Jonah Goldberg
Role at the time: CNN political commentator, on CNN's The Arena with Kasie Hunt
Response to this claim
Vice President JD Vance said he would not call the U.S. fight with Iran a war, saying there is no active shooting right now and that major combat operations lasted about six weeks.
“we're at war whether or not he says he likes the word or not because we're doing a naval blockade of Iran and that is an act of war. One of the games they play is they like to say it's not a war, the war is over in part because they want the narrative to go away and for people to talk about other things ... I don't know which narrative is more important to J.D. Vance, but both are false because we're at war with Iran.”
CNN's rush transcript of CNN's The Arena with Kasie Hunt for September 3, 2026, aired at 4 p.m. ET. Hunt plays Vance's briefing answer and asks a panel about it. CNN captions Goldberg as a CNN political commentator. CNN marks the transcript as possibly not in its final form.
Why we used this label
The reference point is Vance's statement that he would not call the fighting a war. Goldberg gives a different description, "we're at war", and calls the not-a-war claim one of the "games they play" and "false". He rejects the statement as false rather than only offering a different label, so condemns fits better than challenges the characterization.