JD Vance's Hard Road to 2028
Byron York
Vice President JD Vance faced an impossible task trying to negotiate an end to the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran. That Vance failed is no surprise, given Iran's so-far implacable resistance to the demand that it abandon its nuclear weapons program. That, Vance said, is President Donald Trump's "core goal" of the war.
"We've made very clear what our red lines are," Vance told reporters after 21 hours of negotiations. "We just could not get to a situation where the Iranians were willing to accept our terms."
Vance's leading role in the talks attracted a lot of comment, since he was well known to have been skeptical about starting the war in the first place. And that fact -- a vice president having to go along with an action he himself would never have initiated -- highlights Vance's fundamental problem as he hopes to succeed Trump as president. As long as he is in his current job, Vance is stuck doing what Trump wants him to do.
Way back in 1997, when Vice President Al Gore was preparing to run for president after serving two terms under Bill Clinton, a perceptive Washington observer put the VP's problem this way: "Al Gore is locked in the trunk of Bill Clinton's car."
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https://townhall.com/columnists/byronyork/2026/04/14/columnistsbyronyork20260414jd-vances-hard-road-to-2028-n2674460
