BATH –– As U.S. officials prepare for peace talks with Iran this weekend, both of Maine’s U.S. senators criticized the Trump administration’s approach to the war.
Both said they hoped cooler heads would prevail.
“My hope has always been that this would be a brief but successful conflict,” Republican Susan Collins said, speaking Thursday in Bath.
Collins spoke out against a series of posts from President Donald Trump on Truth Social threatening Iran. She called a profanity-laden post made on Easter Sunday “completely inappropriate,” and said the language was “offensive to me and I think to many Americans.”
“The subsequent post when he threatened to essentially annihilate the whole country of Iran is also not conducive to the negotiations that will surely be underway,” she said.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has defended Trump’s rhetoric as effective.
“I think it was a very, very strong threat from the president of the United States that led the Iranian regime to cave to their knees and ask for a ceasefire and agree to reopening the Strait of Hormuz,” she said at a Wednesday White House press briefing.
Independent Angus King, meanwhile, called the war “illegal from the start,” and argued that the only reason the president should have proceeded was an imminent threat from Iran.
“There was no imminent threat from Iran,” he said. “Iran has been threatening for 47 years, but there was nothing to precipitate the level of contact that ensued after Israel and the United States entered into the bombing campaign.”
Collins said she agreed that Iran must not be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon, but reiterated her previous stance that she would not support sending in ground troops.
The only exception, she said, would be a rescue operation like the one over the weekend to retrieve a downed U.S. airman. Collins, who chairs the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee and is running for re-election, called that operation an “incredibly courageous” effort.
King, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, also praised U.S. service members even as he decried the Trump administration.
“Our military performed amazingly, and incredibly professionally and well,” he said. “There was no question about that.”
King noted that there have been no public congressional hearings about Iran since the conflict began in February.
King also said he worried about long-term effects of the war, such as the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the resulting global economic impacts.
“The net result of the war may well be a worse situation than when it started,” he said.
With reporting by the Associated Press.