It’s the War, Stupid? / Trump’s Next Steps in Iran

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0:32From the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch. Republicans are still digesting their generational shellacking at the polls this week, and we'll continue to parse the results and what they mean for the GOP in Congress and across the states. But the vice president, in a remarkable post on social media, blamed the war in Iran as a singular driver of the GOP defeat this week. Is his theory of the case correct? What should Republicans learn on foreign affairs from a defeat of this magnitude? And where does Donald Trump go from here in Iran? Welcome to Potomac Watch. I'm Kate O'Dell, your host, and we're going to dive right in today with my colleague, Elliot Kaufman, a fellow member of the Journal's editorial board.

1:18Elliot, always great to have you. I want to start by reading the vice president's post on social media. J.D. Vance sent this post less than 24 hours after his principal took a big wipeout in Congress. Quote, The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night. If you'd like to argue that it was worth it, that losing the Senate for six years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that's at least honest. But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there. So, Elliot, here on Potomac Watch, we're happy to have honest and difficult conversations and consider our priors.

1:57The war in Iran was clearly unpopular, and voters think that it ties into elevated prices, particularly on gas. But a monocausal explanation for Tuesdays just seems impossible to credit. You don't lose every statewide office in Texas over frustrations on the Iran war. You don't see Democrats make gains in the Indiana State House because of the Iran war. And you don't see voters in South Carolina who elected Lindsey Graham three times turn on you because of the Iran war alone. And so what seems to have happened this week to me seems to be a larger rejection of the Trump modus vivendi, tariffs, immigration overreach, daily circuses, self-enrichment in Trump's orbit, the opera of the Kennedy Center.

2:38Voters wanted to repudiate it all. But start us off here, Elliot, by giving your sense of the politics and what we know about voters said on Tuesday. Was the war the reason that Republicans lost? The war was one of the reasons Republicans lost, and more specifically, the rise in gasoline prices, which is, of course, linked to the war, is one of those reasons. From what we can say, I think you're absolutely right. South Carolina, Texas, Mississippi, these are not known as hard anti-war states, certainly not isolationists. They stuck with President Bush through the Iraq war and so forth. But I think you can do a few things.

3:25You can look at President Trump's approval ratings over time. You can look at exit polls, what they tell us, and learn a few things about what contributed to this really massive loss. Okay, focus in on what voters say was the most important element to their vote, most crucial or most important in shaping how they voted. Number one, 90 % of voters saying corruption, governmental corruption fits that bill. Vice President Vance had nothing to say about that at all. Didn't mention it. Wasn't a part of his story. So it seems like that's a missing element. The number two element was cost of living. There you can say, okay, the war comes into it, but there are other factors as well.

4:16And how do we know that there are other factors? Because President Trump's approval rating on prices and on the economy were already at Joe Biden levels before this Iran war even started. And that's because of tariffs and of many other economic decisions and failures, even hangover from the Biden years. But all of that is before this war starts. And then after this war, you see those approval ratings decline even further. Tariffs, another factor that went completely unmentioned in J.D. Vance's answer. I think you can just also ask voters what they think of the Iran war. The answer, they don't like it.

5:05But by less of a margin than they don't like tariffs, by a very similar margin to their views about Trump immigration enforcement overreach. It seems there are several factors here that explain this, but when it comes to Vice President Vance, he has personal reasons, I think, and political reasons to want to focus on one factor only. I mean, add to your data points, the gas prices, that is the core of the issue that we're talking about where you really connect it with the board. And you do see polling that voters are connecting the dots. I think the Iran war is feeding into higher prices. But it doesn't seem like that's a sufficient explanation either.

5:46I mean, gas prices, when you adjust them for inflation, they are high, but they are at the same or lower than they were in the 22 midterms. And in those midterms, Joe Biden lost only nine seats. The gas prices theory of everything also seems insufficient. And then another kind of tidbit from the exit polling I was looking at, too, that I think is worth foot stomping. These same voters were asked in a Fox exit poll about their view of how should the United States act in the world? Should the U.S. take a more active role in the world? Should it step back? And more than 55 percent said same role in the world or more active.

6:20And that includes 75 percent of Republicans. So the idea that we've got some sort of mandate here for a dramatic exit from the Middle East and giving up on the war in Iran seems hard to credit. There is a coalition in Trump's base that part of Trump's coalition wants that. There is, you know, part of the MAGA base would like that. And I think the Vice President Vance, he wants to lock up that constituency. He wants to show here, ahead of a potential presidential run for 2028, that he speaks for that crowd. I want to ask one more thing on the politics, which is just his decision to include changing the U.S.

6:55relationship with Israel. Vance singled this out as one of four things that he thought really contributed to the defeat of Republicans. What information do we have on that? It's an odd thing to include based on what I understand from the exit polls of how little Israel itself seems to influence voters' decisions. The vice president could have just said the Iran war, but he went out of his way to say, actually, we are getting a mandate to change the U.S. relationship with Israel. Yeah, it's hard to make sense of unless you accept a few other extremely controversial, I would even say conspiratorial things, right?

7:32Because you have someone like Senator-elect Abdullah El-Sayed in Michigan saying that Netanyahu of Israel took Trump into this war. and that really this war is all about Israel and Trump was just fooled by the Israelis. So if you take that theory of the case, then you can blame the whole war on Israel. But that seems like a very strange theory for President Trump's own vice president to indulge, that he wasn't making his own choices, that he wasn't offering his own strategic analysis, his own America first vision. I thought that's what President Trump was supposed to be all about. So if you don't indulge that kind of theory, well then what are you looking at?

8:19You have exit polls showing that even foreign policy writ large was only the primary issue for 4 % of voters. No, they're focused on economic issues, questions of democracy and social issues. Their life, their mortgage with their kids, they're busy, right? They're not voting on the details of what Israel's up to, right? Precisely. And changing that U.S.-Israel military relationship or any other facet of a diplomatic relationship isn't going to change the life of a single American. It's not going to solve any of the social or economic problems. And so I think it's strange to assume that this would be a central issue, especially for Republican voters who remain broadly supportive of Israel.

9:09Hang tight. We'll be back in a moment with more Potomac Watch.

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10:32Welcome back to Potomac Watch. I'm chatting with my colleague, Elliot Kaufman. is the Iran war to blame for the Republican defeat this week. One other aspect of the vice president's post was he said, look, Trump said this himself last night, that this is why we lost. So we're going to play the president's remarks for our listeners and give them a sense of what the president did say after the midterms. Well, I knew the war was going to impact it, but whether it impacted or not, Iran can't have a nuclear weapon. No, but the vice president wrote a very lengthy post about how the war impacted the results last night.

11:06Did you know what was going to happen? I knew he was, I know how he feels about it. I think it was, I think it was fine. I thought it was good. We knew that. I know that. I knew that when I went in and we stopped them from having a nuclear weapon and they will never have a nuclear weapon. Have you spoken to the vice president? Yeah. About the FDA? What is it? I speak to him about a lot of things, but I mean, we'll see what happens. Everybody, you don't know who's talking about running. You can have people running. You can have a lot of people, maybe a lot of people running. Maybe nobody's going to run.

11:42Maybe he won't run. I don't know who's going to run. Well, Elliot, I think one interesting part of this debate has been whether the war was just unpopular from the jump. That's a Newtonian law of gravity. The American public were never going to accept that. And one sort of fascinating thing about Trump's response after his midterm election is he told the newspapers in an interview, I would do it again. One of my questions about that is why wasn't he making this argument in the first place that he was making a decision that was in the long-term interests of the country, that the Iranians, they have a cause that is larger than their own self-preservation.

12:20And And if they get a nuclear weapon, they will use it. So I guess it's unsatisfying to say that it's just a mere failure of salesmanship. But what do you look back on and look at as the real defining moments that kind of sealed the unpopularity of the war? Yeah, I think it is a lot more than a failure of salesmanship. But if you're asking, why didn't he feel the need to sell it in this way? I think the unfortunate answer is that he thought it wouldn't be necessary. He thought this was a quick war. When he announced it, he said four weeks. Then he said four to six weeks. Well, it's been months.

12:59I think he was looking at Venezuela, the experience there of a very quick success in and out. He was thinking of the 12-day war with Iran in which Israel and the US really seemed to confront a paper tiger in the form of the Iranian regime and was expecting the initial blows to be overwhelming. And then you could have a weeks-long campaign, and okay, you didn't need Congress's buy-in, you didn't need allies. Israel was part of it, was sort of fighting alongside the US, but you wouldn't need any other allies. And you wouldn't even necessarily need the US public. And that ended up proving a huge mistake, as we know.

13:44Wars don't always go as planned. Quick wars don't always stay quick. The enemy does get a vote. Once this dragged on, the question became what to do. Should the U.S. escalate? Should it take some kind of decisive action? Should it take more risk? Instead of doing everything from the air and using expensive standoff munitions, are there specific missions that might require special forces? Would the U.S. Navy become far more active in the Strait of Hormuz. And instead of making that decision quickly and embracing what was necessary to achieve US objectives, instead, the decision was made to pull back, have a ceasefire, which wasn't really a ceasefire, but the US wasn't accomplishing much from April, May, June.

14:38And then you get this memorandum of understanding, which promises Iran all kinds of sanctions, relief, And Iran just seeks to take advantage of it and claim ownership of the Strait of Hormuz. And so once the U.S. finally comes around to doing what was necessary to restore traffic in the strait, to impose this blockade and start winning the larger strategic fight, months and months had already passed and the war had already seemed aimless and unwinnable. It wasn't even clear what the objectives were to most Americans. And I mean, this connects directly with the gas prices issue. I mean, one of the reasons that gas prices are staying elevated is because of this continuing will we, won't we?

15:27Are we going back to finish the job? Are we driving our destroyers out of the Strait of Hormuz? That's not helping the fundamental price problem either. I agree that your analysis that the premature ceasefire in April, when it's quite obvious that the U.S. military wanted a few more weeks to continue to degrade military capability of Iranian was a mistake. But in thinking about the decision to go, one argument that the administration had that I think was compelling was that the Iranians are rebuilding their conventional missiles at such great numbers. And they're going to use this to basically as a shield around their nuclear ambitions.

16:02And the production number of those missiles was going up. The Iranians are trying to expand the reach of those conventional missiles so they can threaten more than just the Gulf allies. But the purpose of it was to create a wall around the nuclear program that eventually the U.S. wouldn't have the interceptor, missile defense interceptors, to deal with enough of them. And that if the U.S. were to do anything about the nuclear program, it would be just a much more painful, costly military operation to do so. So I take the point that it is hard to build public support for a military action that is not something that is imminently threatening the United States.

16:41But it is sometimes very advisable to do so and not to wait for threats to you to become dire and then deal with them. Now, Trump did not even try to make that case. The most effective critique of the war has been that it is a war of choice. Democrats say this all the time. And so why are we paying higher in gas for a war of choice, right? That is the argument right there. And it succeeds in part because there's some truth to it in that I think the Trump administration saw opportunity here, a generational opportunity when the Iranian regime had already been battered in June 2025. It seemed to be at its weakest point.

17:26Its own people had risen up. It had to resort to slaughtering its own people by the tens of thousands in the streets. Iran's air defenses were largely down. American war planners saw opportunity here to either take down or seriously degrade this regime, which had been more or less at war with America for 47 years. Okay, so that was the choice element. A strategic opportunity was found. But I think you're right to raise that there were elements of strategic necessity to it. Now, it's an indirect argument, right? Because the missile program could provide a shield for Iran to rebuild its nuclear program.

18:15There are a few conditionals in that statement, which make it a little bit trickier of an argument, but I think there is a real strategic logic there. The problem is, if that was the objective alone, you might want to say that. Now, at some points, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said it, but then he said other things and President Trump said other things. There were all kinds of different rationales offered. And finally, I would just say, if that is the real objective, then only attacking from the air and trying to hit these deep underground fortified missile cities has maybe not been the most effective approach.

18:58The US military has struggled to destroy Iranian missile capabilities buried deep underground. Now, they have been degraded. It has bought the US time on this question, and certainly hitting Iran's defense industrial base has helped a lot on that. Iran's missile growth has been slowed dramatically. But if you really want to destroy these missile cities, you are talking about other options, special forces raids, the use of troops in more risky ways. And there was never any appetite for that from the Trump administration. And when you haven't made the case to the American public, how can you take those risks with American lives?

19:45We're going to take one more quick break on Potomac Watch. everyone wants health care to be simpler and easier that's why united health group is fast tracking more than 60 percent of children's procedures that used to need pre-approval so more kids get the care they need when they need it and speeding up procedure approvals and payments for more than 1500 rural hospitals so they can focus on caring for their communities and that's just the start learn more at uhg.com access

20:19Don't forget, you can reach the latest episode of Potomac Watch anytime. Just ask your smart speaker. Play the Opinion Potomac Watch podcast.

20:31From the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch. And welcome back to the show. Keeping us grounded here in the results this week and the intellectual arguments this week, the vice president has put out this social media post now saying, hey, I oppose this. And now everyone in Washington understood that, that the vice president did not support the war. That's been featured in many media leaks about the war. But now, to get us forward to today, we have an ongoing, inconclusive conflict in the Middle East, and we have a member of the administration who is helping negotiate a potential end to that conflict, outright saying to our adversaries, we don't have the guts to keep fighting this conflict.

21:11We need to get out. It's costing us too much. It wasn't worth it. Is that tenable for him to stay in his position of prominence in the administration in dealing with the war's path forward when he's come out and shown his cards in favor of ending it? He's been leading our negotiations with Iran. Now, a huge part of that is being able to credibly threaten that the United States will finish the job by force if Iran doesn't make certain concessions in negotiations. It seems to me that Vice President Vance is no longer a credible or effective messenger for those threats because everyone knows he thinks that he has more to lose from them than Iran does.

21:58He thinks it has now been said publicly that his party needs out. And I would just call everybody's attention to, He didn't say the U.S. has to secure this and that term, and that could allow us to leave this war with honor, with some achievements, and so forth. He really made it sound like the U.S. has to take whatever deal it can get and run from it before the Republican Party, or he personally, pays more of a political price here. And so that undermines President Trump's position in negotiations. And President Trump's position had been strengthening, meaning when the memorandum of understanding was negotiated, we really needed Iranian concessions in the strait.

22:49We needed Iran to stop firing on ships. Since then, and since Iran broke that deal, the U.S. Navy has restored traffic in the Strait of Hormuz. More oil is getting out of the region than was before this war. So the U.S. position should be strengthening in negotiations. Instead, because of this midterm result, and in particular because of how Vice President Vance responded to it, I don't think the Iranians are going to be in any mood to budge on the key issues. Mm-hmm. To make any concessions, you know, when somebody is tweeting from inside the House that they think we need to wrap it up on the board, it seems hard to do that.

23:33And on the flip side of that, now you have this new large Democratic congressional majority, and we're getting a sense of their ambitions. Ro Khanna, the Democratic legislature, tweeted this week that he thinks that the Congress should do a funding bill that kind of bans any money being used for U.S. military action in Iran, just try to defund the troops, reduce the president's leverage at the negotiation table. There's now multiple constituencies in favor of that. But I want to ask about the path forward now for the president in Iran. He's taken this major beating in the elections, and he now has a kind of a menu of options.

24:11We know he has moved some U.S. military force into the region. We know that there are some in the administration who, like Vance, want to keep negotiating, try to get a deal, get out. There's also those in the administration arguing, to your point, the blockade is working. We should keep the pressure up. It hasn't actually been going on that long when you compare it to other U.S. actions like the tanker wars. Let's keep that pressure on. Let's assume that over time that puts enough pressure on the Iranian regime. And then I think under that path, inevitably, there are probably some strikes the U.S.

24:44has to do in the Strait of Hormuz to keep that project going. But then there's also an argument for trying to get a decisive outcome that is favorable to the United States and solves the problem of will he, won't he, what's he going to do here? So walk us through what do you think is most likely? And is there a decisive action course the president could take that would get him what he wants. In the end, that isn't just the military tactical success. That's a larger strategic success at this point. The way to think about this, I would say, is in terms of U.S. objectives. Okay? And that hasn't necessarily been the way the war has been talked about on either side.

25:27There's been a lot of talk on what you might call escalate to de-escalate. That let's hit them hard here because that will pressure them and then we can get a deal on better terms. So even as you're escalating, in many ways, you're making clear that you don't want to escalate, that you don't really want this fight. You just want the deal. And Iran's regime, its answer at every single point has been, we see right through you, that you don't want this fight. And indeed, Iranian regime publications have been writing for months now, we are going to cause Trump a huge loss in the midterms, and that will persuade him he has to give in on our terms.

26:15And so sure, they can hit us here, and they can hit us there, but we can outlast him. And so I want to get away from that escalate to de-escalate thinking and ask, what is the US objective? If it is solely focused on the Iranian nuclear program, then there are two main remaining assets which have not been touched in this war. Despite all the talk that this is about Iran's nuclear program, those two main assets have not been touched. And those are the deep underground potential enrichment site at Pickaxe Mountain. It is underneath a mountain. And there is Iran's stockpile of highly enriched uranium, which is buried, made inaccessible in the tunnels underneath the Esfahan complex in Iran.

27:10So those are the two. We're not looking at another bombing raid that can make this happen or pressuring Iran into handing it over, that's probably not going to work. What we are talking about is a more risky military special forces operation looking at those two sites. That's if the nuclear is the main objective. Is President Trump willing to accept more risk for a discrete mission focused on those two sites. If, however, the US objective is even greater, is overthrowing Iran's regime, then you could look at it as what are the means necessary for that? And there are two main arguments. One is a true military blitz, immense military force.

28:02The other one is don't go big, but go long. Maintain this naval blockade for as long as is necessary and make clear to Iran's regime that it will have no oil exports. It will have no trade as far as the US can shut that down over land, over plain, over sea, and cut it off one industry and one sector at a time until the pain is truly unbearable and there is no escape out of this. But what I think is less likely to work than those options is the idea that the US could signal, we're going to have a short, intense campaign, four days of strikes to show you that we really mean it, and then you will let us out of this.

28:54I don't think Iran's regime is going to let the US out of it. So it is now a question of what is the U.S. objective and is it willing to commit the force necessary to achieve it? What do you hear on how the administration is receiving its midterm loss in this portfolio? For instance, you know, some scuttlebutt about somebody will be made a scapegoat for the war's failures. I think a particular mistake in that category would be if Admiral Brad Cooper paid a price. He's the CENTCOM commander, who I think has done a very good, credible job explaining to the public exactly what U.S. forces are up to and how they've succeeded.

29:33And so I certainly wouldn't want to see that. But what do you hear about how the administration is absorbing the midterm feedback? Is it changing them kind of laid out here what they could do on the on the substance? Is it changing what they're going to do on the substance? And how will we measure that? How will we know when we see it? So a lot of the talk is that Pentagon Chief Pete Hegseth could be the fall guy for this. And in a way, he makes a strange fall guy because he wasn't as involved in a lot of these choices, as you would expect from a Pentagon chief. Now that right there could be a reason, meaning maybe he should have been more involved, but we're going to see that argument play out.

30:14On the substance of the war, what to do next? I think you have different factions. You have one faction that says the American people told us they don't like this, and therefore we have to listen. And this sign whatever deal we can get, even if that involves in practical terms, handing over the Strait of Hormuz. And that means handing it over to Iranian tolling and also Iranian domination, meaning Iran's regime can say on any day, no ships from this country can cross. Working with that is, I think, very, very difficult for the United States and for the international system writ large. And if any ship tries to take a different route, what happens when Iran fires on?

31:03So I'm not sure that simply signing this deal and simply giving in actually lets the United States out of the conflict without solving some of the core issues here. And voters are going to see through that. They're going to know that's a defeat. There's going to be no packaging that in a way that is good for the U.S. And so we've had a great conversation here. I thought maybe we would do some lessons learned of the U.S. midterms for foreign policy if we see that some of the wrong lessons are being learned. I think we've covered a couple which are don't start a war without the public's buy-in and reading them in.

31:35And if you do that, don't then change your position on the war or wrap it up prematurely. I think one thing to avoid absorbing from the midterm defeat is the idea that the U.S. president can never get the public's buy-in for sustained sacrifice or for objectives that matter to the United States. I don't see any evidence of that here. I think that what the public is expressing their frustration with is the way the war was conducted and the nebulousness of it. But what's your parting advice for Republicans taking all of this week's defeat in? You know, the way President Trump handled this war on a day-to-day basis, saying, I will, I won't, managing the markets, it seemed shrewd for a time that he could keep the price of oil contained, he could keep prices at the pump contained on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis.

32:25But ultimately, I think it was not shrewd. I think that that will he or won't we every single week of the war for months undermined the credibility of the entire mission. And it did so not only with American voters who were left saying, maybe we could be willing to pay higher prices, but for what? We're not sure if we're going to make a deal the next day and give away all those gains, or we're going to destroy Iranian civilization, as President Trump once said. What was it all for? I think it also undermined American credibility with Iran's regime and made it less likely to want out of this war and more likely to think that it could outlast us.

33:13And that right now is the question for the Trump administration, having received this midterm loss. Is it going to choose to interpret it in a very narrow way and say, let's ignore all the issues and just focus on this one and end up giving Iran's regime exactly what it wanted, end up vindicating the strategy of the Iranian regime. That's all for today on Potomac Watch. We'll be back on Friday with more to say.