Early on Saturday, the United States and Israel began a military campaign to overthrow the governing regime in Iran. The strikes have already killed an unknown number of Iranian leaders and civilians; Iran has retaliated by striking American allies in the Middle East and an American naval base in Bahrain.

Hours after the war began, I spoke by phone with Matt Duss, an executive vice-president at the Center for International Policy and a former foreign-policy adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why the U.S. has decided to embark on another conflict in the Middle East, how Trump fooled voters when he declared himself the peace candidate in the 2024 Presidential election, and whether the leadership of the Democratic Party is equipped to stand up to Trump on Iran.

What do you think has changed since June, when the Trump Administration claimed that Iran’s nuclear capacity had been totally destroyed?

It was clear pretty quickly that those claims of obliterating Iran’s nuclear program were false. There was even leaked information from a U.S. intelligence report that pushed back on that, and made clear that Iran’s program had been clearly set back, but not destroyed. And now, of course, one of the justifications it has given for today’s attack is that the Iranian nuclear program has become dangerous again, and that is why we’re doing what we are doing. But it’s offered multiple other justifications, which is one of the ways this is reminiscent of the lead-up to Iraq in 2002 and 2003: it’s just offered this buffet of reasons, and everyone can kind of pick the one they think tastes best. But none of these things really add up to anything close to Iran posing an imminent threat to the United States. I think the urgency here, if there is any, is that Iran has been reconstituting its missile capacity much faster than many people expected.

I heard this from Israeli analysts back in October. One thing that had really surprised them was how Iran was rebuilding its missile capacity much more quickly than expected. These missiles are defensive, and thus far have been used as retaliatory measures. You don’t have to like the Iranian regime—I don’t—to acknowledge that countries do have the right to defend themselves. Iran has used those missiles, again, in a horrible way, firing them into cities and civilian centers in Israel. That’s indefensible. But it seems like Israel’s regional security doctrine, now backed by the United States, is not just that Israel has the right to defend itself but that only Israel has the right to defend itself in the region. And now those missiles pose an unacceptable constraint on Israel’s ability to strike anywhere it wants at any time, an approach to regional security that is clearly backed by the Trump Administration.

You said the missiles were defensive, but they were also used to bomb civilian areas in Israel. So they were in response to Israel’s actions against Iran?

Right. They were retaliatory. Again, it’s indefensible the way they were used, but let’s just acknowledge that it was a response to Israeli and U.S. attacks.

You mentioned the Iraq War and the justifications given. But recalling that debate, there was an effort to make the case for regime change along several different axes, no pun intended. The human-rights violations, fears about the development of weapons of mass destruction, and even the connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda, which were obviously very overblown, were utilized extensively. In this case, a bunch of justifications are occasionally being offered, but there seems to be no consistent case at all, nor is it believable that they care about these non-nuclear missiles or human rights.

That is what is amazing about this: it makes the Bush Administration’s run-up to the Iraq War look better in comparison. The Trump Administration has barely made any attempt to make a coherent case to the American public, let alone to Congress or the United Nations, which the Bush Administration did. There’s not really even an acknowledgment that Trump should need congressional authorization to take the U.S. into another war. Certainly, there is no acknowledgment that the U.S. would need any international or multilateral support to do this. So, yeah, I would say that the differences between the lead-up to the Iraq War and this are very important.

Over the past several months, there has been incredible repression by the Iranian regime against Iranians. We don’t know how many people have been killed, but it’s in the many thousands. The Trump Administration has occasionally threatened Iran, saying that it can’t kill protesters, and has occasionally made noises about caring about the welfare of the Iranian people, but the Administration has obviously allowed the regime to continue killing protesters. What do you think would be a sane posture for America to take toward Iran, and does the repression that we’ve seen over the past few months change how you think about it?

Clearly, this is a bad regime. It’s a repressive regime. It uses enormous violence against its own people, which we’ve seen horrific examples of over the past few weeks. I think the approach to Iran that makes the most sense was the one that President Barack Obama had, which was to acknowledge that Iran poses a challenge on a number of fronts, the most important of which was the possibility of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon. That’s why he pursued diplomacy to deal with that challenge aggressively. He did so with close international partners, and got what, I think, was clearly a pretty strong nonproliferation agreement that established heavy inspections and surveillance of Iran’s nuclear program. That dealt with that one challenge, but it also created the opportunity to begin to deal with the other challenges Iran posed.

At the end of Obama’s Presidency, right before Trump took office, there were a number of American sailors seized by Iran in the Gulf, creating a situation that could have escalated easily and ended very badly. But because there was a line of communication that had been built up between the U.S. and Iran over the course of negotiating the Iran nuclear deal, that situation was de-escalated and ended without real incident. The nuclear deal was an opportunity to begin to deal with issues like Iran’s support for regional extremist groups and questions of Iran’s internal repression. That opportunity was squandered when Trump withdrew from the agreement during his first term. It showed Iran, and frankly showed the world, that you cannot trust the United States. And I have to say, Joe Biden squandered an opportunity to rejoin that agreement and to re-start that channel. I would add this: historically, Iran’s internal repression has gotten worse when it feels threatened externally. I’ve heard this from Iranian activists. And when you dial down tension between the U.S. and Iran, space for reform begins to open up.

Now I think given the level of the Iranian government’s violence against protesters, my understanding, again, from talking to Iranian colleagues, is that we are in a different situation. There’s much less hope now, if any hope, that the current government could be reasonably reformed, but, still, the idea that we can change the Iranian government for the better through a violent regime-change operation, like the one we’re witnessing right now, has a very bad historical track record.

I know there were attempts during the Biden Administration to rejoin the Iran deal, and there were some talks with the Iranian government, but they didn’t go anywhere. Do you think that the Biden Administration made some errors in how it pursued that?

I think they made an enormous error. Biden himself promised pretty unequivocally that he was going to rejoin the nuclear agreement. He published a piece in October of 2020, laying out exactly what he was going to do. Then he came into office and his Administration decided to slow-walk negotiations with Iran in this fantasy that, “Oh, we’re going to play it slow and get a longer and stronger deal.” This suggests that Biden was never really invested in Obama’s achievement, and certain members of his team were certainly hawkish about Iran. And then you had a number of Democrats on the Hill who were more hawkish. So, yeah, I think there were efforts later on in the Biden Administration to negotiate, but that was after a much more hawkish, hard-line government came to power. So I feel like an opportunity to re-start dialogue with Iran was lost at the beginning of Biden’s Administration.

What do you think about how Democrats in Congress have responded to Trump’s strikes against Iran? I’m looking now at a new statement from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries that demands the Trump Administration “explain itself” and involve Congress. Is the main issue here really procedural?

I think responses like that are pathetic. This isn’t a mystery that needs to be solved. This is not the case of the missing casus belli. We understand what’s going on here. There is no imminent threat against the United States from Iran. Certainly not one that would justify the President going to war without congressional authorization. There is a legal side to it, that Trump is doing this without authorization from Congress, which is important, but it’s also just a bad idea substantively. And the Democratic leadership, Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, have broadly responded to the Iran stuff with, “We need to have a briefing.” You have others out there, like Tim Kaine and Ro Khanna, who have been stronger in their criticism, and it is good that we have more of these voices in Congress than we have had in a long time. But unfortunately, the leadership of the Democratic Party remains completely out of touch.

As someone who’s worked on the Hill, does this approach by Democratic leadership stem from political caution or an ideological difference with more antiwar Democrats?

I think it’s both political and ideological. And in both cases it’s completely detached from the expressed views of the majority of Democratic voters, who are pretty overwhelmingly antiwar with regard to Iran. So, again, it’s fine for different Democrats to have different views on foreign policy. Some of them are more hawkish. I would say the more hawkish Democrats are part of a small and thankfully dwindling minority, and yet they are overrepresented in the leadership of the Party. That needs to change.

But what is the substantive difference in policy between Democrats on Iran?

I think some are just more traditional, hawkish Democrats. They believe that the U.S. has the right and the necessity to use force aggressively. But, like I said, it’s both ideological and political. Others believe that having that position is just the safest place to be politically. I think they are wrong on both counts. I think you can look at polls of Democrats and polls of Americans and see that antiwar candidates do very well. Since the end of the Cold War, in every election, with the one exception of 2004, the more antiwar candidate has won. Now, I’m not going to pretend that that’s the reason they won every time.

Are you including Trump?

Yes, that’s how he ran.

I wouldn’t say he was less militaristic. In 2016, he was talking about going to Iraq and stealing their oil.

He clearly ran to Hillary Clinton’s left. He was lying, of course, and he ran against Kamala Harris’s hawkishness. He and Vance leaned into a pro-peace message in the last months of the 2024 election. Again, no one should have believed him. He was clearly lying.

This is a guy who had talked about taking the Panama Canal. There was plenty for everyone to see.

Totally agree. I’m just saying he understood, because he does have a level of political intelligence, that there is a constituency that is attracted to that message. What I’m getting at is that there is a strong antiwar constituency in this country. Democrats need to figure that out.

I have some skepticism that the Trump voters who ostensibly said that they liked his antiwar message were really expressing an opposition to bombing countries or conducting regime-change operations. They may have just not liked us spending money on things in other parts of the world.

I probably don’t disagree, but what I’m arguing is that there are a lot more voters receptive to an antiwar message than the Democratic leadership seems to have figured out. They seem locked into this eternal post-9/11 moment where they’re constantly afraid of getting outflanked on the right. Schumer was attacking Trump from the right for being too weak on Iran. That’s absurd.

Right, and the irony for the Party establishment is that there’s been so much discontent from the Democratic base over the lack of leadership standing up to Trump and differentiating themselves from him that they have given a lot of energy and will continue to give a lot of energy to left-wing candidacies and primaries, which is a real threat to the establishment of the Party.

Yes.

Going forward, can Congress do anything to rein in Trump?

There is a push for a vote on a war-powers resolution in both the House and Senate. The original law was passed in 1973 in the wake of Vietnam, as a way to try to formalize and reassert Congress’s authority over matters of war. It allows any member to introduce this bill and a vote for Congress to authorize a war will get on the floor. It’s a way of sidestepping the formal committee process and just putting a resolution on the floor because this issue is so important. So it’s a way of Congress creating an opportunity for it to say to a President, “You are acting outside the bounds of the Constitution. You are acting illegally. We do not support what you’re doing. You need to withdraw U.S. forces from this conflict.” Now as we saw last year, when Senator Kaine filed the war-powers resolution, it did not pass.

When I was working with Senator Sanders, we passed one calling on the Trump Administration to withdraw from the Saudi-Emirati war in Yemen, and it did pass the Senate and the House. Trump vetoed it and Congress did not have the necessary numbers to overrule that veto, unfortunately, but it was a significant effort as these current war-powers resolutions are an important way of getting members of Congress on record. It creates opportunities for education. Anytime a member of Congress has to vote yes or no, they tend to pay closer attention to the issue at hand. But ultimately, even if a resolution about Trump’s latest attack on Iran did pass, which I don’t think it will, given that Trump has such total control over his party and they’re in the majority, the deeper problem is just the political consensus around the use of force. So there is not a legal fix here. We need a political fix. Our politics is broken and the fact that the Presidents, not just this President, but multiple Presidents have gotten much more comfortable using violence around the world on very flimsy legal pretexts is a reflection of that broken politics.

I was wrong about something, which is that he actually did not start making threats against the Panama Canal until after he won the election. But the idea that an extremely aggressive nationalist who’s made threats against other countries for years has now started getting us enmeshed in multiple wars and aggressive military actions seems like something that should not be surprising.

I think that’s right. As he showed us in his first term very clearly, Trump is not antiwar. Again, the fact is that Congress passed a war-powers resolution against Trump on Yemen and then later, after the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, on Iran as well, and he vetoed both. That tells you that his approach is a very militaristic one. So I agree with you. There are multiple arguments that Democrats need to be making, including the fact that he’s acting illegally, and the fact that he’s acting strategically stupidly. So make all of those arguments. Don’t just ask for a briefing. ♦