More than six months after President Donald Trump announced the start of a war against Iran that has claimed the lives of 18 service members, injured at last 750 more, and cost between $71 billion and $118 billion, Vice President JD Vance now says the war is not a war at all.
The vice president was taking a turn at the lectern in the James Brady Briefing Room on Thursday — the first White House press briefing since former press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s departure — when he was asked to offer a timeline as to when the Trump administration would consider the war to be over and whether that point would be reached before the November midterm elections.
Vance replied that he “wouldn’t call it a war” and claimed there was “no active shooting” between American and Iranian forces happening while downplaying the exchanges of fire that have taken place as points where hostilities have merely “flared up.”
“Major combat operations lasted for about six weeks, and since we destroyed ... their nuclear facilities with Midnight Hammer ... with Epic Fury, we destroyed their defense industrial base for producing weapons, and also a lot of their conventional military. And then we made it harder for them to rebuild that nuclear program,” Vance said.
He then complained that the question was akin to asking him when Iranian forces would “stop shooting at ships.”
“You would have to ask the Iranians when will the Iranians shooting at ships [and] stop having an effect on world energy markets,” he said.
“We're going to do is not depend on the Iranians behaving responsibly or negotiating in good faith — what we're going to do is use the tools that we have at our disposal to ensure that the American people one never have to deal with the threat of an Iranian nuclear program, and ... that world energy markets are properly supplied.”
When pressed on whether his response meant it was solely the responsibility of Tehran to determine when the war the U.S. started would end, he said Washington has “a responsibility” to respond to attacks on commercial shipping traffic because the U.S. is the sole country with the “capability to ensure that the Iranians are not destroying world energy markets.”
“What I would say is it would be irresponsible for us to write out our strategy and our timeline for an Iranian nation that simply cannot honor its commitments and cannot stop shooting at commercial ships,” he added.
Vance’s evasive comments came just a day after Trump dismissed Iran’s latest strikes on US targets as a “love tap” in response to US forces hitting Iranian targets “very hard” in recent air strikes.
“It was a very heavy attack last night, and we’re prepared to do another one anytime we want,” Trump said during an appearance before reporters at the White House on Wednesday.
“We have technology that's incredible. Nobody has technology like we have. So, we hit them hard last night, very hard. They gave a little love tap, but we hit them very hard.”
Despite Vance’s refusal to call the war a war or lay out a timeline for it to end, it appears the Trump administration is preparing to keep already-overextended forces on a combat footing in the Middle East region for the foreseeable future.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered the extension of deployments for troops already in the region through next year as part of a strategy to leave Trump with open-ended options in the war.
The ongoing conflict has taxed American defense industrial capabilities and significantly thinned stockpiles of both costly air defense interceptors and long-range precision munitions that have allowed for U.S. forces to strike targets in Iran at a distance without getting in range of Tehran’s defenses.
The effect of the war on American stockpiles has been a concern among both White House and Pentagon officials for months, even as Trump has denied any negative effect on U.S. readiness as a result of the protracted conflict.
The president lashed out at news outlets for reporting on the stockpile depletions on Thursday, attacking the press as “treasonous SCUM that refuses to accurately report on our Military Operation in Iran” in a Truth Social post in which he also alleged that the Pentagon has “virtually unlimited amounts of Mid to High Grade Ammunition, far more than we could ever use for this, or for any other War.”
He further alleged that the U.S. is “producing Munitions at levels never seen before” and “stockpiling and preparing for any contingency that could happen” while attempting to deflect blame onto his predecessor, Joe Biden, by accusing his prior administration of having given “far more Munitions away to Ukraine, at no cost to them, whatsoever, than we have used in Iran” even though the majority of aid the U.S. provided to Kyiv was in the form of unguided artillery shells that would have no use against Iran because Washington has not deployed ground troops in the war thus far.
