Vance says Iran fight isn’t a ‘war’ as Trump tries to navigate unpopular conflict as election nears — SkimNews
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- JD Vance rejected the word 'war' to describe the six-month-old U.S.-Iran conflict at a White House briefing Thursday, declining to predict it would end before the Nov. 3 midterm elections and saying he didn't know when Iran would 'stop shooting at ships.'
- Iran fired at U.S. Gulf ally Kuwait on Thursday while continuing retaliation for earlier U.S. strikes, which Vance defended as a 'responsibility' because Iran keeps targeting commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz.
- The Trump administration in July reclassified four fallen soldiers and dozens of wounded troops into a new 'Overseas Operations' category after a brief U.S.-Iran ceasefire collapsed, moving them out of Pentagon war casualty tallies.
- Brent crude hovered above $95 per barrel on Thursday, up from roughly $72 the day before the conflict began, while independent trackers showed Strait of Hormuz ship traffic at 102 transits last week — well below 130-plus per day before the war.
- Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the Strait of Hormuz will become 'a worthless piece of water' within two years as new land pipelines bypass the energy chokepoint, and Trump highlighted Syria's Baniyas port as a westward export route.
- Iran and Oman have recently held talks on a phased approach to jointly managing ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz — an arrangement analysts said Trump would be unlikely to accept given the IRGC's leverage.
- Analysts Richard Goldberg and Aaron David Miller said Trump has settled into a midterm-era holding pattern, avoiding both full-throttle bombardment of Iran and any concessions on the strait.
Why it matters: The word-dodge is matched by bookkeeping: in July the administration literally reclassified fallen and wounded troops out of war casualty totals even as Brent crude sits above $95 (up from $72 pre-conflict) and independent trackers show Hormuz traffic still well below pre-war levels. For voters heading to the polls Nov. 3, the conflict won't officially read as a 'war' on Pentagon ledgers, even as Iran is simultaneously opening a diplomatic channel with Oman over the same waterway.
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