WASHINGTON — Vice President JD Vance told Breitbart News exclusively that all of the critics from every direction of President Donald Trump, after his massive success in ending the “12-day war” between Israel and Iran, culminating with U.S. airstrikes on Iranian nuclear sites, need to just “let him cook.”
“President Trump just pulled the Middle East hat trick: Destroyed Iran’s nuke program, no quagmire, pathway to peace,” Vance told Breitbart News. “Let him cook.”
Vance phoned Breitbart News on Tuesday afternoon from the road as he sets out to conduct a series of interviews explaining the new “Trump Doctrine” of foreign policy that he says the president displayed this past two weeks. The war ended in Trumpian fashion on Tuesday morning after the president had ordered U.S. airstrikes from B2 bombers and other platforms to wipe out Iranian nuclear sites on Saturday. That Trump decision for U.S. involvement came a little over a week after Israel began its own strikes on the Islamic Republic of Iran’s leadership and nuclear sites, and then in response the Iranians fired off a handful of missiles at a U.S. base in Qatar that claimed no casualties. A short time later, Trump announced late Monday that he brokered a ceasefire between Iran and Israel set to begin early Tuesday and despite both sides fighting it out to the very bitter deadline—and according to Trump, both sides violating it in the middle of the night after the deadline—the president was able to hold the ceasefire together and force each side to truly deescalate. The war, which Trump has dubbed the “12-day war,” is now officially over—and Vance credits Trump’s approach to foreign policy as the driving force behind the success.
“So if you go back to the first Trump administration—I was actually reading some of his speeches and he’s been very consistent throughout his entire administration that we can engage in America’s national security interest,” Vance told Breitbart News. “We can do big things to accomplish that interest. We can even, if we have to, use overwhelming military power to accomplish an American security goal but then we can get out. We don’t have to have mission creep. We don’t have to let a limited military operation turn into a five year war. And what I think is kind of amazing is that the President threaded the needle between two camps, people who were so worried about a Middle Eastern quagmire that they, frankly, would have let Iran have a nuclear weapon, and people who are so obsessed with what’s going on in the Middle East that they would have happily put 100,000 American boots on the ground. I think what the President said very clearly is number one, Iran getting a nuke is not going to happen. So he defined the national interest very clearly. Number two, he used diplomacy aggressively to try to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. And, number three, when that diplomacy—he felt like it wasn’t going anywhere—he used overwhelming military force to obliterate the nuclear program of Iran. I think just that sequencing, ‘hey everybody, number one, here’s our national interest, number two, let me try to see what I can do through diplomacy, but hell, number three, if diplomacy fails that I will use the overwhelming might of the American military.’ I think what makes it so powerful is that it creates clear lines. Everybody knows exactly what we’re going to do. I think for the American people, they understand what he’s trying to accomplish. He’s sort of telling them, ‘hey, I’m the president, I’ve got access to this classified intelligence. Here’s what I think that we need to do for our own people.’ And then he backs it up with action. So people aren’t they don’t think they can kind of stream along in international diplomacy, they know, if they’re going to do diplomacy with Donald Trump, they have to be serious about it.”
Vance noted too that Trump had to, not because of anything he did but because of a lack of trust many have in the U.S. government and its various institutions like the military and intelligence agencies due to failures of political leaders from both parties dating back the past 30 years, navigate a world of influencers skeptical about use of the U.S. military but also those pushing for far more. Trump struck the perfect balance, he said, effectively establishment what Vance called the “Trump Doctrine.”
“First of all, we inherited a mess. We inherited Iran marching towards a nuclear weapon. Had the President not destroyed that program, I really think that Iran would have had incredible leverage over the United States and could have been a destabilizing force all over the world,” Vance said. “That’s why it matters so much. You think about how much prosperity, how much trade, how much private investment we’re talking about getting from the UAE and from Saudi Arabia. Well, that’s not going to happen [if Iran has a nuke]. All that great peace and prosperity is not going to happen if Iran has a nuclear weapon and is able to bully these guys, and so President Trump just cut this off. That was a very profound thing. But had we not had the Biden and Obama presidencies, then the Iran nuclear program wouldn’t have been in such an advanced shape. But it is what it is. He inherited a mess. He fixed the mess. He inherited a house with some very serious problems. He repaired the problems with Iran. I think now we’re on to other things. The other thing that’s very interesting about all this to me, is you’re right. A lot of the people who are very skeptical about our involvement—about doing anything with regards to the Iranian nuclear program—they’re good people. I understand their concerns about a Middle Eastern quagmire, but I think they forgot that Donald Trump is the president not Dick Cheney. There’s a lot that can be accomplished when you have strong, decisive presidential leadership, as opposed to the kind of presidential leadership where you meander into a foreign war and you kind of get stuck there.”
By standing up against those folks, but also the folks on the other extreme calling for “regime change,” Vance said that Trump was able to reorient U.S. foreign policy for the next generation. Vance said he thinks the “Trump Doctrine” will be followed by leaders of both parties, too, not just Republicans, for the next several years to come.
“The President was very clear, ‘we’re doing this to end Iran’s nuclear program. We’re not trying to change the regime. We’re not trying to create democracy. We’re not trying to turn Iran into Wisconsin, we’re destroying their nuclear program—and once we do that, we’re out,’” Vance said. “I think setting that clear mission, accomplishing that clear mission with overwhelming force, and then being willing to say ‘we’re done’—all three of those things are very, very important, and I see them as the critical piece of the Trump Doctrine. By the way, just one final point on this, I think the Trump doctrine is going to become the dominant force in American foreign policy, not just Republican foreign policy. I think that people are going to take this approach very clearly, defining our interest, trying to use diplomacy, then overwhelming military force when diplomacy fails. Frankly, that’s what we should have been doing for the past 50 years, but like with so many issues President Trump is the person who kind of brought common sense back to another major American set of ideas and this time it’s foreign policy.”
Because of this new doctrine’s success, too, Vance argues that Americans are likely beginning to rebuild the shattered trust in those various institutions—a lack of trust that was originally caused by failures from presidents of both parties the past several decades, from Republicans like George H.W. Bush and his son George W. Bush to Democrats like Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden.
“I really do. I think our confidence is coming back,” Vance said when asked if Trump is restoring American faith in these institutions. “I think people are starting to realize that you can have a president who does what he says and actually accomplishes something rather than just getting involved in stupid government action that doesn’t accomplish anything. I think so much of what has happened over the past five or six administrations in the past, so much of what’s happened over the past 30 years, is that every time our government does something it tends to screw it up. Well, under President Trump’s leadership, we’re doing a lot and we’re accomplishing a lot and we’re not screwing it up—we’re actually acting decisively and effectively, and that’s such a departure. But I think the net effect is it gives people confidence that America can still do great things. That may be the enduring legacy of President Trump’s administration is, ‘yes, the American people can still do great things, even after 40 years of a lot of bad decisions from, frankly, a bipartisan consensus in both foreign and domestic policy,’ and when I say ‘do great things’ I mean that at the same moment the President is obliterating the Iranian nuclear program and enforcing this new path to peace he’s also working on immigration and he’s also meeting with senators to get the Big, Beautiful Bill over the finish line. This is a guy who, yesterday, was negotiating an end to a war, working with senators to get his major legislation passed, working on cutting taxes on tips and on overtime and not to mention keeping the foot on the gas on the immigration policy which is why we have the lowest illegal immigration numbers that we’ve had in a generation. All this is happening simultaneously. So there’s just this sense of momentum and action, like we elected a guy to do a job, but he’s actually doing it—and he’s empowering his people to go and get a lot accomplished. That’s a really fun place to come to work, but I think the American people are seeing that they don’t have to accept a government that does nothing. They can actually elect people to do a job and expect that it’s going to get done again.”
Vance also pointed out that when it comes to illegal immigration, the numbers are now net negative if one adds up the fact that there are zero new border crossers combined with the deportations currently underway.
“If you look at the immigration numbers, we now have net negative immigration numbers,” Vance said. “That means deportations are higher than the number of immigrants that we’re letting in. That hasn’t been true in a very, very long time. What that means is that, on the one hand, the President has stopped the flow of illegal immigration. On the other hand, we’re actually deporting a lot of the people who came in during the Biden illegal immigrant invasion. So what’s happening here is, one minute, he’s working on cease fires. The other minute, he’s working on destroying Iran’s nuclear program. The next minute, he’s ensuring that we eliminate the effects of the Biden border invasion. Pretty successful Monday in the Trump White House, but I think it illustrates just the kind of job that we’re all doing under his leadership.”
