When the Iran war started, JD Vance was photographed in the White House Situation Room looking disheveled and tieless beneath the grand seal of the President of the United States. There were some empty seats and a handful of cabinet members present (two looking at their phones). He did not cut a commanding figure.

This was not the room where it happened. All the action was taking place at a makeshift command centre at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s Florida compound, where the multitasking US President was launching lethal missile strikes and hosting a Maga Inc fundraising party.

Protocol dictates that vice presidents can’t be in the same place as their boss when war breaks out, but the image summed up Vance’s powerlessness. He had the look of a man watching his presidential ambitions going up in smoke.

The Iran war has merely amplified Vance’s political problems at home. In the US, it turns out he has been anointed man-of-the-future by the wrong crowd. Despite his vaunted brains, he did not see that coming.

Vance was against the war before he was for it, telling a podcaster in 2024 that Iran was “the most likely and dangerous scenario for provoking World War Three”. Let’s hope he was wrong about that.

Swallowing his reservations, the isolationist Vance reportedly counseled Trump to go “big and fast” on Iran or don’t........

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