As senior Democrats emerged from a classified briefing on Iran with the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, earlier this week, the leaders of the opposition delivered reserved, cryptic warnings of what may become the US’s largest military intervention since the Iraq war.
This was not a line in the sand against a new war in the Middle East. Instead, Democrats targeted the opaque decision-making around Donald Trump – as well as his own unpredictable whims – that could guide the weightiest foreign-policy decision of his two terms in office.
“This is serious and the administration has to make its case to the American people,” Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader and one of the party’s most senior lawmakers, said following the briefing.
“If they want to do something in Iran – and who the hell knows what it is – they should make it public,” he added. Fellow Democrats in the briefing for the “gang of eight” senior lawmakers followed suit.
These were hardly the kind of full-throated denunciations of the move towards war that many Americans may want if recent polling is correct. Donald Trump’s ultimate goals in Iran remain unclear, but his mustering of the largest invasion force since 2003 has brought on a sense of inevitability that the US could soon be at war again.
And absent the pro-war sentiment that flourished after the 9/11 attacks, a collective consensus – or initial acquiescence – has emerged through Trump’s immense gravitational pull among his supporters, and the fractured opposition among Democrats.
A backlash may be in the making. After a tumultuous internal deliberation, House Democrats have announced that next week they will force a vote summoning Trump to Congress to explain his plans for Iran.
“The Iranian regime is brutal and destabilizing, seen most recently in the killing of thousands of protestors,” read the statement, which it said would allow Democrats to go on record about their support or opposition to a war absent consent of Congress.
“However, undertaking a war of choice in the Middle East, without a full understanding of all the attendant risks to our servicemembers and to escalation, is reckless. We maintain that any such action would be unconstitutional without consultation with and authorization from Congress.”
“I think there has been a shift from Democratic leadership and a number of mainstream Democrats in the last 48 hours or so,” said Dylan Williams, the vice-president for government affairs at the Center for International Policy, a left-leaning thinktank. “Once it became clear how much this mattered to the Democratic voting base, those leaders have started to speak out more strongly on the substance of the issue.” Schumer also listed himself as a co-sponsor for a corresponding measure in the Senate to limit Trump’s use of the military in Iran.
Trump has prided himself on his early opposition to the Iraq war (although he gave lukewarm support to the invasion until late 2003, when it began to descend into a quagmire). During his first term in office, he said that his victory had been bolstered by his goal to end US interventions in the Middle East, saying that he had been “elected on getting out of these ridiculous endless wars”.
But like George W Bush in the early 2000s, he and his administration have presented a shifting series of rationales to justify striking Iran: first, the regime’s crackdown on pro-democracy protesters that Trump said left 32,000 dead (others have made lower estimates), then the regime’s nuclear programme, then its efforts to build ballistic missiles.
Despite assembling a team that included vocal opponents of further US interventions in the Middle East – especially JD Vance, who helped build a national security team focused on the long-term threat from China – Trump’s administration is reported to be edging toward a significant military strike if this week’s negotiations do not yield results.
During his State of the Union address, Trump reiterated his declarations that Iran could not possess a nuclear weapon – despite his claims that last summer’s Midnight Hammer operation had “obliterated” the Iranian nuclear programme.
Then, he went a step further in describing Iran’s current state as a clear and present danger to the United States, saying: “They’ve already developed missiles that can threaten Europe and our bases overseas, and they’re working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America.” The administration has not offered evidence to support that claim or lay out a timeline for which Iran could develop those missiles.
The remarks echo the warnings of the Bush administration, which steadily built the case for the war in Iraq in 2022 with the threat of weapons of mass destruction.
Trump’s closest advisers – including Vance, Rubio and envoy Steve Witkoff – have bristled at such comparisons. After last year’s limited strikes on Iran’s nuclear programme, Vance said that he empathised with Americans who were “exhausted after 25 years of foreign entanglements in the Middle East” but that “back then, we had dumb presidents, and now we have a president who actually knows how to accomplish America’s national security objectives”.
This Thursday, Vance echoed Trump’s remarks that Iran was crossing a red line, saying: “It’s very simple ... I think most Americans understand that you can’t let the craziest and worst regime in the world have nuclear weapons.”
