The war in Iran‘s first few months belonged to Marco Rubio. The secretary of state seemed to be everywhere at once: blanketing the airwaves, leading press conferences, and leaning over President Donald Trump’s shoulder to whisper in his ear. Vice President JD Vance had been relegated to the bench — seated alongside the equally sidelined Tulsi Gabbard — while Trump and Rubio ran the war from Mar-a-Lago.
A few months later, their roles have reversed. Vance has led negotiations for a memorandum of understanding with the speaker of the Iranian Parliament. And in the hours since the news broke, he’s barnstormed the media landscape to sell it to the public (and also to sell his book), joining the ladies at The View, the partisans on Gutfeld!, and the suits at CNN, NBC News, and the like. Vance is now the face of the war. Rubio, meanwhile, is suddenly invisible.
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One of Vance’s stops stood out: The Megyn Kelly Show, where the host and the audience have loathed the war since the first shot was fired. Here, for once, no one pushed back. And Vance, opposed to the war all along, trained his fire not on the actual arguments of pro-war conservatives — that a nuclear-armed Iran would be a moral and strategic catastrophe and that walking away now would eviscerate American credibility on the world stage — but on a parade of straw men.
“Right now we have a very good deal for the American people,” Vance told Kelly, “and importantly, we have a constituency right now that is saying that we’re going to send boots on the ground. They want Donald Trump to send hundreds of thousands of ground troops into Iran.”
This is a fabricated opposition. Very few serious people called for boots on the ground in Iran, and certainly no one suggested “hundreds of thousands” of them. Many so-called hawks wanted to continue applying maximum pressure while arming the internal opposition and continuing operations to weaken the regime. Others sought to finish the air campaign and destroy the remaining nuclear stockpile.
No prominent voices pushed for an Iraq-scale invasion or prolonged nation-building. The only prominent person to even entertain the idea was Trump himself, who repeatedly refused to “rule out” the possibility.
Vance’s straw man gallery didn’t stop there.
“They want this to go on until every bomb has been dropped, or until every Iranian is dead,” the vice president said of his adversaries on the Right. “That is not what the president of the United States wants.”
This is an outright lie, unworthy of a cable news pundit, let alone a vice president. Much of the conservative support for military intervention in Iran was ignited by reports of thousands of Iranian people being executed by their own government for protesting openly in the streets. No prominent pro-intervention voices on the Right expressed animosity toward the Iranian people, only the vicious Iranian regime Vance spent the last week glad-handing.
The one voice that did threaten harm to the Iranian people was not a hawk’s — it was, again, Vance’s boss, who threatened that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” unless the regime surrendered. The pro-interventionist Right recoiled at this — repulsed by the damage it had done to the larger mission and, above all, by the immorality of the statement itself.
At the risk of psychologizing a politician, Vance’s straw man attack has the hallmarks of classic displacement. Is his real quarrel with the hawks? Or with the man whose threats he’s been unwilling to condemn, lest he jeopardize his shot at the presidency?
Vance is set to sign the MOU alongside his Iranian counterpart Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf on Friday in Switzerland. Ghalibaf is a former Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps brigadier general who personally admitted in a leaked audio recording to beating protesters with wooden sticks during the 1999 student uprising. He later said he was “proud” to have been “among those carrying out beatings at the street level.” During the 2025-26 Iranian protests, he called protesters “enemies and terrorists” and demanded punishment against them.
“The coolest thing about the progress we’ve made over the last few weeks,” the vice president said on CNN on Monday, “is that you see people within the Iranian system, senior leadership, even IRGC officials say, ‘You know what, we may have some animosity, we may have some mistrust, but we recognize the way that we’ve done business with the United States for 47 years is a mistake. Let’s try something else.'”
VANCE’S SCANDALOUS EXCUSE FOR NOT SHOWING THE IRAN DEAL TO THE PEOPLE
Ghalibaf, presumably, is one of those Guard officials. Isn’t that cool?
At least he’s not a “neocon” — that would make him one of the bad guys.