What Is the Democrats’ Plan to End the Iran War?
Let’s agree with everything the Democrats are saying about the war.
The war was unnecessary. It was a war of choice. Trump started it on bad assumptions, promised it would take four or five weeks, and five months later it is still going. He made a bad situation worse. Grant all of it. Stipulate every word.
Now answer one question.
What do you want him to do or not do?
Where We Actually Are
We are in the middle of a war. There is a huge American naval presence in the Gulf and troops across the Middle East. We are running a blockade. We are bombing Iran. We are trying to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, by diplomacy or by force.
Those are the things that leave when we leave. Here is what stays.
The Strait of Hormuz is closed. Iran was charging for passage, with the money deposited in its central bank, and it will not agree to any ceasefire or future memorandum that does not leave the waterway under its control alongside Oman.
The Houthis are attacking shipping in the Red Sea, which is the only route around Hormuz. They have declared a maritime embargo on Saudi Arabia and put missiles and drones on Bab el-Mandeb. Both chokepoints are hostage, and the second one is being squeezed precisely because it was the escape from the first.
Nobody has accounted for Iran’s enriched uranium since American bombs landed near it.
The fourteen-point memorandum signed on June 17 is dead in practice, and its terms are what anyone would have to renegotiate: who administers the strait, which sanctions come off, and three hundred billion dollars for Iranian reconstruction.
Lebanon.
And the Gulf states that host our forces have been taking Iranian missiles.
That is the situation. Not the argument about how we got here. The situation.
What Have the Democrats Proposed We Do?
They have proposed nothing in five months.
So why, after five months, is there still no answer?
Two possibilities. Neither is good.
The first is that a good exit is a Republican win. Trump ending this war on decent terms before November is the worst outcome available to a party campaigning on his recklessness. Jeffries is already building the midterm message around Democratic veterans who oppose the war. An America that loses to Iran is an America that fires Republicans. Under that logic the correct move is to keep the war illegal, keep it expensive, keep it unresolved, and make him carry every day of it. No plan is needed. A plan would only risk handing him one.
The second is that they have given no plan because they have no plan or better idea to give. All they can say is that their no plan is better than Trump’s plan.
What They Have Actually Done
They complained about the war.
They passed war powers resolutions. The House twice, and in June both chambers passed one for the first time. It was nonbinding. Trump ignored it. When the Senate tried again on July 23 with a binding version, it fell two votes short. None of this was ever going to work. No president since 1973 has accepted that the War Powers Resolution binds him, and every one of them has ignored it when it suited him.
They voted down the defense authorization bill and refused the war supplemental.
They asked the administration to come explain itself. That has happened.
They want guardrails. They want hearings. They want an authorization vote.
The Question Nobody Will Answer
Stop the war. Fine. Stop it.
Who administers the Strait of Hormuz, and does anyone pay to use it? Where is the enriched uranium and who inspects it? Which sanctions come off, in what order, against what verification? What happens in Lebanon, where the memorandum guaranteed territorial integrity and never once mentions Israel, which is not a party to it? What do the Gulf states do the morning after Washington leaves — Bahrain, which hosts the Fifth Fleet and has taken Iranian missiles, and Riyadh, which is currently being shot at from Yemen?
Those are the files. Bringing everyone home does not close a single one of them.
Trump was asked his exit strategy on July 24. He named two: keep bombing, possibly harder, or make a deal.
The Democrats have no exit strategy that they have articulated; just that Trump’s is no good. What is theirs?