Reported by Al Jazeera
US Vice President JD Vance blames the war for the midterm rout as Democrats prepare to use Congress to rein it in.
Vice President JD Vance has blamed the war on Iran for the Republican Party’s sweeping defeat in Tuesday’s midterm elections , in which Democrats won control of both chambers of the United States Congress.
“The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night,” Vance wrote in a lengthy post on X on Wednesday.
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Senator Ted Cruz, a longtime Iran hawk, also turned on the conflict, saying in an episode of his podcast on Wednesday that it “should have been brief, decisive, and over”.
This week, President Donald Trump has insisted that he has no regrets. “I did the right thing. I would have done it again,” he told The Wall Street Journal about launching a war on Iran alongside Israel in February.
So, why are Trump’s allies breaking ranks, and what does it mean for the war? Here’s what you need to know:
Vance, a likely 2028 presidential candidate and heir apparent to Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, questioned whether the war had been worth the political cost.
“If you’d like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so,” he wrote.
Citing an unnamed pollster, Vance said ending the Iran war and “changing our relationship with Israel” were two of the top four answers given ahead of this week’s midterms by Americans who voted for Trump in 2024 but planned to vote for Democrats this year.
Cruz’s criticism came from another direction. The war had “dragged on too long”, he said in a post on X, adding that Washington “should never, under any circumstances, give the Ayatollah billions of dollars”.
He was apparently referring to the June memorandum of understanding signed by Washington and Tehran, which included a $300bn fund to help rebuild post-war Iran among several topics for discussion in wider peace talks. The proposal for the fund triggered hefty pushback from conservative lawmakers, including Cruz, who…