Talking in October 2024 weeks before election day, Vice President JD Vance cited an America First pillar in stating that the “United States doesn’t constantly have to police every region of the world.”
It was the kind of statement, like Trump’s campaign-era pledge to release the Epstein files, that rallied MAGA and won praise and loyalty from lawmakers like conservative former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), one of Trump’s most bellicose supporters turned MAGA apostate, since betrayed by the Trump administration’s economic priorities and its regime-change excursions around the globe.
Now three weeks into the U.S. attacks on Iran, the Vance video is being recirculated, with its logic overtly running counter to what Trump is doing and Vance’s resounding opinion that attacking Iran would be “the dumbest of all possible things.” (Note: Vance’s statements preceded Trump’s recent — and much questioned — assertion that Iran posed an imminent threat to the U.S., which, if true, would presumably change the Vice President’s calculus.)
JD Vance: Going to war with Iran would be a huge destruction of US resources.
Let the Israelis and the Gulf states counterbalance Iran.
Kamala Harris loves war and they’re sleepwalking into war with Iran. pic.twitter.com/fZ9c1NUrWH
— Sizwe SikaMusi (@SizweLo) March 17, 2026
Back in 2024, seeking to emphasize what he cast as a big difference between the Trump-Vance ticket’s ostensibly non-interventionist stance and what Vance characterized as the more jingoistic approach of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris (“I actually think she kind of likes war”), he said: “Let the Israelis and the Gulf Arab states provide the counterbalance to Iran. We should empower people to police their own regions of the world.” (This, notably, is the “police their own regions” approach the Biden administration took in supporting Ukraine as it defended itself against Russia after Putin’s 2022 invasion.)
Vance continued, in language that has a new charge in the present moment: “Our interest is very much in not going to war with Iran. It would be a huge distraction of resources, it would be massively expensive to our country.”
Vance then said, speaking of Harris, not Trump, despite how it may sound to today’s listeners: “Maybe she feels like a tough guy about it. I don’t know why it is. And they seem to be sort of sleepwalking us into war with Iran.”
Vance has since reconsidered what the “stupidest thing in the world” would be. After the U.S. launched a series of bombing attacks in June meant to hinder Iran’s nuclear capabilities, the Vice President said that Iran retaliation would be the “stupidest thing in the world.” After the June attacks President Trump said that the Iranian nuclear program had been “obliterated.” In explaining his reasons for attacking again in February, Trump cited a desire to destroy Iran’s nuclear program.
Questioned about his reversal on the wisdom of the U.S. attacking Iran, Vance accounted for his change of mind by saying “we have a smart president, whereas in the past we’ve had dumb presidents, and I trust President Trump to get the job done.”