The war with Iran has had an official reason for six months: the bomb. On Thursday, the vice president of the United States published the real ranking. J.D. Vance, speaking on Fox News, put the aims of the war in order. He said the first goal was keeping oil and gas cheap for Americans across the country, and the second was ensuring Iran never gets a nuclear weapon.
No American official has stated the priorities of this war more plainly. The order is the story. The price of gasoline outranks the atomic program. The administration that went to war saying Iran’s nuclear work was the one thing it could not tolerate has now told the country, and told Tehran, that the first goal of the fighting is the price at the pump. The nuclear program is still the official reason. The oil is the actual goal number one.
The ranking contradicts the administration’s own sales pitch. President Trump has repeatedly described the war’s sole objective as preventing a nuclear Iran, even at short-term economic cost to Americans. Vance’s arithmetic inverts that. He acknowledged the economic dimension of the war with unusual candor, saying the administration sometimes focused on energy so Americans could afford the price of oil and gas, and sometimes on the military and the nuclear program. He noted that oil was well below the highs of the early days of the conflict, and declared Trump at the height of his authority, with many tools, diplomatic, military and economic.
The ranking explains the conduct of the war. The blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, the economic pressure campaign, the stalled talks: all of it makes sense once the first goal is cheap oil. The diplomatic path is blocked because both sides are holding to their own conditions for reopening the waterway, and the waterway is the price. On Friday, oil prices rose again after Washington threatened an indefinite blockade and promised Tehran economic measures of a kind never seen before. The administration’s goal number one is set by its own escalation. The war spiked the price; the war’s first goal is now to undo the damage the war did.
The candor is also a message to Iran. If goal one is cheap oil and goal two is no bomb, then the negotiation that ends this war will be about the strait and the barrels, not the centrifuges. Tehran has its own list: sanctions lifted, assets returned, payment for the damage of the fighting. Washington’s list, as ranked by its vice president, starts with the American price of gasoline. The two lists can meet. That is the real news in Vance’s sentence: the deal this war produces, whenever it comes, will be priced in oil, and the nuclear program will be the clause that lets both sides call it a victory.
There is a reason the ranking was spoken by Vance rather than by the president. Vance has been the administration’s most open skeptic of the offensive that began in late February. His remarks were framed as a statement of policy, and they track with the shift toward economic pressure as the military options narrow: American media report that stocks of some missiles and drones are running down. The vice president’s goal number one is also the practical goal. If the missiles are limited, the blockade is the weapon that remains.
None of this makes the war cheaper for the people fighting it. Iran’s economy is under siege, American households are paying the price the war itself raised, and the strait carries about a fifth of the world’s traded oil. The ranking of aims does not end the war. It only says what the war is for. The president sold the war on the bomb. The vice president has now told the truth about the order of things, and the order is this: first the pump, then the bomb, and the distance between them is where the deal will be found.
Sources: The Hindu, NBC News, Al-Monitor, Anadolu Agency, The Independent