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Vance on Iran: ‘If you’re going to punch the Iranians, you punch them hard’

Trump’s running mate, in a new Fox News interview, praised Trump’s decision to assassinate Qassem Soleimani

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) talks to reporters during votes on foreign aid legislation.

MILWAUKEE — Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), the newly minted running mate of former President Donald Trump, is embracing a hawkish approach to American engagement in the Middle East.

Speaking with Fox News on Monday evening, the vice presidential hopeful laid out an aggressive path to countering Iran, arguing that Trump’s decision to assassinate Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in 2020 had “actually brought peace” to the region rather than instability, as critics had warned.

“If you’re going to punch the Iranians, you punch them hard,” Vance said in an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity in Milwaukee, where the Republican National Convention began on Monday.

Reiterating his commitment to expanding the Abraham Accords, which he described as “maybe the most important diplomatic breakthrough of the Trump administration,” Vance expressed support for creating conditions to “enable the Israelis and the Sunni Arab states to work together and actually provide a counterbalance to Iran.”

The Biden administration, he claimed, “has done nothing” to advance such efforts, even as it has long worked to strike a diplomatic agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which Vance has backed.

Vance also criticized President Joe Biden’s handling of the war between Israel and Hamas, alleging that his administration has “prolonged” the conflict and has “made it harder for us to really move towards a sustainable peace.”

Echoing Trump, Vance, 39, called for ending the war “as quickly as possible” to help “reinvigorate” the “peace process between” Israel and the Saudis.

The first-term Ohio senator has generally espoused an isolationist message while in the Senate — most notably on the war in Ukraine, which he does not view as vital to American national security interests.

But in recent months, Vance has more openly sought to carve out an exception for Israel and the Middle East, amid concerns from some pro-Israel donors and GOP hawks who have raised questions over the consistency of his America First foreign policy views. In a May speech, he differentiated between his criticism of funding Ukraine and his self-avowed commitment to Israel in its war with Hamas.

Like several members of his populist cohort, Vance, an Iraq War veteran, has long voiced skepticism of costly foreign entanglements in the Middle East, while advocating for a more hawkish posture toward China.

“My basic foreign policy,” he said in an interview with Jewish Insider in 2021 during his first Senate campaign, “is that Americans have to be a little bit more humble about what we can accomplish in the Middle East, and importantly, what we can accomplish in the world.”

But in the same interview, Vance also explained that he has always regarded Israel as a unique exception to that assessment, a view he is seeking to promote more aggressively now that he has joined Trump as his running mate.

“I think there are things that we can do with Israel that we just can’t successfully do with other countries, and we should have a little bit of humility about that fact,” Vance told JI three years ago. “I’ve always thought we should be more willing to help Israel. We should recognize that it’s sort of an island of shared values in a sea of really despotic regimes, and that’s important.”

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