Vance discovers the Iran war costs votes, not just lives

According to the Guardian, JD Vance said on Wednesday that the war against Iran was the "real reason" for the Republican defeat in the midterm elections, widely read as a repudiation of the Trump presidency. Still according to the British daily, the position signals that the vice-president, for a time the face of the administration's efforts to negotiate with Tehran, is seeking to distance himself from an unpopular conflict as he eyes a possible run for the White House in 2028.

That is all the dispatch says. It gives neither the election figures, nor the human toll of the war, nor any detail of the operations. We will not invent them. The civilians and soldiers who pay for this conflict deserve better than approximations. That leaves the question of structure, and it is simple: who profits from the war, and who answers for it?

First reading, our own: Vance is not conducting an examination of conscience, he is doing a calculation. He does not say the war is unjust or illegal. He says it is bad for the party. The objection is electoral, not moral. When a leader discovers that imperialism is expensive, it is rarely because he has read the critique. It is because the poll has spoken.

Second reading. For Lenin, the rivalry of great powers for hegemony aims not only at territory as such, but at weakening the adversary and its positions. The Middle East is the classic illustration: resources, routes, bases, alliances. Sanctions, arms contracts and military pacts are, as our notes on finance and imperialism summarise, the political envelope of economic rivalries. Nothing in the dispatch documents these specific interests in the present case. But it would be naive to believe that the general staff, the arms suppliers and the investors watch the ballot with the same eye as the voter who pays for petrol and buries his loved ones.

Third point: consent. Gramsci spoke of hegemony, that domination which holds as much through adherence as through force. A war requires that common sense accept it. When that common sense cracks, the state does not change its nature, it changes its face. The vote punishes a policy here, not the system that produced it. And this is where Vance shows his skill: he offers a scapegoat, the war, to save the essentials, the party.

Fourth point, the most bitter. Luxemburg warned against those who mistake a concession for a victory. An electoral setback is not the end of a war. It can produce a tactical retreat, a negotiation, a new wrapping. It dismantles neither the arms industry nor the logic of power. The question to put to the newly elected will be concrete: will they vote for budgets, restrictions, accountability? Or will they be content to manage what comes next?

What we do not yet know: the exact scale of the defeat, the military future of the conflict, Trump's real position towards his vice-president. What we do know: when war becomes an electoral liability, its promoters suddenly discover their pacifism. Caution. Calendar pacifism has rarely saved anyone.