JD Vance just admitted Trump's strategy is rotten to the core

As the US ceasefire with Iran hangs in the balance following another weekend of tit-for-tat hostilities between the two countries, Vice President JD Vance is articulating the view that whatever happens, “America wins either way”.

The man who is a heartbeat away from the presidency is touring the United States, promoting a new memoir about his decision to convert to the Catholic faith. Few interviews have been more toe-curling than his appearance on HBO’s weekly talk show hosted by comedian and political commentator Bill Maher.

“If we make the final deal, then great,” Vance said of ongoing negotiations with Iran that are now in significant jeopardy as the two sides accuse one another of breaching the 14-point Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed just over a week ago. “If we don’t make the final deal, their nuclear programme is still destroyed. They’re still much weaker as a country. So my attitude is America wins either way.”

New EU border checks should be suspended before peak summer, aviation industry leaders have said, after Brits reported huge delays due to the new Entry/Exit System (EES). 

The system, rolled out fully in April, involves people from the UK having their fingerprints registered and photographs taken to enter certain countries.

The EES is used to enter the Schengen Area, which consists of 29 European countries, mainly in the EU.

For most UK travellers, the process is done at foreign airports.

Severe operational consequences disrupting passengers and putting border authorities, airports and airlines under unsustainable pressure.

Senior figures at three major aviation industry bodies wrote to Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission warning waiting times at border control had “increased significantly, now reaching up to five hours”.

Since it’s implementation, the EES has caused travel chaos for Brits.

Russia launched a large-scale attack on Ukraine’s capital Kyiv with missiles and drones, killing at least 13 people and injuring dozens more.

Russia launched a series of strikes on Kyiv, hitting residential ⁠buildings and ⁠triggering ​a fire in a hotel on a central boulevard.

Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko has said 13 people had been killed, ⁠with about three dozen locations across the city damaged in the attacks.

Many residents took shelter at metro stations after the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, issued the first warnings of the attack.

Zelenskyy was forced to cut short a trip to Dublin on Wednesday, citing intelligence reports of a large-scale Russian attack.

Ukraine said on Tuesday it hit one of Russia’s largest satellite communication centers in north Moscow for the second time in just over a week.

Russian president Vladimir Putin also recently admitted Russia is facing fuel shortages after Ukraine launched repeated strikes on oil refineries, while Kyiv notably launched a large-scale attack on Moscow last month.

Sir Keir Starmer’s much-delayed Defence Investment Plan had one big bet at its heart: drones are the future of warfare.

American company Anduril makes the “Seabed Sentry“- a weighted cylinder that uses sensors and AI to monitor what is happening under the sea. They could be used to listen out for spying and sabotage by Russian submarines. They are far cheaper than crewed submarines using traditional sonar.

A dozen of the cylinders can be dropped onto the seabed at a time by an autonomous submarine, with the devices forming a network which communicate between themselves and listens out for undersea activity.

The UK is woefully unprepared with the Royal Navy in a desperate condition. Whoever sits in Downing Street come next September will need to address matters of defence, homeland and cyber defence especially, with urgency.

Officials have drawn up contingency plans to cut further green levies from energy bills if prices remain high this winter, The i Paper has been told.

Several options are now circulating among Burnham’s transition team who are believed to be weighing up how to deliver on that pledge. A Treasury source said work on a package was ongoing to help with rising costs.

Burnham could remove remaining green levies from energy bills, funded through general taxation instead.

One proposal would be to raise the bank surcharge from its current 3 per cent.

Replace stamp duty, loosen fiscal rules and tax the capital gains uplift on inherited assets.

A written statement published by the Chancellor said the remaining sum would be “confirmed at Budget 2026, in a fair and balanced way”.

The coronation of Andy Burnham is fraught with dangers. Never will a prime minister have arrived in Downing Street with so little scrutiny of what he wants to do.

Electric flying taxis could be above the streets of London by 2028, a manufacturer has claimed. Here’s what you need to know.

Vertical Aerospace is still testing the aircraft and it will need to be approved by both the approval from the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) and the European Aviation Safety Authority (EASA). But the company says the aim is for air taxis to become as cheap and convenient as ordering an Uber to the airport.

It is always tempting to look at life through rose-tinted spectacles. While the Vice President’s claim might make good material for a satirical monologue on late night TV, the administration’s critics argue it does not contain the ingredients for a mature national security strategy.

At a stroke, Vance revealed the hollow nature of President Donald Trump’s existing agreement with the Iranians and raised fresh questions about why the war on Iran was ignited on 28 February.

If the 60 days of negotiations set in train by the MOU do not bear fruit, then Iran’s nuclear programme will not have been “destroyed” – unless you believe Trump’s claims that he succeeded in obliterating Iran’s nuclear programme a year ago during “Operation Midnight Hammer”.

That operation last July is now a millstone around the administration’s neck, because Trump also claimed the whole point of this year’s “Operation Epic Fury” was the urgent need to destroy an Iranian nuclear programme the President claims was suddenly a fortnight away from being able to target Europe and the US.

Either the Iranians have got a nuclear weapons programme or – as US intelligence contends – they have not. But the notion that “America wins either way” flies in the face of logic. Failed negotiations would certainly leave Iran in possession of a significant stockpile of highly enriched uranium that remains buried deep in the country’s mountainsides, though it would be hard and dangerous to access it.

Perhaps sensing the pickle in which he had placed himself, Vance took to his social media accounts on Friday night and adopted a new position. “Iran signed a ceasefire agreement. We have honoured it. If they have disagreements about how the MOU is being applied, they can pick up the phone. But violence will be met with violence,” he warned.

That tough-guy language appears designed to appeal to his boss, a president who spent the weekend threatening to “militarily complete the job” and wipe out Iran. But the notion that the country can just “pick up the phone” is not entirely factual, given that Pakistani and Qatari negotiators have spent the past week trying to establish a hotline between Tehran and Washington that has not yet borne fruit.

The Qatari Prime Minister described the hotline as essential to counter “disinformation” being promulgated by “people who will try to sabotage” negotiations by making false threats to shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard is currently rejecting the idea.

It was not only on Iran that Vance twisted himself up into a pretzel during his interview with Maher. The comedian also challenged the Vice President over Trump’s position that the only free and fair elections in America are those that Republicans win. “That shit has got to stop,” Maher told Vance.

But the Vice President offered his host no assurances, and instead voiced claims that in the 2020 election, “technology companies were putting their thumb on the scale in a way that completely obliterated the real open exchange of facts”. He argued that Joe Biden’s election victory was achieved after unidentified tech companies “were quite literally censoring negative information about the left and promoting negative information about the right”.

None of those claims has ever stood up in any American court.

Vance’s remarks suggest that it remains impossible for anyone in Trump’s inner circle to publicly accept that Republicans could fairly lose this November’s midterm elections. That fuels the possibility of a major constitutional clash at the end of the year if – as they expect – the Democrats romp to victory.

The Vice President’s continuing genuflection before Trump makes it clear: if push comes to shove, Vance will make no attempt to protect the sanctity of American democracy.