On Wednesday, President Donald Trump defended Iran’s ballistic missiles as “self-defense;” floated Space Force monitoring of Iranian uranium, should extraction prove “impossible,” as a solution; and dismissed skeptics of his Iran memorandum as “losers” too blind to recognize his “genius.”

Vice President JD Vance supplied the doctrine the next day. Trump, he said, was the “only world leader still sympathetic to Israel.” Then he warned Jerusalem to “respect this peace process,” halt strikes in Beirut, and not “go wild in Lebanon,” even as Hezbollah keeps firing. Vance placed Iran’s missiles and Israel’s self-defense on the same moral plane and told Israeli critics to “wake up.”