A top ally to former Vice President Mike Pence criticized Vice President JD Vance for taking jabs at Pence’s concerns about the Trump administration’s negotiations with Iran, arguing that the White House is pivoting to “straw man” arguments that distract from the reality of the war.
Tim Chapman, the president of Advancing American Freedom, a public policy advocacy organization founded by Pence, said in an interview published Wednesday that Vance delved into dangerous strawman arguments to mischaracterize Pence’s position during the vice president’s recent appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience. Vance suggested during his appearance on Rogan’s podcast that Pence and his allies are seeking to “derail” negotiations with Iran because they want regime change for “the military campaign to go on forever.”
Chapman pushed back, telling Washington Examiner editor Peter Laffin that Pence “didn’t properly or truthfully represent the views of Vice President Pence or many of us on the outside who are critics of the MOU.” The memorandum of understanding was a short-term deal the U.S. signed with Iran aimed at opening the Strait of Hormuz while broader talks continued regarding Iran’s nuclear program.
“The straw man was that all these people are war mongers, or these people, you know, just want boots on the ground and never-ending wars in Iran,” Chapman said. “And I don’t see a single person calling for that, Peter. Nobody, not one hawk on the outside is calling for endless wars, boots on the ground.”
Vance defended the MOU during his interview with Rogan, saying it represented a “delicate diplomatic dance where we’re using economic leverage points.” He said there are two camps of people with Iran, the pragmatists and the “crazy people.” The “crazies” would continue to derail traffic in the Strait of Hormuz even if the U.S. bombed Iran “into oblivion,” Vance said, which he claimed Pence’s hawkish camp would love to see. The vice president claimed Pence and his allies primarily want to see regime change in Iran and put 150,000 boots on-site to accomplish that objective.
“I’m very frustrated by the Americans … who are like, ‘You cannot negotiate with the Iranians.’ … Well, then, what is your proposal to get people to stop shooting at ships in the Strait of Hormuz?” Vance said. “You can bomb them, you can take away their radar, you can take away some of their drones and some of their missiles, but it’s just too easy to fire at ships in the straits, so you’ve got to actually be willing to talk and to try to figure out the problem. What the president has done, I think, very, very capably, is said, ‘We’re going to use military force in this situation when it’s connected to something we’re trying to achieve,'” earlier noting the “delicate diplomatic dance where we’re using economic leverage points, we’re using carrots and sticks, we’re trying to talk to the pragmatists.
“If you look at what Mike Pence or some of the conservative hawks, like people who voted for us but have been very critical of me, very critical of the administration, if you actually look at what they’re proposing, they just want the military campaign to go on forever,” the vice president said. “Some of them want us to accomplish a complete change in the government of Iran to topple the clerics and to replace those clerics with somebody who’s much friendlier. … You’re basically saying that the U.S. military should do the job for the Iranian people. We’re not in that business anymore.”
Chapman told Laffin that the Pence camp’s issue with the MOU was that it “was naive.” He believes it took a gullible view of Iranian negotiators, which has given the country an upper hand in the war.
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“The MOU thought that we had turned over a new leaf with these Iranian negotiators, and that they were willing to enter into a new kind of relationship with the United States, and it was completely contradicted by the historical facts of the matter and the way that these people have negotiated for decades,” Chapman warned. “It turns out that the critics of the MOU were actually correct in saying that this was a bad way to go because what the MOU did was actually just buy more time for Iran to to rearm and to reengage, and right now you see missiles being lobbed across the Middle East from the Iranian regime, and that that would not have happened if we didn’t take that pause.
“The idea that there are ‘neocons’ on the outside or war mongers who want nothing more than boots on the ground is a complete straw man — it’s really an absurd position to take, and too many who are critical of the efforts in Iran are taking that position,” he said. “I just think that that kind of straw man argument is really a bad place to be on the Right, and we need to do our best as conservatives to represent the people we disagree with in the best light possible, so that we actually can win on the merits in the arguments rather than a bonfire of strawmen.”
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
