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I think JD Vance might have finally fumbled the ball irretrievably. He’s midair, horizontal, arms extended, face contorted in panic. He’ll do anything he can to salvage it—it, being the ball, which represents his deeply held pretensions to power. But it’s exceeding his grasp.
Many have made note of Vance’s recent tactical failures: His failure to talk Donald Trump out of starting a disastrous war. His subsequent failure to negotiate an end to the war. And his crowning failure to help Viktor Orban, a fellow authoritarian stooge, win re-election in Hungary. The two men campaigned together in Budapest on the eve of the election—a highly aberrant act of U.S. meddling—only for Orban to lose Sunday in a landslide.
But I think Vance’s larger strategic failure is much worse than any of the tactical ones. His goal all along has been to keep himself clean enough to all factions of the pro-Trump coalition that he remains heir to Trump by default. That of course entails being Trump’s errand boy, setting himself up for humiliation after humiliation. But he’s recently tacked on an aggressive public relations offensive to portray himself as a tragic hero, hard at work keeping things on an even keel. The only senior official with both the wisdom to suspect war with Iran would descend into quagmire and the courage to say so to the boss’s face. Allegedly.
As the New York Times has it, in a piece that’s suspiciously favorable to Vance, “Mr. Trump’s war cabinet—with the stark exception of Mr. Vance, the figure inside the White House most opposed to a full-scale war—deferred to the president’s instincts, including his abundant confidence that the war would be quick and decisive.”
This has already created a bunch of problems. By depicting himself as the lone voice of reason, Vance has managed to alienate almost all of his colleagues, and made it harder for Trump to end the war. He’s thus positioned himself as the avatar of MAGA’s failure at the exact moment when he’s failing most visibly. His pitch: Join our party, where the only worthy person is an arrogant loudmouth taking L after L.
But it gets worse. I think that by wrapping his holy honor in a Cassandra-style myth, Vance has weakened many of the incentives pointing to a quick and dirty peace. With his failed negotiations this past weekend, he may have actually locked us into war indefinitely. Let’s walk through the logic together.
Quick disclaimer: it isn’t actually clear that the Vance-side leaks are true. They’re not obviously false, but they come from the guy who admitted he makes up stories to manipulate media into skewing political coverage to his advantage.
So…skepticism is warranted.
But the harm doesn’t stem from what’s true so much as what’s been reported. Even if his version of events is narrowly accurate, seeding it for public consumption now makes it more than ordinary public relations, the kind of post facto cleanup you’d normally read in a memoir many years after the fact.
Instead, it’s become endogenous to the conflict itself. ...