Iran and Israel lead off vice-presidential debate

The U.S. vice-presidential debate on Tuesday night between Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, kicked off with a question about Iran’s ballistic-missile attack on Israel earlier that day.

The moderator, Margaret Brennan of CBS, asked the candidates if they would support the Jewish state making a preemptive strike on Iran’s nuclear program.

A visibly nervous Walz didn’t answer the question directly.

“Israel’s ability to be able to defend itself is absolutely fundamental, getting its hostages back, fundamental, and ending the humanitarian crisis in Gaza,” Walz said. “What’s fundamental here is that steady leadership is going to matter.”

“A nearly 80-year-old Donald Trump talking about crowd sizes is not what we need in this moment,” Walz added. “It’s those that were closest to Donald Trump that understand how dangerous he is when the world is this dangerous.”

Throughout the night, Walz appeared to make some verbal errors. Apparently meaning Iran, he referred to “the expansion of Israel and its proxies.” He later responded to a question about gun violence by saying, “I’ve become friends with school shooters,” seeming to mean with the families of victims of school shootings.

In his answer to the question about attacking Iran, Vance said he would defer to Israel.

“It is up to Israel what they think they need to do to keep their country safe,” he said. “We should support our allies wherever they are when they’re fighting the bad guys.”

Vance also accused the Biden-Harris administration of enabling the attack through its Iran policies.

“Iran, which launched this attack, has received over $100 billion in unfrozen assets thanks to the Kamala Harris administration,” he said. “What do they use that money for? They use it to buy weapons that they’re now launching against our allies and, God forbid, potentially launching against the United States as well.”

That dollar figure appears to refer to estimates of total Iranian oil sales since U.S. President Joe Biden took office in 2021.

Critics accuse the Biden administration of failing to enforce existing U.S. sanctions on Iranian oil sales. Those sales reached a 40-year low during the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran in 2020 but have since recovered during the Biden administration.

Walz, in turn, blamed former President Donald Trump for letting Iran get closer to a nuclear weapon when he withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal—formally the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA—in May 2018.

“We had a coalition of nations that had boxed Iran’s nuclear program in the inability to advance it,” Walz said. “Donald Trump pulled that program and put nothing else in its place. So Iran is closer to a nuclear weapon than they were before because of Donald Trump’s fickle leadership.”

Iran and Israel took up only a small part of the nearly two-hour-long debate, which focused primarily on domestic issues and the records of the prospective bosses of the two candidates.

Vance was frequently the more polished and articulate of the two debaters, with Walz acknowledging that he sometimes misspeaks during an answer to a question about why he had claimed falsely to have been in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square Massacre in Beijing in 1989.

“I’ve not been perfect,” Walz said. “I’m a knucklehead at times.”

The two potential vice presidents were generally cordial with one another, shaking hands before and after the debate, and acknowledging their points of agreement on policy issues. Even so, the moderators cut off their microphones during one exchange about immigration law.

In one of the more revealing answers of the evening, Vance said that the American people had lost confidence in the Republican Party on the question of abortion and reproductive rights.

“As a Republican who proudly wants to protect innocent life in this country, who proudly wants to protect the vulnerable is that my party—we’ve got to do so much better of a job at earning the American people’s trust back on this issue where they frankly just don’t trust us,” he said.

“I want us, as a Republican Party, to be pro-family in the fullest sense of the word. I want us to support fertility treatments. I want us to make it easier for moms to afford to have babies. I want it to make it easier for young families to afford a home, so they can afford a place to raise that family,” he said. “I think there’s so much that we can do on the public policy front just to give women more options.”

The vice-presidential debate is likely the last chance that the voting public will have to hear the national candidates of the two opposing parties square off on a stage. Trump repeated his rejection on Tuesday of debating Harris a second time.

“I beat Biden. I then beat her, and I’m not looking to do it again, too far down the line,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. “Votes are already cast. And I’m leading big in the polls.”