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At about 5pm on Thursday 26 February, Donald Trump’s inner cabinet met in the White House Situation Room to decide whether to go to war with Iran. Trump sat at the head of the table; his Vice President, JD Vance, was at his right hand. “You know I think this is a bad idea,” Vance is supposed to have said, “but if you want to do it, I’ll support you.” The bombing began two days later.
In Trump’s first administration, various senior officials took it in turns to be “the grown-up in the room”. They stopped the President from wrecking Nato, pulling out of the North American Free Trade Agreement, and firing off a tweet that could have started nuclear war with North Korea. Today, the grown-up in the room is the young Vice President – and he’s struggling with Trump Mark 2.
Vance’s greatest failure was not stopping Trump from going to war; his second-greatest failure, so far, is not ending it. You have to feel a little sorry for him. In 2023, he endorsed Trump with a opinion piece headlined: “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars.” But the Trump Vance campaigned with is not the Trump he got.
Vance has taken full ownership of peace negotiations. That was inevitable after he called war with Iran a bad idea during the presidential election campaign. His hopes of becoming president himself in 2028 depend on delivering a deal that is not too obvious a humiliation for the United States. He is an intelligent man and a fluent media performer, but he’s going to tie himself in knots if the agreement with Iran is half as bad as it looks.
The talks are based on the memorandum of understanding that Vance brought back from Pakistan in June. A former Trump official told last month that Vance’s aides thought they and their boss were succeeding in a mission to save the world. “God bless them,” the former official said, “but it’s like, dude, you just got handed a shit sandwich. You can’t cover up the taste too much.”
So it has proved. Vance himself told Fox News this week, ruefully, that the Iranian negotiators were “extraordinarily difficult people” and warned that any final agreement would be “messy”. It must be nearly impossible to negotiate when the Iranians know that Trump’s regular threats to escalate are bluster. “Trump the fool has run out of steam!” as Iran’s Fars news agency put it.
Trump keeps claiming publicly that the Iranians are begging him to talk. Then, Tehran declines even to send the negotiating team out of the country. Trump is left to complain that the Iranian leadership are “unbelievably duplicitous”. The current round of discussions is in fact between Iran and Oman, about the Strait of Hormuz, which both countries overlook. The Americans are apparently not at the table, and the Iranians clearly expect that they, not Washington, will end up in charge of the waterway. This is the deal that will be hung around Vance’s neck.
Trump can’t go into the midterm elections in November with the price of fuel rising to $5 or $6 a gallon. So, he threatened “the biggest attack since World War Two” this week, but – once again – backed off because carpet bombing would bring Iranian missiles down on Gulf oil refineries. The Saudis are terrified of any more damage that might take years to repair. The always well-briefed Axios said the Saudi defence minister had delivered a personal message to Trump and Vance from the kingdom’s ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman: de-escalate now.
Tehran is in no hurry to end the war. The aim, it seems, is to drag negotiations out through the midterms. The deputy foreign minister, Kazem Gharibabadi, said that first there would have to be agreement on the Strait of Hormuz; only then could there be talks on Iran’s nuclear programme – in “two to four months”. The original timetable was 30 days. Perhaps the Iranians hope to destroy Trump politically, as they destroyed Jimmy Carter.
Trump has trapped himself between a war he can’t win and a peace he can’t sell. This is Vance’s problem too. He is no Hubert Humphrey, the vice president cut out of decision-making in Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam war but forced to defend it publicly. Vance was “in the room”. Trump consulted him, and though he was conspicuously quiet in the war’s first days, he has defended the attack on the record as necessary to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.
That February scene in the Situation Room is from a new book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. Haberman has watched Trump longer and more closely than perhaps any other reporter alive. It’s hard to be shocked by any claim about Trump, but on a podcast this week she said this: “If you looked at a chart of his mind share… 70 per cent of it would be on his renovations.” Iran is a distant second to building a new White House ballroom covered in gold leaf.
Trump is not good at taking responsibility, and he’ll need someone to take the fall for Iran. He trolled Vance about the elusive peace deal before a room full of guests at the White House, Vance himself in the audience. “If it doesn’t happen, I’m blaming JD Vance. If it does happen, I’m taking full credit.” If anyone thought Trump was playing for laughs, Senator John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas, put them right: “It wasn’t a joke.”
Vance can take the blame for a failed peace; Marco Rubio – Secretary of State, acting National Security Adviser – for the war itself. These two happen to be the front-runners for the Republican nomination in 2028. Less than a day after the US began bombing Iran, Trump had two dozen donors over to Mar-a-Lago. As reported by , they dined on jumbo crab and rib-eye steaks. Trump asked them: “What do you think of JD Vance and Marco Rubio?” The guests applauded louder for Rubio.
Jump forward to last month, and Trump is in the Oval Office with another group of big shots who want to give him money. has him telling them: “At the end of the day, we need to elect JD.” On the record, Trump has denied this. “No…we’re way too early to even be thinking about that.” Trump seems to be enjoying judging an -style contest to replace him as president.
In February, one poll had Vance 46 points ahead of Rubio. As the war ground on, another poll had him up a single point: a statistical tie. Rubio has insisted he is friendly with Vance and would step aside for him. Rubio’s political career has been marked by ruthless ambition up until now, but stranger things have happened in politics.
One scenario: the war continues, fuel prices rocket, and the Democrats reclaim both House and Senate. Donald Trump would almost certainly face his third impeachment hearing. Vice presidents are famously “a heartbeat” away from the presidency, but they are also only a Senate vote away from the top job. The House of Representatives votes to impeach, or charge; the Senate votes on whether or not to convict.
Most likely, Vance’s path to the presidency still runs through an Iran peace agreement. If he’s very lucky, he’ll get something that looks like Barack Obama’s nuclear deal – the one President Trump has spent the past 10 years mocking. A bad peace is better than war, especially one that Vance never believed in.
John Yorke’s new book on storytelling, Trip to the Moon, is a masterpiece, with something to make you think, or smile, on every page. He is a former head of drama at the BBC and Channel Four, and sprinkles the book with examples from Chinese poetry to the superhero blockbuster to . When Bianca spends a whole episode of looking for her lost hairbrush, that’s a perfect miniature of story mechanics: desire plus obstacle equals narrative. An audience will happily follow the effort to satisfy even the smallest want if it’s structured properly. You may already know Yorke from his first instant classic, Into the Woods.