Calm Down About JD Vance

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JD Vance is getting a lot of heat right now because he’s become the face of the administration in trying to deal with the Iranian mullahs, as thankless a job as one could ever imagine. The Iranian mullahs are degenerate freaks who want to annihilate every Jew, then every Christian, from the face of the Earth, so you can see the problem he faces in trying to negotiate with them and in discussing the results of those negotiations. To the extent he supports the negotiations, we’re entitled to tie him to what is a miserable deal. If I had my way, we’d be destroying these people. But I don’t get my way. I wasn’t elected to anything, and a majority of Americans appear to support resolving this situation—for the time being, because we’re not actually resolving anything—by talking instead of bombing.

I’d prefer the bombing. I want to make that clear. But the president and the vice president have chosen to go in another direction, one that the American people seem more inclined to support. They don’t want another war right now, or rather, they don’t want a kinetic war right now. They’re willing to accept a phony, temporary peace, which is pretty much what this MOU means. This war is going to go on one way or the other until either the mullahs or we are dead. That’s a consequence of dealing with apocalyptic 7th-century pagans.

What we are really negotiating for is a halftime to avoid economic collapse and a Democrat wave in the midterms. As Clausewitz pointed out, war is a subset of politics, and in this case, it’s domestic politics. You can like that or not like that, but it doesn’t really matter. It’s a fact that Donald Trump and JD Vance have to consider, even if a lot of critics have not.

I like most of these critics and agree with much of what they’re saying. Not all of them, because some of them are nuts, but like them, I’m not happy with this deal. Yet I understand why we’re making it. I also understand the problems we are having implementing it and fully expected them. I suspect JD Vance feels the same way, though he’s being painted as someone who sincerely believes this is a terrific diplomatic coup instead of the best of several bad choices.

There’s no way that JD Vance is fooled by these people any more than Donald Trump is fooled by these people—as Salena Zito famously observed, one needs to take Donald Trump’s bluster and blarney about the MOU seriously, not literally. They’re liars, degenerates, and sociopaths. Aided by the mainstream media, which credulously reports anything that anyone remotely connected with the regime—or not connected with the regime—says that contradicts what the Americans are saying, the Iranians are presenting an image of chaos. But it’s only an image. This is an information operation. They don’t have much in the way of kinetic power. They can scare ships from going through the Strait of Hormuz. They can promise to shoot missiles at the Gulf states’ installations. They can even threaten to walk out of the negotiations, although you’ll note that they walked right back after they ostentatiously departed the other day.

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They want this deal, but unfortunately, the administration wants it, too, and they’re taking full advantage of that fact. JD Vance has been taking a lot of heat for being the face of this project. You’ll notice that we haven’t seen anything about Secretary Rubio or Secretary Hegseth in the last week or so. It’s clear they hate the deal and don’t want anything to do with it. JD Vance is taking a risk by making himself the face of it. If the whole thing goes to hell, that’ll be on him. And if we manage to muddle through, he’ll get some of the credit.

A lot of folks on our side irrationally hate JD Vance. Part of this may be transferred anger against Donald Trump—there are real consequences for crossing the president, but the vice president? Not so much. Still, it’s unreasonable. He’s an extremely intelligent guy, and he’s very well-spoken. We’ve seen a lot of short clips of him over the last week or so, but you need to watch longer. This is a guy who can handle himself. Most of what he says isn’t crazy. Now, some of it was not great—he misspoke about World War II, for instance, and that was embarrassing. But if you think he’s dumb, you’re just deluding yourself. He’s not dumb. He’s a very smart guy who is very suspicious of the use of American power in the Middle East, which is not surprising because he’s one of the relatively few people screaming about all of this who actually put on a uniform and went over there. It’s personal for him.

There’s an idea out there that he is somehow playing footsies with the groyper types, and that he hates Israel and, for some reason, loves the Iranians. Look, I get why a lot of people on our side are paranoid about being sold out. It comes from being sold out. No one gets sold out like conservatives. Look at John Cornyn, Donald Trump’s very best friend until he lost his primary, and now all he does is try to screw with the president on Twitter.

But it’s especially true if you’re a supporter of Israel, which I am—my criticism of Israel is that it’s been far too nice to Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran. If you’re Jewish, or a friend of the Jewish people, yeah, you should be paranoid, because a huge number of people want to kill you. That’s now an unofficial plank of the Democrat Party platform if you haven’t noticed. Oh, they don’t say they want genocide. They just want to accuse Israel of genocide, and to do things that are entirely consistent with allowing their new green/red friends to murder everyone of the Jewish faith from the river to the sea.

JD Vance does not support that nonsense. The idea that he’s some sort of secret antisemite is ridiculous. He gets grief because of his friendship with some of the podcast types. He was a personal friend of Tucker Carlson, and Tucker’s gone insane. It’s not fun to have your friends go haywire. However, JD Vance has demonstrated zero concurrence with any of Tucker’s more bizarre tangents. There are people out there who want JD Vance to “repudiate” Tucker or otherwise trash him. He refuses to do so, and I don’t blame him. For one thing, the people demanding he disavow his friend aren’t going to like him any better once he does. They’re just going to add “weakness” to their list of objections to the vice president. The second thing is that you don’t trash your friends because somebody tells you to. Occasionally, in the conservative movement, I’ve been told I must repudiate somebody who’s a friend and who has said something I don’t necessarily agree with, and my reaction is always the same: Pound sand. Nobody gets to tell me what I have to say. Ever. And JD Vance, who grew up in Appalachia, where loyalty means something, clearly feels the same way. If your price of admission for JD Vance is that he publicly castigates friends, you’re out of luck.

But there are legitimate criticisms of JD Vance, such as over his criticism of Israeli politicians. You can argue that he’s been too harsh, but that’s not necessarily indicative of an anti-Israel bias. Statements he makes while negotiating with Iranians are not necessarily evidence that he thinks Israel is the problem. And sometimes, Israel is a problem in the sense that what it wants is not necessarily what America needs. Look, the Venn diagram of American and Israeli interests is not a perfect circle, though it overlaps about 90 percent. There’s a 10 percent difference. Israel is a different country. It has different interests and it pursues them, as one should expect. The United States has its own interests, and sometimes they conflict with Israel’s. Sorry about that, but America needs to do what America needs to do. JD Vance does not hate Israel because he points out that indisputable fact.

The Iranians are doing everything they can to make him look bad, and the necessity of defending this deal implies the necessity to put up with a lot of Iranian nonsense. You typically don’t go into negotiation screaming obscenities about your negotiating partner. JD Vance is being nicer to the Iranians than they deserve because he’s trying to get this negotiation done. His problem is not only that the mullahs are sociopathic liars, but that there are many different regime factions and they are all saying different things. Who the hell is in charge over there? That’s kind of hard to know because we’ve killed so many of them. That’s why you get 10 different takes on whatever JD Vance comes out and says. It doesn’t reflect on him that the Iranians can’t get their act together.

Now, we all know—and that includes JD Vance—that these semi-humans are going to lie and cheat. Again, the vice president is not stupid. He knows this will not lead to a final peace. It’s going to be a temporary truce. And to make the deal, we’re going to have to give up things, like letting them sell oil under certain conditions. Apparently, the oil money can only be used to buy food from American farmers, which sounds like a pretty good deal. As for the nuclear weapons inspectors, well, we’ll see how that goes, but I think we all know the Iranians are going to renege, and eventually we’re going to have to go in and smash them. But we’re not going to go in with boots on the ground and conduct regime change. There’s no support for that from anybody. Since that isn’t possible, JD Vance, as the president’s lead negotiator, needs to look at what is possible. Sometimes all you have are bad choices.

The Republican Party is going to have to make a choice in 2028. It must choose someone to carry on the Trump legacy. Right now, the obvious, and overwhelmingly likely, choice is JD Vance. But some of the MOU critics—again, with whom I mostly agree about destroying the mullahs—have announced that they are out. They consider this an absolute betrayal. They’re going to sit out the midterms, and they are not going to support JD Vance if he’s nominated.

Since we’re demanding people repudiate friends, let me do it. That’s stupid. As I said, life is about choices, and you don’t always get to pick between ones you find optimal. JD Vance is very popular among the base and is overwhelmingly likely to be our nominee at this point. It’s not completely settled, though, and this controversy does create an opening for someone to run against him (which I think will be Ted Cruz, who will lose). The bottom line is that in 2028, a lot of people who are very mad at JD Vance are going to have to choose between JD Vance and Kamala Harris, who’s almost certain to be their nominee. Kamala Harris will actively support the enemies of Israel and the United States. Where JD Vance chastises Israel in the gentlest terms, she will cut off their arms and ally us with people who want to finish what Hitler started.

That’s the choice. It’s literal madness to be so mad at JD Vance for his minor disagreements with Israel and his embrace of what he sees as the least-worst Iran option that one would effectively support someone who literally supports our enemies. So, calm down, be objective, and focus on the long-term goal of defeating our enemies abroad and at home. Focusing on JD Vance and imagining he is some sort of malignant monster supports neither.

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