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 president himself said so last night,” Vance wrote in a lengthy post on X on Wednesday. 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 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. 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 said it amounted to a massive payout for the Iranian regime.
The June agreement, which provided for a ceasefire at the time, quickly fell apart, however. Trump told reporters at the White House on Wednesday that Vance’s assessment was “largely true”, blaming higher fuel prices, as a result of the war, for Americans turning against his party. But the president insisted the war was necessary to stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
Republicans are positioning themselves for the 2028 presidential election, which Trump will not be able to run in, as he will have served the maximum of two terms as president. Paul Musgrave, associate professor of government at Georgetown University in Qatar, told Al Jazeera there are “major internal divisions within the Republican Party” over the war. The US decision to attack Iran triggered a global fuel crisis with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which has cost the US taxpayer an estimated $47bn so far.
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