Vance: We have options if Iran tries to rebuild nuclear program, but we won’t needlessly drop bombs

Addressing troops at a naval air base in Virginia, US Vice President JD Vance says Iran’s nuclear program has been set back decades thanks to American military strikes against it.

“If you look at what our own intelligence says about their nuclear program, they are further away from developing a nuclear bomb than they have ever been since basically the last 20 or 30 years,” Vance says, stopping short of US President Donald Trump’s claim that Iran’s nuclear program has been “totally obliterated.”

“What the president asks you to accomplish is to destroy the defense industrial base of that country, so that if they ever decided to rebuild their military, or if they ever decided to rebuild that nuclear program, they would be harmless to do it. You did that exactly as well,” Vance tells the US troops.

Vance claims Trump is now “negotiating from a position of strength because of you.”

“If the Iranians try to rebuild the nuclear program, the President’s got options. If the Iranians try to threaten their neighbors or fund terrorism, we’ve got options.”

“But what we must never do is drop bombs just for the sake of dropping bombs. And that is what the president will never ask you to do,” Vance continues.

“He’ll ask you to go to war, yes. But when he asks you to go to war, he’ll tell you exactly what you’re going for. And I think that is what you should expect out of your political leadership,” the vice president says.

“What I noticed about the people who are attacking the administration for negotiating is that they are the very same people who, for example, encouraged us to just go a little bit further and just drop a few more bombs in places like Afghanistan. If you go back to the mistakes that were made, those very same people refused to say what we were dropping bombs for.”

But the Trump administration has, in fact, come under fire for what critics say have been unclear goals in the Iran war. The Trump administration has asserted that it launched the war primarily to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, even though the president has also claimed to have completely destroyed Iran’s nuclear program in strikes a year ago.

Vance doesn’t go as far as to say that the US shouldn’t use military force.

“We dropped some bombs a couple of days ago… Because the Iranians were shooting at commercial ships… We applied some leverage, and we’ve had free commercial transit for the last three days,” Vance claims.