Leaving aside the usual caveats about the possibility of another Trump run, Vice President J.D. Vance has long been viewed as the top contender for the 2028 Republican nomination.
Over the past year, Vance has positioned himself as an “America First” conservative, primarily focused on domestic affairs and skeptical of foreign intervention. He’s even criticized Israeli policy and pushed back on the idea that any critique of the country is rooted in antisemitism.
“Pro-Israel people in the United States make two critical mistakes,” the Vice President recently told NBC News. “One, on the one hand, is not delineating between America’s interest and Israeli interests because they’re not the same. But the second is always conflating criticism of a particular government with Jew hatred, because if everything is Jew hatred, then nothing is Jew hatred.”
Last November, American Conservative senior editor Andrew Day published a piece titled “J.D. Vance Can Lead a Post-Israel America,” in which he envisioned Vance potentially navigating a redefined relationship between the two countries.
“On Israel and U.S. foreign policy, Vance contains within himself the tensions currently rising among conservatives,” wrote Day. “While ideological purists may see that as evidence of inauthenticity and untrustworthiness, such tensions can, if handled carefully, make Vance broadly palatable to a fragmented American right.”
A few months after Day’s piece ran, Trump and Netanyahu began bombing Iran in a war that they would ultimately lose. Now, Vance is the public face of negotiations between the United States, and Trump is openly joking about blaming him if the deal ends up falling through.
Will this turn of events potentially scuttle Vance’s presidential ambitions? Even if he’s able to beat out a more hawkish candidate like Marco Rubio in the primary, will his boss’s foreign policy dampen his appeal in the general election, as it did for Kamala Harris in 2024?
“I think any association with President Trump and the foreign policy is a political liability,” Thomas Massie, the Kentucky Representative and Trump foe who recently lost his primary amid record spending from the Israel Lobby recently told MS Now. “Before JD Vance became vice president, when he was a senator, he was one of those — of us — who was questioning all of our engagements overseas, particularly Ukraine. So he’s had to do a 180 since he’s been in there, and it is a liability for him.”
Day, the author of the aforementioned American Conservative article, told Mondoweiss that Vance faces an uphill battle due to Iran.
“As an advocate of foreign policy restraint, JD Vance was in an impossible position during the active-fighting phase of the Iran War,” said Day. “Now he’s in a difficult position, trying to resolve a conflict that never should have been waged and that conservative hawks would like to resume. That’s an improvement in his political positioning, but he’s not out of the woods yet. The polls show that Vance remains the frontrunner in the 2028 GOP primary contest, but the general election will be tough, given the unpopularity of the Trump administration.”
However, he added that Vance has a good shot at becoming President if nominated, especially if he can deliver a lasting deal with Iran.
“I suspect that voters will credit him for ending the war rather than blame him for being number two in the administration that launched it,” Day explained.
Ironically, Vance is currently negotiating the Iran deal alongside a potential future political rival, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio is also expected to run for the nomination and will likely take a more hawkish stance on foreign policy than Vance. In contrast to Vance, Rubio has refrained from criticizing the U.S. ally.
“The talk about differences is not idle speculation,” Dan Fried, a former assistant secretary of state and ambassador to Poland, recently told PBS. “There is definitely something to it.”
The White House has batted down any suggestion that there’s a rift between the two men. “There is one camp – President Trump’s camp – and the entire administration is fully behind the president’s efforts to ensure Iran can never possess a nuclear weapon,” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly recently declared.
Curt Mills, the Executive Director of The American Conservative, doesn’t think the Harris and Vance situations are comparable, as Vance has already done more to distinguish himself from Trump’s foreign policy than Harris did with Biden.
“I think most Democrats would concede that a crucial political error Kamala Harris made in 2024 was her abject inability to distinguish herself from Joe Biden in any way. It basically seemed like it was a policy,” said Mills. “Say what you will about Donald Trump, who demands loyalty, but Vance has already cleared the bar set by Harris. You don’t have to take it from Vance; you can take it from Trump himself, who said that Vance is not as enthusiastic about the war. Appointing him as a point man to end the war is evidence enough of Vance’s distinction vis-à-vis Trump.”
“I’m by no means suggesting that Vance is going to run away from the Trump association. I think he’s proud of it, but he’s going to present a case to the American people if he runs in 2028, that this would not have happened if he were the President,” he continued. “This is contrast to Harris, who said, ‘I can walk, I’m not dubiously senile, but what would I have done differently from 2021 to 2024? Entirely unclear.’ Vance will have a clear answer.”
As negotiations have continued, that answer has begun to take shape, at least on a rhetorical level. While many GOP lawmakers continue to call for the ouster of Iranian leadership, Vance has spoken of the two countries working “together to promote peace and prosperity.
“It’s very simple,” said Vance recently. “You can’t tell a country, whether Israel or Iran, they’re not allowed to have any self-defense.”
Michael Arria
Michael Arria is Mondoweiss’ U.S. correspondents. He is the author of Medium Blue: The Politics of MSNBC. Follow him on X at @michaelarria.
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