Vance breaks with Trump over Iran: the war is already weighing on the ballot box

According to France 24, US Vice-President J.D. Vance distanced himself, on Wednesday 4 November, from the war in Iran waged by Donald Trump. He questions whether that decision was right, and attributes to the conflict the heavy setbacks the Republicans suffered the day before in the midterm elections. That is all the dispatch establishes. We do not know what exact words he used, nor what he proposes in their place. Nor whether the White House responded.

The rest is our reading.

A vice-president does not criticise his president out of mood. He does so when the political cost of a policy outweighs what it brings in. Here, the electoral verdict has landed, and the number two is looking for the exit. Cui bono? Not the population, which pays for the war in taxes, in anxiety and, for some, in lives. The dead of this conflict, whoever they are, do not appear in this dispatch, but they are the reality that campaign arithmetic papers over.

What is playing out, in our view, is a crack in the American ruling bloc. For Lenin, imperialism is born of the push of finance capital towards outlets, raw materials and spheres of influence. States divide the world and fight over shares. Sanctions, alliances, arms contracts: the political wrapping of these rivalries. But this ruling class is not a block of granite. One faction judges the war profitable. Another sees a bill, a risk, an electoral millstone. Vance speaks for the second, or wants to appear to.

Note the vocabulary. He does not contest, according to what France 24 reports, the principle of American power. He contests the expediency. A question of method, not of nature. It is the classic quarrel between managers of the empire: should one strike, or extract differently? When the political market turns, strategic scruples suddenly appear.

Be wary, too, of the narrative of contrition. Lenin noted how states cloak the defence of the predatory interests of "their" bourgeoisie in fine phrases about defending the homeland. The reverse also exists: one can drape oneself in prudence to prepare what comes next. A vice-president thinking about his future knows that one does not inherit an unpopular war with pleasure.

Who profits from the conflict? The dispatch does not say, and we will not invent anything. The question nonetheless remains the right one: which industrial, financial and military groups gain from prolonging it, and which lose from instability? As long as these interests diverge at the top, criticism flows. When they converge again, it falls silent.

The lesson for those below: do not mistake a split within the apparatus for a policy of peace. A leader's retreat in the face of the ballot box is not the end of a war. Only organised pressure, outside the campaign headquarters, can impose it.