Over the weekend, Vice President JD Vance headed to Switzerland for what might be the most consequential moment of his vice presidency: negotiating peace between the United States and Iran after the end of President Donald Trump’s war of choice with Iran.
He also laundered some of Trump’s most inflammatory words.
“What we told the Iranians yesterday is that when you guys engage in what us millennials might call trash talk, you can't expect the president of the United States not to respond and not to correct the record,” he said.
The moment echoed his famous upbraiding of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, where he asked Zelensky, “Have you said, thank you, once?”
Since negotiations began, Republicans have raged against the memorandum of understanding that came out last week to end hostilities between the United States and Iran, calling it nothing short of a capitulation to Iran. When Vance spoke to reporters last week, he specifically called out members of Israel’s cabinet, saying that Trump is “the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment in time.”
All the while, Trump’s top diplomat — Secretary of State Marco Rubio — was absent. Rubio was present for another moment: when the president said that “if it works out, I’m going to take the credit. If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming JD.”
It’s all beginning to bear striking similarity to the predicament his predecessor as vice president, Kamala Harris, faced with her task as the point person on the crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border.
For those who might have forgotten, when immigration surged at the border in 2021, it became a political crisis for Joe Biden’s presidency, as Biden had hoped to turn a page on the cruelty of the first Trump administration’s approach to immigration.
But giving Harris the immigration portfolio would blow up in her face when she replaced Biden as the nominee. It turned out to be one of the numerous ways that Biden undermined her. Now Vance faces just as weighty a problem: the Iran crisis is easily one of Trump’s most unpopular policies and one in which he blew whatever was left of his dwindling political capital. If the negotiations fail, Vance’s presidential ambitions could be over before they begin.
As much as both of them might not want to admit it, Vance and Harris share many parallels. They each only briefly served in the Senate. In Biden and Trump’s cases, they picked running mates not to balance the ticket, but rather to shore up their base; Biden picked Harris as a “thank you” to Black voters for delivering him the nomination and Trump’s decision to pick Vance showed he wanted a foot soldier in the MAGA army who could excite the next generation.
But both had relatively little experience on the world stage and the few times they did go abroad, it yielded less than stellar results.
Harris famously came under criticism during her interview with NBC Nightly News host Lester Holt when she laughed when asked if she had been to the U.S.-Mexico border. And Vance famously blew up at Zelensky in the Oval Office with Trump. He followed that up with chastising Europe for its immigration and free speech policies at the Munich Security Conference.
Part of this comes with the job. Being the running mate means taking on jobs that are simply too politically toxic for the president and serving as a heat shield.
Vance, who is only 41 and wears his ambition in a way that not even his facial hair can mask, faces major questions about whether he can succeed Trump as the heir.
Working on the international stage also directly goes against Vance’s more “America First” isolationist ideology.
But a successful turn can also yield positive results.
George H.W. Bush as Ronald Reagan’s vice president met with many heads of state just by virtue of going state funerals, so by the time he entered the White House, he knew most world leaders.
Barack Obama’s lack of foreign policy credentials when he entered the White House meant he leaned heavily on Biden as his vice president. That burnished Biden’s image as a competent leader and willing number two that shaped his image when he ran for president.
But in both cases, those were experienced hands serving at the pleasure of political rookies. All the while, Rubio, a far proponent of a more robust and interventionist foreign policy, has sat back. If Vance fails, Rubio can easily appeal to donors, his former colleagues in the Senate and others in the GOP establishment to sell himself as the competent foreign policy hand.
Vance is about to see whether he can withstand the bright lights of the world stage when it matters. It’s his decision whether he can deliver. But for all his jokes, it will be the president who gave him this unwelcome gift.
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