The Democrats’ Iran Gamble

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, March 05, 2026

 

It’s not just the progressive activists in Congress who are seeking advice on how to approach the politics of the Iran war from the most unreliable narrators in America. It seems that the Democratic Party, broadly, has concluded that the roughly 120-hour-old campaign is a disaster that the public is destined to despise.

 

New Mexico Senator Martin Heinrich told Semafor, “This seems like a really stupid f***ing idea.” Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez agreed. “I, of course, personally, substantively, and vocally oppose war with Iran,” she said. This positioning aligns with the advice the progressives are getting from the likes of Islamic Republic lobbyist Trita Parsi and foreign-affairs hobbyist Ben Rhodes.

 

But the left’s outlook is not out of step with that of the Democratic Party’s moderates. “I do not see a scenario by which, in 2028, what Trump has done here is popular,” said Third Way President Jonathan Cowan — certainly not “popular enough among swing voters” to “decide the 2028 general election.” Everyone seems to be on board with the view expressed by Senator Bernie Sanders’s foreign policy brain trust, Matt Duss: “I don’t think any Democrat can credibly claim to lead the party or the country without opposing Trump’s reckless, lawless war,” he asserted. “Honestly, it shouldn’t even be a tough call.”

 

Democrats are betting on post-war chaos in the region. There’s ample reason to worry they could be right. As I’ve written, though, chaos will have a harder time taking root in the region in the absence of its foremost chaos agent. Indeed, almost all the region’s worst malefactors, from Saddam Hussein and Ali Khamenei to Hassan Nasrallah and Yahya Sinwar, are dead and gone.

 

If the war looks by 2028 like a qualified success, Democrats may attempt to take their pessimism back — if only to steal some credit for Trump’s successes. (For an example of what such a cravenly opportunistic messaging campaign would look like, review how Biden administration alumni attempted to claim Operation Midnight Hammer.)

 

But that assumes that Democrats can disown the remarks they’re making today. That may be a heavy lift.

 

Take Gavin Newsom. The California governor can read a poll as well as anyone. And his reading of the Democratic landscape tells him that his party’s presidential primary voters detest Israel and all its works — even those it undertakes alongside the U.S. in a joint effort to neutralize a shared enemy soaked in American and Israeli blood. So, the governor is frequenting on edgy left-wing podcasts in which the hosts refer to Israel, not Iran, as a “terrorist state,” and he’s laying down his own markers meant to establish his anti-Israel bona fides.

 

“We’re talking about regime change?” Newsom marveled during a Tuesday book tour event. “For two years, they haven’t even been able to solve the Hamas question in Israel.” Newsom appeared to drop the “deep reverence” he had expressed for Israel way back in September of last year. Instead, he entertained the prospect that it had become in the intervening months “an apartheid state.” That would be news to the Israeli Arabs who speak their own language, have all the civil rights that attend citizenship, and represent their own communities in the country’s parliament. But Newsom’s line is not meant to describe the world as it is. It is designed to flatter the prejudices fashionable among Zohran Mamdani fans.

 

The Democratic Party will be an anti-Israel party, if it isn’t already. Its voters will make sure of that. But those same constituents may be dragging the party’s representatives into a position that will not age well.

 

The U.S. and Israel are going for the head of the snake — the locus of terror and destabilization in the Middle East. If there was ever a “forever war” to which America was committed, it is the nearly 50-year armed struggle against the Islamic Republic. Victory speaks for itself. And if the U.S. and Israel engineer a victory for the West in Iran, Democrats will have to spend 2028 arguing that voters should not believe their lying eyes.

 

The Democrats are betting on failure, and they may be right. If they are, we’ll have bigger problems than the Democratic Party’s political achievements. But if they aren’t, Democrats will regret having to argue that the world was better off with the Islamic Republic of Iran.