‘We’re not at war with Iran,” Vice President JD Vance declared on Meet the Press the morning after the United States went to war against Iran. “We’re at war with Iran’s nuclear program.”
That would be a relief. Attacking Iran is something almost nobody in Donald Trump’s base asked for. Futile foreign wars, like the one in Iraq that destroyed the presidency of George W. Bush, are what delivered the Republican Party into Trump’s hands in the first place. But the president has spent the week after Israel attacked Iran’s nuclear-enrichment program on June 13 trying to find a way to fight on Israel’s side without sending his rank-and-file backers fleeing. Now, Trump has simply declared the outcome the best of both worlds. After announcing that American B-2 bombers had destroyed three crucial nuclear plants, he signaled to Iran that as long as it chooses not to retaliate there would be no hard feelings. Orwell would have called it Doublespeak.
Maybe it will work. Maybe Trump, who has performed so many unprecedented electoral feats, has done it yet again, protecting an ally from the risk of retaliation in a war that it started, without exposing his own country’s citizens to risks themselves. But wars don’t tend to work that way. They are notorious for sucking in statesmen who swear they don’t want to be sucked in. It will be a while before we can conclude whether Trump has been a visionary or a patsy.