Vice President JD Vance sat down with podcaster Joe Rogan and delivered the bluntest public case yet against regime change in Iran, warning that toppling Tehran’s government would send 94 million desperate people streaming toward Europe and the United States, and hand terrorist networks exactly the kind of failed-state chaos they need to rebuild.
The interview, published Wednesday on Fox News, also saw Vance take direct aim at hawkish Republicans he accused of trying to sabotage the administration’s diplomatic negotiations with Iran, and of deliberately lying about the terms of a memorandum of understanding that would channel $300 billion in Gulf-state investment into Iran.
The vice president did not name the hawks in question. He did not pull the punch, either.
Vance lays out the regime-change trap
Vance framed the argument in terms no foreign-policy realist could miss: the United States has run the regime-change experiment before, and the results are on the record. He pointed to Libya and Syria as twin case studies in what happens when Washington removes a government without a plan for what comes next.