Democrats Raise Alarms About Trump’s War In Iran After Classified Briefing

WASHINGTON ― Democratic lawmakers emerged from a classified briefing on the U.S. war in Iran sharply critical of the Trump administration’s strategy and rationale for launching the nation into another Middle Eastern conflict.

“I’m more convinced now that this is going to be open-ended and forever,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) told reporters on Tuesday. “This feels like a multi-trillion-dollar open-ended conflict with a very confusing and constantly shifting set of goals.”

“They clearly seem fine with hard-line elements being in control of the country, because they plan to permanently run air operations in order to chase [Iran’s] missile-making capability, drone-making capability and nuclear capabilities,” he said.

Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) added, “I don’t have any more confidence now than I did before I went into the brief.”

The closed-door briefing for all members of the U.S. Senate featured top Trump administration officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine. Rubio defended President Donald Trump’s decision to launch massive missile strikes against Iran over the weekend authorization from Congress before he met with lawmakers.

“Iran is run by lunatics, religious fanatic lunatics,” Rubio told reporters. “They have an ambition to have nuclear weapons. They intend to develop those nuclear weapons behind a program of missiles and drones, and terrorism. That the world will not be able to touch them for fear of those things. And this is the weakest they’ve ever been. Now is the time to go after them.”

Senators of both parties said they were given no timetable for the conflict, and that the Trump administration did not rule out committing U.S. troops on the ground in Iran.

“It sounded very open-ended to me,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), a populist critic of interventions abroad, said Tuesday. “What I took away is, it’s rapidly evolving…the aims are very ambitious.”

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) also rejected Rubio’s rationale for launching military strikes without authorization from Congress. The secretary of state suggested a day prior that the U.S. had to act because it feared U.S. troops would have been targeted if Israel launched missile strikes against Iran alone, comments he attempted to walk back on Tuesday.

“It clearly was not an imminent threat,” Kaine said on Tuesday. “I do not believe this got anywhere near that the U.S. was facing an imminent threat, the term has traditionally been used when talking about military actions.”

“That’s not imminence under any legal definition I’m aware of. That’s outsourcing the starting of a U.S. war to another nation,” he said.

Asked if Israel forced his hand in attacking Iran, as Rubio suggested, Trump said the opposite might be true.

“Based on the way the negotiation was going, I think [Iran] was going to attack first, and I didn’t want that to happen — so if anything, I might’ve forced Israel’s hand,” he told reporters at the White House.

Other Democrats, meanwhile, leaned away from making process arguments in favor of slamming the Trump administration for spending blood and treasure abroad as opposed to focusing on helping Americans at home, the underpinning of Trump’s “America First” agenda that helped win him the 2024 presidential campaign.

“I’m utterly astonished by the lack of information provided to justify hundreds of billions of dollars lost and the American lives lost, all while we have a president who is literally cutting health care for millions of Americans and is literally taking away programs for our veterans, for our children’s school lunches,” Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) said.

John Fetterman of Pennsylvania was the only Senate Democrat who defended the Trump administration’s strategy, making clear he would not support a bipartisan effort to end hostilities in Iran because they had not been explicitly authorized by Congress.

“Everything that I’ve heard in there, to me, there’s no new, shocking kind of news,” Fetterman said after the briefing.

He then urged his fellow Democrats to support Trump’s goal of blocking Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. “Why can’t you just acknowledge that’s a good thing?” he asked.