Andreas Kluth writes:

It was bad enough that Donald Trump hasn’t been able to explain clearly why he yet again felt he had to attack Iran, and why now. His national security advisor and secretary of state, Marco Rubio, then inadvertently made everything worse by implying that the president wasn’t so much leading — in the spirit of America First and Peace through Strength — as following. Worse yet, Trump seemed to be following a foreign power, Israel. Accidentally, Rubio inverted Trump’s entire foreign-policy shtick: America Second, Israel First.

Here’s Rubio’s original statement: “We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.” That, Rubio said, was the “imminent threat”: not an Iranian strike out of the blue (which American intelligence wasn’t expecting) but an Israeli strike against Iran, against which Iran would have to retaliate.

In this narrative, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was the one making the primary decisions about war and peace, life and death, while Trump and the American superpower had at best limited agency. Not a good look.

Here is how Senator Angus King, an Independent, put it when grilling a Pentagon official the following day: “Have we now delegated the most solemn decision that can be made in our society, the decision to go to war, to another country?” That, King said, was the “breathtaking” meaning of Rubio’s slip: “We’re going to be taken into a war by the prime minister of another country.” [Continue reading…]