Axios reports:

MAGA’s ascendant “America First” wing erupted after Secretary of State Marco Rubio effectively blamed Israel for drawing the U.S. into war with Iran.

Why it matters: Rubio’s remarks were the first time a Trump official had so explicitly acknowledged Israel as a driving force behind the war — landing at a moment when Americans’ public support for Israel has hit historic lows.

“We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action” against Iran, Rubio told reporters on Capitol Hill on Monday. “We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces” by the Iranian regime.

• “And we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties … And then we would all be here answering questions about why we knew that and didn’t act,” Rubio continued.
• Rubio added later: “Obviously, we were aware of Israeli intentions and understood what that would mean for us, and we had to be prepared to act as a result of it.  But this had to happen no matter what.”

The widely repeated translation: The U.S. couldn’t stop its ally — a far smaller nation that America arms, funds and protects — from attacking Iran on Saturday. So the U.S. had to strike Iran, too. [Continue reading…]

Politico reports:

In January 2023, then-Senator JD Vance took to the Wall Street Journal op-ed page to announce his early support for Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election. The primary reason for his support, he claimed, was that Trump “started no wars.”

“In Mr. Trump’s four years in office, he started no wars despite enormous pressure from his own party and even members of his own administration,” wrote Vance, then just one month into his first term as the junior senator from Ohio. Trump’s refusal to plunge the U.S. into any new foreign conflicts marked “the first real disruption to a failed consensus and the terrible consequences it wrought” — a record that, “more than any single accomplishment, is the enduring legacy of Mr. Trump’s first term.”

Now, as the Trump administration oversees a far-reaching assault on Iran’s Islamist regime, Vance is participating in a swift reversal of that legacy. The about-face is all the more striking for the vice president, who rose to national prominence as the standard-bearer of MAGA’s anti-interventionist faction that took shape in opposition to the “forever wars” in the Middle East, and which has harshly criticized U.S. intervention in more recent foreign conflicts like Russia’s war in Ukraine. More recently, Vance has positioned himself as a vocal Republican skeptic of war with Iran, arguing as recently as October of 2024 that “our interest, I think very much is not going to war with Iran.”

Against that backdrop, Trump’s attack on Iran appears to be a major political setback for Vance and the anti-interventionist faction on the right — even in the eyes of Vance’s putative allies. [Continue reading…]