Vance, skeptical of foreign wars, becomes the face of Trump's tentative deal to end war with Iran
WASHINGTON (AP) — JD Vance was supposed to be spending the week promoting his new book, the kind of event a potential presidential candidate like the vice president typically uses to speak to a wide audience about his life and values ahead of a campaign.
Instead, the rollout of Vance’s second book, “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,” has been largely crowded out by something else he’s put his name on: the tentative deal to end the Iran war.
The Republican vice president has embraced the role of chief defender of the agreement he and President Donald Trump signed with Tehran, giving a series of interviews touting the memorandum of understanding as a success and releasing a video championing it.
It’s a striking emergence for a politician who was known for his skepticism of foreign military interventions and who seemed reluctant to speak on the conflict when Trump launched it in late February.
The vice president is poised to yoke himself further to the conflict’s outcome on Friday, when he’s expected to travel to Switzerland to kick off a new phase of negotiations with Iran. He was originally expected to attend a formal signing ceremony for the deal, but Trump formally signed it on Wednesday instead.
Vance becoming a hype man for the agreement seems to be an all-in gamble that, should he decide to seek the White House in 2028, voters will reward him for being the face of ending an unpopular conflict.
It’s also setting Vance up as the presumptive fall-guy should the deal with Iran falter.
Trump joked about such a possibility on Wednesday.
“If it works out, I’m going to take the credit. If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming JD,” Trump said.
The White House in a statement called Vance the president's “right-hand man and an invaluable member of the President’s talented national security team.”
"That’s why the Vice President was trusted to lead these negotiations alongside Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner," White House spokeswoman Olivia Wales said. "What President Trump and his team achieved on the battlefield and at the negotiating table is nothing short of remarkable and will strengthen American security for years to come.”
But backlash, including from conservatives, began growing this week after the U.S. digitally signed the memorandum of understanding with Iran on Sunday.
Luke Schroeder, a spokesman for the vice president, said in a statement: “It’s unfortunate that some Republicans are attempting to undermine the President’s efforts to achieve peace in the Middle East and ensure Iran never has a nuclear weapon.”
Officials gave shifting answers about when they would release the text, but leaked copies of a draft were quickly met with anger and skepticism from Democratic and Republican U.S. lawmakers, as well as Israel and pro-Israel advocates. Their criticisms included concerns that the deal, meant to open a two-month negotiating period, seemed to offer Iran wins up front while guaranteeing little in return, and that Trump’s stated reason for launching the conflict, to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, remains unresolved.
Vance has reiterated that Iran must meet its obligations.
“If they don’t behave properly, they don’t get any of the benefits of this bargain,” he said Tuesday on Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends."
In response to the backlash and mounting questions, the U.S. on Wednesday provided the text of the agreement to journalists.
The agreement states that Iran's stockpile of highly enriched uranium, which is believed to be buried under rubble, must at minimum be diluted under international supervision. It also states that Iran shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons — a commitment it has made previously. But beyond stating that the U.S. and Iran will negotiate over Iran's nuclear program, other commitments still need to be worked out.
Criticism on the right persisted after the text was released.
Conservative radio host Erick Erickson, a hawk who has defended the war, said Wednesday: “This is an American surrender.”
Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, a potential 2028 presidential candidate, criticized the agreement and said to reporters, “I think the president, unfortunately, is receiving bad advice.”
The conflict, which has stretched into its fourth month, has cleaved Trump’s broad Make America Great Again coalition and angered both those who favored a harder line against Iran and those drawn to Trump’s “America First” foreign policy underscored by a message of “no new wars.”
Critics, including Republicans, have already started pointing fingers in Vance's direction, questioning whether the deal resembles the 2015 nuclear agreement struck by Democratic President Barack Obama and whether this new agreement achieves Trump’s stated objectives for launching the war.
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a Trump ally and Iran hawk, had been skeptical of the agreement and referred to Vance on social media as “the architect of the deal."
After the agreement was released, Graham issued a tepid statement of support, saying, “Whether or not the United States can reach an acceptable, verifiable deal with Iran regarding its nuclear program and other issues is yet to be determined, but I see little downside to trying.”
Ben Domenech, The Daily Wire’s opinion editor, said on Fox News that everything he was hearing about the deal “seems bad” and appeared to cast blame on Vance by alluding to his first book, “Hillbilly Elegy."
“Are we going to backslide into being some kind of ‘hillbilly Obama’ kind of GOP?” Domenech said.
The Trump administration has not offered formal briefings to Congress on the details of the memorandum, but Vance has quietly started doing outreach to some Republican senators on Capitol Hill.
Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, a close ally of Vance's, said the vice president would be able to assuage even critics within his own party who are skeptical of the deal because “JD is just the president’s messenger, and the president’s going to prove them all wrong.”
Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., said the deal “certainly adds to the national security and geopolitical chops” of Vance, who spent two years as a U.S. senator for Ohio before ascending to the vice presidency.
But Cramer acknowledged the risks if the agreement goes awry.
“I guess the nice thing is, if you’re not the No. 1 person, you can take credit and avoid risk, avoid the criticism, but probably not so easily,” Cramer said.
In interviews this week, Vance has sought to speak directly to the skeptics in his party, a preview of the difficult explanations he may be pressed to make as a candidate on the war.
On Megyn Kelly's show, the vice president said the critics “believe Iranian propaganda” about the deal. But he acknowledged some of the frustrations on the hawkish right while trying to reassure the anti-interventionists that the Iran conflict isn't the war in Iraq, where he served as a Marine.
“We were never going to get the quagmire that a lot of people were worrying about because Donald Trump is just not George W. Bush,” he said.
Democrats have stressed that even as Vance becomes the face of the Iran deal, the fate of any administration official who harbors presidential aspirations — particularly hawkish Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has largely been quiet in the agreement's final phases — will be tied to its outcome.
“I think any member of this administration is going to rise or fall on the basis of the Iran war and the handling of the economy, and I don’t think there are exceptions,” said Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii.
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Associated Press writer Will Weissert contributed to this report.
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