Middle East & North Africa
Vance on the Iran war: “the enemy gets a vote too” – seeks a “final, durable commitment” that Tehran will not rebuild its nuclear programme
At a CBS News town hall in Michigan, Vice President JD Vance defended the administration’s Iran strategy, blamed Iranian tanker attacks for high fuel prices and acknowledged a “huge mistake” in the positioning of troops, after a widow challenged him.
US Vice President JD Vance defended the Trump administration’s strategy in the war with Iran during a CBS News town hall with Michigan voters on the evening of Saturday, October 17. Asked by host Tony Dokoupil why the United States has not won decisively a war that has lasted longer than the president expected, he answered that “in some sense we have won decisively”, but that “the enemy gets a vote too”. The administration, he said, is seeking “a final, durable commitment from the Iranians that they will not rebuild their nuclear programme”.
On high fuel prices, Vance conceded that they are “very high right now” and blamed Iranian attacks on tankers. “We’ve never had a situation like this, where the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism is trying to completely choke off global energy supply,” he said. If the United States left and let the Iranians control shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, “you’d pay a lot more for gas,” he argued. “When this conflict is over, you’ll see prices come down,” he added. CBS notes that 21 American service members have been killed and hundreds wounded since the war began in late February.
The widow’s challenge
The most charged moment was an intervention by Joey Amor, the husband of Sergeant First Class Nicole Amor, who was killed with five other Army reservists in an Iranian drone attack on the port of Shuaiba in Kuwait on March 1, the deadliest attack on American forces in the war. “Although the Iranian drone was the weapon that killed my wife, there were a lot of mistakes and a lot of fundamental failures,” he said, asking that those responsible be held accountable.
Vance replied that it was “the first time” he had heard of it and that as vice president “you live in a bit of a bubble”, but he acknowledged there had been problems with “where the troops were located”, which was a “huge mistake” that has been corrected, and that tactics for countering drones had changed. Vance, who took part in the talks with Iran in the summer, said he would not give details, “because I don’t want the Iranians to learn something else they’ll use to target somebody else’s wife or mother.”
Calm in the fighting, tension in the Strait
The United States and Iran have avoided active combat in recent weeks, but tension around the Strait remains. CENTCOM has rejected Iranian claims of threats against Iranian seafarers, and the Revolutionary Guards say a supertanker hit a mine. These are the claims of the parties.
