Is This the Best They’ve Got?

By Noah Rothman

Monday, June 23, 2025

 

As NBC News put it, Democrats have begun to “sharpen their arguments against Trump’s foreign policy” in the wake of the president’s strikes on Iranian nuclear targets. The observation implicitly admits the Democrats’ attacks on Trump’s foreign policy were, at the very least, less than incisive. The opposition party’s criticisms of the president’s actions may be clear, but that doesn’t render them especially compelling.

 

The party’s initial instinct to oppose Trump’s initiatives led them to criticize him for failing to seek congressional authorization for these strikes in advance. For the reasons Charlie Cooke articulated, no one should operate under the misguided assumption that these arguments are at all sincere. They are, however, unobjectionable insofar as they gesture toward constitutional propriety. Because those arguments are unobjectionable, they were destined to be dispensed with in favor of more salacious claims.

 

In the Democrats’ effort to “sharpen” their arguments, some have landed on the notion that the Islamic Republic of Iran posed no direct threat to the United States. “There was no imminent threat,” said Senator Chris Murphy in response to Speaker Mike Johnson’s claim that “the imminent danger” posed by Iran precluded waiting for Congress to pass legislation in support of the strikes. Murphy’s fellow Democrats echoed his skepticism. “I fear deeply we’re being misled about this, just as we were before we tragically got into a war with Iraq,” Senator Tim Kaine warned.

 

It seems rather unlikely that Iran did not have an undeclared nuclear weapons program. Save Iranian regime officials, virtually no one denies its existence. Even the United Nations’ atomic regulatory agency had declared Iran to be in violation of its nuclear non-proliferation requirements. There’s room for speculation about how close Iran was to developing a functioning fission weapon, but the claim that Iran’s nuclear program was peaceful in nature is not credible. So, that argument isn’t especially sharp.

 

Some Democrats have mourned Donald Trump’s failure to observe his self-set duty to end wars rather than start them. Trump acted “against his own words,” said Democratic National Committee chairman Ken Martin. He pledged “to get us out of foreign wars,” Representative Adam Smith observed. “Trump has now started a war with Iran.” Indeed, “He has impulsively risked launching a war that may ensnare us for generations,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez mourned.

 

The Islamic Republic of Iran has been at war with the United States for 46 years. As Phil Klein detailed, Iran is directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans. It is the foremost sponsor of terrorism on earth, and its agents execute terror and assassination plots on U.S. soil. It projects force against civilian targets as a matter of doctrine. Its proxies and militias target U.S. military assets and those of our allies. The United States has been engaged in a low-intensity war against Iran’s cats’ paws for over a generation, and it is now going at the head of the snake. Democrats may be just tuning into this long-running dynamic now, but it’s a safe bet the American public has been aware of it for far longer.

 

Then there’s the remarkably craven claim that the United States should not act aggressively in pursuit of its own interests because that would be too dangerous. “I think certainly for the 40,000 troops in at least six countries in the Middle East — we have a lot of bases in the Middle East — those troops are now at greater risk,” Senator Mark Kelly fretted.

 

Why does the senator think the U.S. maintains such a large footprint in the Middle East? Those assets are occupying forward positions to deter Iran and its vassals from the aggression to which they are constitutionally committed. If the regional threat environment improved, our posture would shift accordingly. The threat from the Iranian regime will persist so long as the regime survives, but neutralizing Iran’s nuclear program robs it of an instrument that would have made it more prone to court risk. That will make the Middle East marginally safer, which advances core U.S. strategic interests.

 

That’s what the U.S. military is for. It is bizarre to argue that the U.S. military cannot be deployed against threats to American security because doing so would make those troops less safe. That is a recipe for paralyzing indecision and the perpetuation of a suboptimal status quo.

 

If these are the sharpest arguments Democrats can deploy, Trump is in little danger of being undone by the opposition party’s rhetoric.