When it comes to foreign interventionism, Donald Trump’s team features a variety of prominent skeptics, but none of them has gone further than JD Vance. Indeed, as MS NOW summarized over the weekend, the incumbent vice president has “built his political identity in part on rejecting what he characterized as decades of failed American interventionism in the Middle East.”

It was Vance who wrote a 2023 op-ed for The Wall Street Journal touting Trump as a Republican who hasn’t “started any wars” and “won’t recklessly send Americans to fight overseas.” It was also Vance who told voters, about a week before Election Day 2024, “Our interest very much is in not going to war with Iran. It would be a huge distraction of resources. It would be massively expensive to our country.”

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A year and a half later, the administration that Vance ostensibly helps lead went to war in Iran. Trump launched the conflict from his glorified country club in Florida, though the vice president did not join him, and the Ohio Republican had very little to say once the bombs started dropping. (A Politico report described him as having been “conspicuously quiet.”)

It seemed plausible to think that Vance was taking some time to digest the developments and figure out a way to defend a military operation that, by all appearances, he should oppose and had said wouldn’t happen. If that was the case, Americans saw the fruits of those efforts on Monday night, when the vice president sat down with Fox News’ Jesse Watters to present his best pitch.

It was a rather brief interview. Vance said the ongoing mission in Iran is different from other recent wars in the Middle East because “the president has clearly defined what he wants to accomplish.” Given that Trump has done no such thing, I was left wondering whether Vance was referring to some other president.

But there was another part of the interview that stood out as especially notable.

As the interview got underway, the vice president made the case that the administration had “eliminated” Iran’s ability to build a nuclear weapon last summer but that Trump was “looking for the long haul” and decided to launch an offensive anyway.

“[Trump] saw that the Iranian regime was weakened; he knew that they were committed to getting on that brink of a nuclear weapon; and he decided to take action because he felt that was necessary in order to protect the nation’s security,” Vance argued.

The relevant phrase went by quickly, but it’s worth dwelling on: According to the vice president, the U.S. went to war not because Iran was on the brink of acquiring a nuclear weapon, but because it was “committed to getting on that brink of a nuclear weapon.”

The rhetoric would have been amusing were we not talking about matters of life and death. By Vance’s own reasoning, Iran didn’t have a nuclear weapon. It didn’t even have the capability of developing a nuclear weapon. But the U.S. is at war anyway because, according to the vice president, Iran was “committed” to eventually, at some point in the future, reaching the point at which it would be on the “brink” of a nuclear weapon.

All things considered, perhaps the Ohioan would have been better off remaining “conspicuously quiet.”