“I wouldn’t call it a war,” Vance told reporters at a White House press briefing, the first since Karoline Leavitt stepped down as press secretary last month. “Right now, there is no active shooting.”
More than six months later, that distinction has become increasingly difficult to sustain. The United States has repeatedly bombed targets inside Iran as Tehran attacks commercial shipping vessels through the Strait of Hormuz, contributing to higher energy prices.
He said Operation Epic Fury, the large-scale campaign that followed last year’s Operation Midnight Hammer, lasted roughly six weeks. The earlier operation, he said, destroyed Iranian nuclear facilities, while Epic Fury severely damaged Iran’s conventional military and its ability to produce weapons and rebuild its nuclear program.
The answer underscored the open-ended nature of a conflict that Trump and others in the Administration repeatedly predicted would be brief. As recently as Wednesday, the President said he did not believe it would last “much longer.” But his Administration is simultaneously intensifying economic pressure on Iran, maintaining a naval blockade, and reserving the option of further military strikes if Iran attacks American interests or interferes with commercial shipping.
In March, Trump openly acknowledged that referring to the conflict as “war” carried legal significance because Congress had not authorized it. “I won’t use the word ‘war’ because they say, if you use the word war, that’s maybe not a good thing to do,” he told House Republicans at the time. “They don’t like the word ‘war,’ because you’re supposed to get approval, so I’ll use the word ‘military operation,’ which is really what it is.”
Economic and military pressure
Vance said Thursday that the administration would not rely on Iran to negotiate in good faith and would instead use whatever tools it considered necessary to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to protect global energy markets.
Vance acknowledged the pain of higher gasoline prices but argued that they could have risen substantially more without American intervention in Iran. “Gas, frankly, could have been much, much higher were it not for our efforts,” he said. He declined to predict when prices might return to around $3 a gallon, saying the more important objective was ensuring “that Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapon.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said this week that the Administration expected the principal pressure on Iran going forward to be economic, while reserving the right to use military force when necessary.
Iranian uprising
When asked by TIME on Thursday whether the Trump Administration was considering arming Iranian dissidents or providing them with other direct assistance, Vance declined to provide more details. “Everything that could happen is on the table: economic pressure, military pressure, diplomatic pressure, covert pressure,” he said. “Of course, these are tools in the President's toolkit.”
The renewed American bombing has also brought fresh scrutiny of civilian casualties. Iranian authorities said a U.S. strike this week hit a wedding celebration in Sirik in southern Iran, killing at least five people and wounding scores more, including women and children. A New York Times visual analysis and a weapons expert concluded that the wedding was struck by a bomb released by American forces during attacks in the area.
“Obviously, sometimes things happen,” he added. “When our military makes mistakes, they learn from them to try to get better from them, so we’re investigating it very fully.”
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