement from the vice-president, who has for several years been one of Trump’s most effective surrogates.
But it also underscored an abrupt change of tone for Vance, a US Marine Corps veteran who has built his political brand on opposing military intervention across the world from Ukraine to the Middle East.
Vance announced his endorsement for Trump’s third White House bid in a January 2023 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal under the headline: “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars.”
The following year in a speech on the Senate floor, Vance invoked his experience serving in Iraq to slam his colleagues who supported more military intervention overseas.
“I saw when I went to Iraq that I had been lied to, that the promises of the foreign policy establishment of this country were a complete joke,” Vance said in April 2024, four months before he was selected as Trump’s running mate.
“Too many in this chamber have decided that we should police the entire world,” Vance added. “The American taxpayer be damned.”
Vance, 41, is widely seen as the frontrunner to succeed his boss as the Republican Party’s nominee for president in 2028. If the vice-president makes his own push for the White House, he will have to defend the Trump administration’s record to voters — including its decision to wage war in the Middle East.
That could be a tough sell if the public fails to rally behind the White House. A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted at the weekend found just one in four Americans approved of the initial strikes, while about half — including one in four Republicans — thought Trump was too willing to use military force.
As a vice-presidential candidate, Vance explicitly made the case against US military action in Iran, saying on a November 2024 podcast: “Our interest, I think, very much is in not going to war with Iran, right? It would be a huge distraction of resources. It would be massively expensive to our country.”
Vance’s previous statements, coupled with his striking silence over the weekend, stoked speculation over whether he supported the latest military offensive.
The New York Times on Monday reported Vance had argued in a White House Situation Room meeting that if the US was going to hit Iran, it should “go big and go fast”. A spokesperson for the vice-president declined to comment on the report.
Pictures released by the White House at the weekend showed Trump monitoring the initial strikes in Operation Epic Fury from his Mar-a-Lago resort on Saturday, flanked by secretary of state Marco Rubio, CIA director John Ratcliffe and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles.
Vance, meanwhile, was pictured in the Situation Room in Washington alongside Treasury secretary Scott Bessent, energy secretary Chris Wright and Tulsi Gabbard, director of national intelligence, another longtime sceptic of military intervention who, as a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, sold T-shirts with the slogan: “No War With Iran”.
A spokesperson for the vice-president said Vance was “fully integrated in the planning process and monitored the execution of the operation from the Situation Room”.
“The vice-president remained in Washington to maintain operational secrecy, and in keeping with the administration’s security protocols to limit the president and vice president co-locating away from the White House,” the person added.
The White House has rejected any suggestion that Vance, who met the foreign minister of Oman, which had been mediating US-Iran talks, on Friday in Washington, was sidelined in the decision-making.
Trump on Monday told Real Clear Politics that Vance “did not take persuading”.
A senior White House official said on Tuesday that the president’s national security team had been “huddled all day, every day focused on executing the operation and being tightly co-ordinated on ensuring uniformity of message”.
“Especially in a very fluid situation, the national security team was deliberate on letting the president’s statements and addresses to the nation stand as the operation unfolded,” the official added. “The vice-president and other administration officials conducted multiple media interviews, and will continue to do so.”
Vance defended his boss on Monday night and insisted that unlike his predecessors, Trump had the smarts to avoid a drawn-out conflict.
“What is different about President Trump . . . it’s frankly different about both Republicans and Democrats of the past, is that he’s not going to let his country go to war unless there’s a clearly defined objective,” he said.
“He’s defined that objective as Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon and has to commit long term to never trying to rebuild their nuclear capability. It’s pretty clear. It’s pretty simple.
“And I think that means that we’re not going to get into the problems that we’ve had with Iraq and Afghanistan.”