JD Vance went on “The View” Tuesday to sell a book. He came to promote “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,” and when the panel pulled him into the Iran war he tried to steer the conversation back. “I’m here to sell books,” he said. The vice president has been selling more than books this week. He has been all over the airwaves trying to sell the Iran deal President Trump announced Sunday — a deal whose fine print nobody outside the White House has actually seen. He used the same television circuit that his critics dominate to calmly insist that the alternative they are offering is an endless war.
The hawks who backed the war now reject the peace. Vance sat with Megyn Kelly and told her audience that the critics “are proposing an endless conflict” and that “they want this to go on until every bomb has been dropped or until every Iranian is dead.” That is a substantive accusation, and on the evidence available, it is true.
I want to be precise about what is happening here, because the coverage of this story is already sliding into the familiar Washington pattern where the peace faction and the war faction are treated as two respectable positions in a legitimate debate, as if the burden of persuasion falls equally on both sides. It does not. The war faction is the faction that supported a military campaign whose objectives were never defined, whose endpoint was never specified, that has now drained U.S. munitions stockpiles to the point where the president has invoked the Cold War-era Defense Production Act to jump-start the factories, and that has diverted ammunition and equipment from allies in Europe and the Pacific who need them to deter adversaries that have not, as of this writing, been bombed. That faction is now demanding that the war continue until they are satisfied that Iran has been sufficiently degraded. When pressed to define “sufficiently degraded,” they will not give you a number. They will give you a feeling.
I’ve sat in the gunner’s seat and I’ve read the books since, and the pattern is the same one every veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan has seen: the same class of voices backed the invasion, demanded the surge, insisted on nation-building, opposed every drawdown and every withdrawal, and then — when the wars ended badly — blamed the withdrawal rather than the strategy. The institutional assumption driving the objection is the one Andrew Bacevich documented across decades in Washington Rules: that American military intervention will produce favorable outcomes if we just apply more force, sustained longer, with fewer constraints.
The hawks have a legitimate objection buried inside their position. The Wall Street Journal reported details still being negotiated, including that a draft deal would allow Iran to sell oil and that Iranian tankers have already been permitted to depart through the U.S. blockade. Iran is eyeing billions in frozen assets locked abroad. If the terms don’t genuinely constrain Iran’s nuclear program under verifiable conditions, if the economic relief allows Tehran to restock its conventional arsenal, if the enrichment framework leaves breakout capability intact, then the hawks are right that this deal is weaker than what the strikes were supposed to produce. That question matters, and it deserves an honest answer from the administration.
But the hawks are not waiting for the terms to make that argument. They are opposing the concept of settlement itself — insisting that anything short of total capitulation is surrender. That is a different argument, and it is the same argument they have made before every exit from every war in my adult lifetime.
The strikes had a strategic logic that Sun Tzu would recognize. Chapter Three of The Art of War: to subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill. The purpose of the campaign was to coerce concessions — to impose costs sufficient that Iran’s leadership would calculate that continued resistance costs more than what the deal demands. Thomas Schelling drew the distinction in Arms and Influence: compellence means inducing the adversary to give something up. If Iran is offering to negotiate under pressure from the bombardment, the strikes did their job.
The hawks wanted something different. They wanted the strikes to be the strategy, not the instrument of strategy — the means by which Iran would be brought not to the negotiating table but to unconditional surrender. That is not compellence. That is what happens when you mistake the tool for the outcome.
And the tool has already failed them. The hawks say the deal won’t go far enough to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and that the economic relief will let the regime rebuild its conventional arsenal. But the war they are defending has not been shown to alleviate the fears they are invoking. After months of bombing, the president is invoking the Defense Production Act to replenish munitions that were never meant to be expended on an open-ended Middle Eastern war. If the yardstick is the hawks’ own stated concern, the war has already failed to meet it. The question they refuse to answer is not “what would victory look like?” — they will tell you what victory would look like, in detail, with maps. The question they refuse to answer is “when, and at what cost, and who pays it?”
The men and women who would pay it are the same ones who always pay it. A 2006 Associated Press survey found that about half a dozen members of Congress had children serving in Iraq; every subsequent tally has hovered in the single digits. The political class, in other words, has been disproportionately insulated from the human costs of the wars it authorizes. That is not a partisan observation. It is a demographic one, and it has held across every American conflict since the draft ended in 1973.
The credibility argument is where the hawks are weakest, and they do not seem to know it. The scholars who study this — Daryl Press in Calculating Credibility and Jonathan Mercer in Reputation and International Politics, building on Schelling’s own framework — have documented that reputation for resolve does not transfer across crises the way the hawks’ playbook assumes. What persuades an adversary is demonstrated capability and case-specific interest, not the memory of what the United States did in a different theater under different circumstances. The hawks’ claim that compromising on Iran’s nuclear program will embolden China, Russia, and every adversary who is watching rests on a theory of reputation that the empirical record contradicts. Credibility comes from having a strategy that works, not from refusing to stop bombing.
The hawks now criticizing the deal were aboard the war train when the train left the station. They did not ask, at the outset, what the off-ramp would be. They are not asking now. They are asking for more track.
What Vance is selling, whatever the fine print turns out to contain, is an off-ramp. The hawks are selling more track. The citizen who is trying to decide which of these two things is the better purchase does not need a PhD in international relations. She needs to know that one of the two sellers has a documented history of building track that other people’s children will be asked to walk down, and that the other seller is at least naming the existence of an exit. That does not make the exit good. It makes the existence of the exit preferable to the alternative the war faction is refusing to name.
Eisenhower, in his farewell address of January 17, 1961, warned of the “acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” He did not warn about the influence of the complex only when Democrats are in office. The complex operates across administrations. It has been operating across this one. The munitions manufacturers who are now receiving Defense Production Act orders to replenish what the war expended are the same firms that would receive the next set of replenishment orders if the war continued. The operating-tempo logic of the military-industrial complex does not require a named president. It requires a named war.
The war in Iraq ended with Iran more influential in Baghdad than it had been before the invasion. The war in Afghanistan ended with the Taliban back in Kabul. The hawks demanded both wars and then opposed both exits. Now they are doing it again.
The hawks are, in other words, auditioning for the next war while this one is still being settled. The same class of voices who backed every escalation and opposed every exit in Iraq and Afghanistan are now doing it with Iran. The war taught nothing to the class of voices whose profession is advocating for the next one.
Here is what I know from where I sat in the gunner’s seat. The men I served with did not go to Iraq so that the same class of voices could back another war without a plan for the peace. They did not serve so that the hawks could demand maximum pressure, reject every settlement that falls short of total capitulation, and then — when the settlement comes anyway, under worse terms than an earlier deal would have produced — explain why the problem was insufficient resolve rather than the absence of a strategy that could actually work.
Vance should show the American people the fine print. And the hawks should stop auditioning for the next war while this one is still being settled. The men and women who will bear the consequences of either decision — in uniform, in the VA system, in the communities that send their children to fight — deserve to know what they are being asked to support.