Le Monde writes that the U.S.-Israel war on Iran has thrown into relief the deepening divide between the two leading contenders for Trump’s political legacy. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a longtime Iran hawk, stumbled badly on March 2 when he told reporters the U.S. had launched preemptive strikes knowing Israeli action would provoke Iranian attacks on American forces—an admission that enraged the MAGA base and raised the question of whether Washington had been dragged into war by Tel Aviv. He spent the following day insisting his words had been misrepresented. They had not.
JD Vance, meanwhile, was conspicuously absent from Mar-a-Lago when the offensive began, photographed alone in the Situation Room while Trump was flanked by Rubio and Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. On X, he went silent. His public defense of the war—that Trump has “clearly defined” objectives—was widely read as the opposite of reassurance.
