Transcript: "Chasing the Dragon" In Iran (with Sen. Ruben Gallego)
The Long Game - Episode 18
Transcript - The Long Game with Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer
"Chasing the Dragon" In Iran (with Sen. Ruben Gallego)
March 19, 2026
TEASER:
Senator Ruben Gallego:
This is a new type of war, and the US military has not been engaged in this type of drone warfare, infantry drone warfare, the scale of which really only Russia and Ukraine have seen and understand.
Jon Finer:
Welcome to The Long Game. I’m Jon Finer.
Jake Sullivan:
And I’m Jake Sullivan. And over the last few episodes, we’ve looked at the war in Iran and, frankly, American foreign policy more broadly from a number of different angles, the decision making in the room where it happens, the other countries that get a say in how those decisions play out, the economic impacts of national security issues like this major war in the Middle East. Today, we’re going to get our first look at another critical actor in the consequential drama of American foreign policy, the United States Congress.
We are really excited to have as our guest Senator Ruben Gallego, who actually has served in both Houses of Congress, representing the state of Arizona. But as importantly, he’s also played a personal role in what was perhaps the defining foreign policy initiative of our time, the war in Iraq, where he fought as a US Marine and Anbar Province, which was one of the hardest places at one of the hardest moments of that war. I’m not sure if he ever actually anticipated then that his country would one day return to the Middle East with ambitions about remaking an adversary by force, or that he’d be speaking out with such passion and clarity about it as a United States Senator, but here we are.
And after we speak to Senator Gallego, Jon and I will review the state of play on Iran. We’ll reflect on how President Trump’s options have evolved since our options memo last week. We’ll touch on some of the variables that are factoring into his thinking, including gas prices, the views of our Gulf State partners and other things. And we’ll also look at the options from Iran’s point of view, because of course they have a vote in this.
So there’s a lot to talk about and let’s get to it. Senator Gallego, with that big wind up, welcome to The Long Game.
Senator Ruben Gallego:
Thanks for having me.
Jon Finer:
It’s great to have you with us. So let’s start where that introduction left off. If anything, it almost understates what you went through during your time in Iraq. Your unit, Lima Company, 3rd battalion, 25th Marine Regiment took more casualties than maybe any other unit that fought during that long war. I actually remember personally, because I was living in Baghdad at the time, I think it was May 11th, 2005, one of the darkest days for that unit when you guys were attacked in Al-Qa’im Iraq.
I’m just wondering, given what you went through, how often, if ever, you thought back then about what people in Washington who sent you to that war, either the US Congress, which voted to authorize it, or obviously the White House, which championed it, were thinking when they did that and how you think now, looking back on that, about the decisions that are being made about the current war.
Senator Ruben Gallego:
Yeah. May 11th, 2005, that’s actually my platoon that got hit. So we actually got hit between May 8th and May 11th twice, once on a IED and once when we hit an ambush [inaudible 00:03:07]. My best friend, Jonathan Grant, and then a lot of really good friends obviously from my platoon. So those days are very much steered in my brain, and that we still had about five more months after that of fighting where even more men died.
So it propelled me into politics because I was really mad at politicians. And just to be clear, I was mad at Democrats and Republicans because the Republicans led by George Bush, Cheney lied us into this war. We had Democrats that were afraid of being considered run and cover Democrats, [inaudible 00:03:47] what they used to call them back in the day, and couldn’t separate, I think, their feelings from what was happening in Afghanistan and what happened from 9/11 from Iraq. And I knew that what happened in Afghanistan was not directly related to this whatsoever. But I had signed the contract and I was going to fulfill that. I was not going to let anyone take my spot.
Coming out of that, I thought I would never see one of these wars of choice again, especially in the Middle East, especially against someone who, a country that is actually probably more prepared than Saddam Hussein was, that has more geopolitical advantages, has more strategic, at least locations that can really put pressure on us and our allies, and that we’d have a smarter foreign policy that would have learned the mistakes of the Iraq war to stop that. And I’ve been disappointed the whole time.
The only thing that I have been very happy to see is that clearly, the Democratic Party, Democrats themselves, Senate and House Democrats have learned the lessons of the Iraq war, are not going to fall into the same trap like if you don’t support the war, you don’t support troops. We all know that’s BS. The best way to support the troops is don’t send us to stupid wars. And even though we don’t have the power to stop what’s happening right now because we don’t have control of it, the fact is at some point there’s going to be a check on this administration. It’s going to come from his own party when they realize that he is slowly, slowly and steadily, steadily getting more and more involved in a war that nobody in this country wants at this point.
Jake Sullivan:
Ruben, we’re Executive Branch guys. We spent a lot of time in both the Obama and the Biden administration. We each, Jon and I, spent a short stint as staffers in Congress, got a little bit of a glimpse of it, but not too much.
Senator Ruben Gallego:
Enough to run away.
Jake Sullivan:
Yeah, yeah, right, exactly.
Senator Ruben Gallego:
Well put.
Jake Sullivan:
Exactly. We had a cup of coffee and that was about that.
Senator Ruben Gallego:
Yeah.
Jake Sullivan:
You’ve spoken now poignantly about your vantage point from actually being a US Marine there in the fight, now can you talk for a minute about what you actually see as being the role for Congress in American foreign policy and how this current moment, as you’ve tried and your colleagues have tried to speak with a congressional voice to make your voice heard, but the Republicans obviously have blocked the opportunity to pass War Powers Resolution? How do you think about the role of Congress? And what does this current period reflect or reveal about the limitations and the opportunities you have to shape US foreign policy?
Senator Ruben Gallego:
I think the United States Congress is trying to kind of wrestle back some of its statutory duties on the Constitution when it comes to war making that has slipped and had been slipping for a while. Some of it is a reflection of what was going on during the Bush administration. And then going into the Obama administration, there was a lot of leaning on different types of war powers and whether it’s attacking different countries, we could have discussions about that later, that we never even reigned in under President Obama, nor did we finally do it under Biden. It took for quite a while for us to get to that.
And I think that was kind of, in my opinion, a big mistake. We should have, as the Senate and not necessarily as a partisan entity, wrestled back a lot of these powers, whether it was under President Obama, even if I agree with some of his actions, or whether it was under President Biden, if I agree with some of his actions, we should have forced a vote on a lot of this to make sure that there is a check on any presidency. And by not doing that, we set ourselves up for what we just are seeing right now with Donald Trump.
So I believe that my role right now is to find any which way for me to stop this war from expanding, to stop this war from getting us into a quagmire, forcing our Republican President, Donald Trump, to understand that the political situation that he’s putting himself in is truly political and it’s going to hurt his party because at the end of the day, hopefully that forces them to come to a resolution about how to exit this quagmire that they’ve just put themselves in.
So we’ll do that with the War Powers Resolutions. Even if we lose those, then we’ll move on to the funding argument and then we’ll have to go to the bully pulpit. And I think the bully pulpit may end up being the best guard against us fully engaging into a war in Iran that could really spiral out of control, really tilts our regional allies against us or just send them to neutral and end up making China a more powerful regional partner in the Gulf Coast that wasn’t before this war started.
Jake Sullivan:
You make a really good point that the absence of Congress in this war powers conversation didn’t just start with this war. It goes back all the way to the Obama administration, maybe even before then to a certain extent. And you talked about efforts in the past to wrestle back powers. Do you have any kind of explanation for why you think it’s been so difficult for Congress to do this? Are there certain calculations or motivations? How much of this is partisan? How much of it is just that there’s a lot of members who just don’t want to deal with this? What’s your view on the why?
Senator Ruben Gallego:
You can’t deny there’s partisanship that is involved this. And a lot of times it’s just an overlapping times too where there wasn’t enough of a concentration of Democrats while there was a Democrat in charge, enough Republicans while Republican was in charge.
And then there’s always the kind of scare factor like what am I actually doing? Because the Executive has more information, especially if you’re just kind of your run-of-the-mill member of Congress and/or Senator, and they have more action.
So to stop momentum, especially when it comes to war making, as you know, it takes a lot. And you have a lot of institutions that will gladly continue encouraging you to stay in war. Certainly, when we saw this with Afghan war, for example. I remember I was then the chairman of Intel Special Operations on the Armed Services Committee. And without mentioning names, meeting different generals and trying to extract when are we getting out of Afghanistan? And I always heard the same thing, success is just around the corner, the Afghans got to get better.
But I only had so much information in front of me, save for the fact that I had a lot of friends that were still in the war that would tell me that, no, the Afghan government is not getting better. The Afghan military is not getting any better. But when you have only so much information, you have to make your decisions based on just the information they have in front of you.
And that is the thing what actually really helped, what got us eventually out of Afghanistan. And I think there was a lot of policymakers, congressmen and senators that were ready to get out, but there was an institution, different institutions, whether it’s the DOD, the CIA, different groups that wanted us to stay in Afghanistan. And in the end, they didn’t get their way, thank God, but it was not obviously the ideal way that we got out either.
Jon Finer:
Your turn the corner phrase is really seared in my mind, having run through-
Senator Ruben Gallego:
I’m sure you guys heard a gazillion times.
Jon Finer:
... the Afghanistan policy debates over more years than I like to recall. And I sometimes thought of it that we had turned the corner so many times that we’d actually spun ourselves around in circles by the end.
Senator Ruben Gallego:
I made some joke to in general in one of the committees, and not that it was something to be flippant about, we keep turning the corner, eventually we’re just going to bump into each other, right?
Jake Sullivan:
Yeah, exactly.
Jon Finer:
That’s another good way to think about it.
Senator Ruben Gallego:
And again, I’d been on the Armed Services Committee at that point for like six years and I’m like, “Okay, so again, another corner turned, great.”
Jon Finer:
Part of what I think was going on there, and actually maybe a little bit part of what is going on inside the White House now is this desire for some outcome that can be portrayed as a victory, which in Afghanistan obviously was quite elusive, and I think there’s some reason to believe maybe elusive in Iran as well. And I guess I’m wondering whether you think the United States can win at this point. And knowing that you were against this from the start, what would you recommend they do? We do?
Senator Ruben Gallego:
One of the things that really disturbed me, at least about the Afghan War was that until President Biden made the decision, no president wanted to be the one who lost the Afghan war. And no general wanted to be the last general that lost the Afghan war, which is all fine and dandy except it’s some lance corporal, corporal that are the ones that are going to be the last ones that die in these wars.
And this is the kind of the same scenario you’re kind of describing right now, that they want this win, this validation of this was all worth it because in the end, the problem that we’re going to find ourselves is that the region’s probably going to be more destabilized and actually we’re going to be weaker by how this ends.
And why do I say that? Well, we took out the Khamenei and replaced them with a worse Khamenei. The Khamenei that we killed was actually more moderate than the Khamenei that’s in charge right now. And if this continues going down the road that it is, the IRGC generals and military leadership is actually even worse than some of the kind of religious institutions that are in charge of Iran.
So what Iran ends up at the end of this war may end up being a victory for Iran because they end up being stronger in terms of the consolidation of their power. I’m sure they’re using this time right now to purge the government of any moderates or any dissidents under the guise of war.
And what does a victory for us look like? And obviously, unfortunately, the enemy always has a vote on this, but if we actually wanted to get out of this and declare a victory, I think it’d have to be something along the lines of a ceasing of hostilities, a movement towards setting the table for some type of negotiations that gives, at least at a minimum, some slowing down of nuclear growth, weapons growth of Iran, some, I would say symbolic, and I say symbolic because I know Iran probably won’t agree to this, but they would have no choice, some symbolic limits on their ballistic missile capability in the sense that we’ve knocked down most of the ballistic missiles. We could say we want five years for them. They’ll say, “Sure, we’ll take five years,” because it’s going to take them five years and they need to rebuild it anyway. And we will claim a victory and they will claim a victory.
But at the end of the day, we could claim it, but I think we’re going to end up being unfortunately weaker as a country in terms of our national security and weaker in terms of our presence in the Gulf Coast. I think a lot of our allies are going to start recognizing that we may not be a really good stabilizer and they may start tilting themselves more towards China to kind of equalize what they believe was a potential fault in their alliance with us.
Jake Sullivan:
I think you’ve captured very well that the bind the administration is in trying to figure a way to declare some kind of victory while facing some of these larger strategic consequences that you’ve just pointed out. They’re clearly contemplating putting service members, Marines like you, paratroopers from the 82nd Airbornes, sailors from the US Navy into harm’s way to an even greater extent than they have yet to do some kind of operation, whether it’s to seize an island or it’s to go seize nuclear material, or it’s to try to forcibly reopen the strait, physically some way, maybe some other mission.
What do you think of that idea? What kind of goes through your mind when you think about this new generation of Ruben Gallegos that might be asked to perform a mission like that?
Senator Ruben Gallego:
We have an amazing military. I do worry because this is a new type of war. And the US military has not been engaged in this type of drone warfare, infantry drone warfare, the scale of which really only Russia and Ukraine have seen and understand. Iran probably knows a little better than everybody because they’ve been collecting all the data from all their Shahed drone strikes. And let’s not be naive. Obviously, Russia will be 100% advising Iran this whole time, especially if we do any type of incursion.
And it’s not that this is going to be a hand-to-hand situation. Iran has really been smart and investing in the kind of standoff weaponry that they’re going to be able to strike and hit us from a distance. And I think that’s a very dangerous situation.
So the problem is now you’re also doubling down on bad policy. So what happens if we do this? And let’s say we take, I think it’s called Kharg Island, Khrag Island, I’m not exact the name, but we lose 400, 300 men in the process of taking it. Now the ante goes up for what defines a victory. You see what I’m saying? The hole gets deeper and deeper, so now we have to say, “Okay, now, well, we can’t just leave at any point. Now we have to have even a bigger victory,” which means what I’ve been saying from the beginning of this whole war is that they’re going to be chasing the dragon. If you’ve ever heard that saying when it comes to addiction, they’re going to be chasing a victory and it just causes more and more bad outcomes.
Jake Sullivan:
Wow. I think that’s a very powerful point, the grim logic of you take the next step and you sacrifice more and then you feel you have to go further in and on and on. And I hadn’t heard that chasing the dragon phrase before, but I think that logic of how you get deeper and deeper into a war is quite powerful.
Senator Ruben Gallego:
And we’ve seen it. You’ve seen it. Vietnam’s a good example. The best example of us not chasing the dragon is actually George Herbert Walker Bush. When he said, “Stop, we’re done. We’ve hit our objectives. We are pulling out and we’re done.” That is a very good example of smart, tactical, political, and strategic victories that it gave us the goals of what we needed as a country and made us stronger in terms of our alliances around the world. What we may end up chasing could end up making us weaker altogether.
Jake Sullivan:
Do you see a scenario, if this war goes on for a while, where Congress actually does exercise its authority, whether it’s on war powers or it’s on the funding or in some other way, is there any hope that Congress would actually say to the Executive Branch, “Enough”?
Senator Ruben Gallego:
Yeah, I think so. Look, the American public started against this war. The numbers only get worse, especially now the economic toil starts having an impact. And let’s hope it doesn’t happen. Let’s hope I’m totally wrong and somehow we get to a beautiful victory that we can all walk away from and we end up being better as a nation.
But if that doesn’t happen and then the body bags start showing up, the American public is not going to be in support of this. It’s an election year. There’s going to be a lot of Republicans that are going to realize that this is also not the hill they want to die on. And I think there’s going to be some major constraints put into it. Would it be able to cut off altogether the war? I don’t believe so, but I think there would be enough that it would give the message to the executive that, “You know what? We need to figure out how to wrap this up.”
The other thing that we have to entirely accept entirely possible is that because this president doesn’t understand the idea of strategic victory for this country, and for him, everything is personal. At any point, Saudi Arabia can just call up or Qatar just call up and be like, “Hey. Love you. We got a great relationship. It’s time to wrap this up. You’re affecting our life, you’re [inaudible 00:19:37] our investments. It’s going to be affecting our investments in you in the future.” And we cannot put it beyond this president that he could just say, “We’ve destroyed what we want to destroy, we’re pulling out and we’re done,” and declaring victory.
Now, strategically, may not be the best way to do it, but it may be the way that we get out. Donald Trump doesn’t think about national interest, doesn’t think about what I have to do to keep our coalition together to make sure that we teach a lesson to Iran not to do this to us. For him, it could just be like, “I personally don’t like this anymore. I thought this was going to be easy. I’m just going to pull out.”
Jon Finer:
Yeah, a bit more me first than America first.
Senator Ruben Gallego:
100%. Yeah.
Jon Finer:
Interesting that you brought up the Gulf countries. I do think that was a big part of Iran’s strategy, attack them, get them to put pressure on us to restrain us. So far, that has not played well for Iran because they’ve not done that, but you’re right, it could pivot.
The other major protagonist obviously in this war has been Israel, also a major issue in American politics. Secretary Rubio, somewhat confoundingly, said early on in the conflict that the United States had to bomb Iran because otherwise Israel would do it, which seemed a pretty big abdication of responsibility for a superpower. We saw you said that you’re no longer going to take money from AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group. I’m just wondering how you see the Israeli role in this war and the bilateral relationship with Israel coming out of it.
Senator Ruben Gallego:
Yeah. It was very shocking when Marco Rubio said that. And I don’t know if you were quoting me when you said, “That’s a weird way for a superpower to act,” because I actually did say that on camera like, “Are we not a superpower? Are we still not a superpower?” And then of course, Fox News clipped in and says, “Ruben Gallego says the US is not a superpower.”
No, what I’m saying is superpowers don’t follow subordinate allies into war. We tell our subordinate allies, “Okay, we’ll go to war with you.” We don’t say, “Well, if you’re going, I guess we have to go.” Right? Because the most important thing as a nation is we first take care of our interests, our national interests. Israel, as their own nation, has to take care of their own national interests. If we have alignment, then we can go together, right? So this is the first time I’d ever seen us really subordinate our national interests to another foreign country, this time being Israel.
That being said, it’s not as if Netanyahu just came up with this idea of nowhere. He had been trying to do this through every administration. And I remember the first go around under the JCPOA, I was just a brand new baby member of Congress, and the amount of pressure that the Israeli government put on members of Congress in terms of just meetings, in terms of sending us information, I remember their intel telling us that, “The end of the world is coming and if you do the JCPOA, it’s going to end up making Iran stronger,” and all this stuff.
Well, it ends up, and I was very happy I did vote for the JCPOA, it ends up that what we had done was essentially probably the best outcome we could have gotten. We limited the growth of Iranian stockpile. It was under observation. There was a lot of other problems, obviously, with how and what Iran was doing in terms of proxies, in terms of support of terrorist organizations, which we should have been taken care of by different ways and different means. That’s another conversation for another time.
But what we end up doing now is probably going to end up creating an Iranian nuclear state at the first go and advantage they have to do it. And they’re going to do it as fast as possible because they just learned a lesson that the United States government and the Israeli government together, or even separate, will try to do a regime change move on you, so why not get a nuclear weapon? This is exactly, if you look at who’s looking around looking like a genius right now, North Korea looks really smart right now. And we have just basically pushed off, I think, a nuclear Iran maybe by a couple years because of these rash actions.
And the fact that the United States didn’t tell Israel, “Listen, you want to do that? You go alone because we know what’s going to end up happening. Number one, you’re not going to be successful. Yes, you may be able to kill as many of their leadership, but you’re only going to end up creating an unstable situation that’s not going to benefit us as a country, as a region. It’s only going to ensure a nuclear Iran.” And the fact that we didn’t tell Israel, no, we didn’t also pull any type of our capabilities and say, “You can go, but we’re not going to give you any of the capabilities you need to do this,” tells me a lot.
Jake Sullivan:
Your reflections back on the pressure you felt on the Iran nuclear deal, the JCPOA, that takes Jon and me back. We were both involved.
Senator Ruben Gallego:
Yeah, you guys were around that. I think you actually, Jake, you and I had a lot of briefings at the White House too.
Jake Sullivan:
So it was quite interesting because at the time, the argument that we were making was if you don’t do a deal, even an imperfect deal, even a deal that has some hair on it, your alternative is war.
Senator Ruben Gallego:
That’s right.
Jake Sullivan:
And the other side said, “Oh, no, no, no, no, you can’t possibly say that. Don’t say that.” And now all those same guys are the cheerleaders for this war.
Senator Ruben Gallego:
And I remember sitting in my office and saying the exact same thing. And look, this is 2015, I think is when we started talking about this.
Jake Sullivan:
‘15 is when the deal got done. Yeah.
Senator Ruben Gallego:
That was only 10 years post-war for me. And I remember sitting there and talking to different policymakers, the Israeli ambassador, and saying, “I don’t understand why we’re not going to give peace a chance because what you’re saying is that this deal will end up making us go to war versus us, if this deal isn’t perfect, it is imperfect, it is a deal that we could continue to build on.”
And it ends up, we were right. And they pulled out of the JCPOA, Donald Trump. We found ourselves in this ever escalating situation where they ended up, according to them as, well, war was the only options to stop. That’s not true. You made a lot of decisions that got you to this point and some of them you willingly did, whether it was a mistake or not, but there was always an option and you didn’t take that off-ramp.
Jon Finer:
Senator, if you’ll indulge one last question, we’ll let you on your way. Jake and I practice politics occasionally without a license, at least I think that’s how President Biden saw it-
Senator Ruben Gallego:
It’s dangerous, be careful.
Jon Finer:
... when we talked to him about that. You are a professional politician in addition to having such depth and experience on these issues, which is a bit unusual in the Congress. I’m wondering how much of a role you think these issues that we’ve been talking about today will play in the midterm elections and maybe which ones specifically. And then if you can also say a word or two about how the Democratic Party should position itself in 2028 to run against whoever succeeds President Trump. There’s a lot of push for generational change, for different types of candidates, wondering how you’re thinking about that.
Senator Ruben Gallego:
Success, again, by whatever is defined in Iran is not going to have any political outcome that is positive for Republicans. And to be clear, I would love nothing more than this war to get wrapped up and the United States somehow come out victorious in a strategic way, right? Because even though I’m against this president, I still am, I’m like him, America first, right?
But if it goes well or if it doesn’t go well, the American public’s going to be the same because they’re pissed. They believe that we should be focusing on the homeland right now. They’re mad that everything is so expensive. They don’t really believe this president is on their side, nor the Republicans. The Republicans just told them for two years that we have to cut Medicaid, we have to cut food stamps, we’re going to cut all these programs because we need to give tax cuts. And now they’re seeing a $200 billion ask for a war that they’re against. And if anything, the war is probably going to bring even more young voters that were going to probably stay out of it into the fold to come out and vote against this.
If there’s any positive effects, it’ll be kind of in regional areas like in Florida for the expat Cuban community and Venezuelan community. Although just I’ve been campaigning down there for different candidates and a lot of Democrats have been winning these special elections down there. My sense is that even a lot of these Venezuelans and Cubans are mad because of the deportation policy. And they may have been able to get some of them back, but they’re losing a lot of other Latinos in the process.
But I fear, because of pollsters and consultants, that there’s going to be this lie that will be fed to Donald Trump that if you want to really get the Latinos back, invading a couple of these countries in Latin America will do that. And A, won’t do it. There’ll probably be even a worse blowback. But B, again, you’re potentially putting men and women in danger and death for really negligible outcomes.
2028 has to be a focus on two things, stability and progress. Very simple, right? And every 2028 candidate can do and say however you want to spin it. You could use your words, whatever it is. People are very anxious right now. Working class people are very anxious right now. They just want to know that things are at least going to start getting more stable, prices are going to come under the control and hopefully start getting clawed back.
So the 2028 candidate I think has to be somewhat on the younger side, or at least have the kind of, I would say, young vibe where people will look at that candidate and say like, “Okay, that person understands what I’m going through right now. That person is aspirational. That person is going to be fighting for my family.”
In terms of foreign policy, I’m not sure foreign policy is going to be as big of a deal to voters, provided that whatever foreign policy is happening at that time is not screwing up everyone’s personal wellbeing. But the candidates that can talk to directly to the needs and wants of Americans, especially that middle of America that’s just really hurting right now, is going to be a very successful candidate.
And we can’t ignore that the Republicans may be able to do that also, right? And I think everyone’s ascribing the 2028 election as a slam dunk for us, when these elections sometimes, again, are won on the margins.
Jon Finer:
We’ll keep an eye out for a person like that. Thank you.
Senator Ruben Gallego:
Thank you, guys.
Jake Sullivan:
Yeah, exactly. Thank you, Ruben Gallego. Thank you for coming to The Long Game. Really appreciate it.
Senator Ruben Gallego:
Adios. Take care. Bye, guys.
Jon Finer:
All right. So a bit of an unusual guest for us, but a great one actually in Senator Ruben Gallego, very plain-spoken, lots of experience on these issues. It was interesting to me that he alluded to, I think knowingly, a statement that was made during the Vietnam War by a former colleague of ours, my former boss, John Kerry, about being the last, I think he said corporal to die for an unpopular war. We are in the midst right now of a quite unpopular conflict. That statement by John Kerry was made in the US Congress in testimony when he had come back from the war to talk about the mistakes that were being made there.
We got a little bit out of the senator on the role of Congress in this conflict. This is something that we’ve wrestled with from inside an administration we’re seeing play out now. What do you think about the question you asked him as to whether Congress is going to assert itself more than it has just given the history here?
Jake Sullivan:
Well, first, I’d just say I’ve been very impressed with the Democrats being so full-throated and so willing to step up and say both, “We want to vote on war powers and we want to vote no, the president is not authorized to do this.” And second, actually willing to say, “We’re not going to vote for funding for this war and we’re not going to be cowed by the argument that a refusal to vote for funding for the war is somehow a refusal to support the troops.” That has been impressive and unusual. And Ruben, Senator Gallego pointed that out.
He also made, I think, a broader point that you and I both experienced firsthand, which is that yes, the Executive Branch has asserted greater authority when it comes to the use of military force, but Congress has also ceded a lot of that authority quite consciously.
And a good example of that is the famous red line on Syria when President Obama said that we would take some form of action if Bashar Assad gassed his own people. He then went ahead and did that. He used chemical weapons, killed more than 1,000 people in a Damascus suburb. And President Obama said, “I’m prepared to use military action, but I want Congress to authorize it.” And you and I were both involved from our perches, me at the White House, you at the State Department, of trying to rally Congress to actually pass an authorization to use military force. And the main answer we got from them was not yes or no, but, “Why are you asking us?”
Jon Finer:
“Don’t make us do this.” Right.
Jake Sullivan:
Right. “Why don’t you just do the military action and then we’ll put out statements either supporting it or opposing it. We’ll see how it goes.” But basically the vibe on a bipartisan basis from the Congress was, “Don’t come here and ask us for this, just act.”
And Ruben made a point that I thought was important, which is there is a sense for many members that just not having all the information and then being put on the spot to make a big call like this is a challenging thing. And having a lot more members now, like one Congresswoman, Maggie Goodlander from New Hampshire or Senator Ruben Gallego from Arizona who are veterans, who have military experience actually, and a larger number of those folks being willing to speak out on these issues. This I think is changing from what we experienced on Syria. But it really has been a two-way street of the Executive Branch not wanting to be constrained by the Congress, but the Congress not really wanting to be saddled with the responsibility of making these big calls. And this Iran War, maybe it’s a turning point, I hesitate to use the word maybe we’re turning the corner since-
Jon Finer:
Turning the corner.
Jake Sullivan:
That has been very derided over the course of this podcast correctly. But anyway, that was something that was going through my mind as the senator was speaking.
Jon Finer:
I actually remember it somewhat even more cynically than you laid it out, the Syria episode, because there were many demands, direct demands to the White House, public demands on cable to give Congress a role in this.
Jake Sullivan:
Yeah, right. Right.
Jon Finer:
How can the administration go and do this without coming to Congress? Which I think were made in the belief that the administration would never actually call that bluff and try to put them on the hook with a vote. And then some of those same people who had been basically deriding President Obama for moving ahead without authorization were the ones who were saying, “Please put on the brakes.”
Jake Sullivan:
Who were like, “Hey, hey. No, no, no, no.”
Jon Finer:
“Don’t make us vote on this.” So pretty cynical episode all around in that case. And I think Congress has sought to basically have a voice on foreign policy without having the accountability that comes from having to make decisions, basically.
Jake Sullivan:
Well, that was very much a dog that caught the car moment when these very same people who were saying, “Hey, Congress has a role here,” when we tried to give it to them, said, “We want nothing to do with that.”
In the Biden administration, there was another episode along this same theme. We were operating, when we were conducting operations against terrorists in multiple different countries, under an authorization to use military force that had been passed in 2001 to go after Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. And it was still on the books and still the operative legal framework for the use of force against terrorists in Syria and Somalia, in Yemen, in other places, against groups that didn’t even exist in 2001. And we went up to the Congress and said, “You guys have got to pass a new authorization to use military force that more clearly defines the scope of that authority when it comes to which groups, which geographies, what kind of time limit.”
And the Congress debated that at some length, they kicked it around various committees, but fundamentally didn’t really want ultimately to own the difficult set of questions that came with trying to shape and scope such an authorization. So to this day, 25 years later, we’re still operating under that same authorization, and that I think is not a sound basis upon which to conduct American foreign policy. And maybe what’s happening here on Iran will help shake loose a fuller debate and ultimately lead Congress to move forward with a different kind of authorization when it comes to the campaign against terrorist groups that continue to threaten the United States.
Jon Finer:
You make a good point about how these authorizations can metastasize and be used for purposes for which they were clearly not intended. And by the way, there are members of Congress, members of the Senate who have identified this, tried to remedy it.
Jake Sullivan:
Absolutely.
Jon Finer:
Senator Kane is the one who comes to mind, who’s made this a priority throughout the recent part of his career. But as you say, largely unsuccessfully in terms of getting fellow members to be on board for it.
The other authorization where this phenomenon occurred was the 2002 authorization to use military force in Iraq. Became infamous, at least in the Democratic Party, because so many people voted for it. That was later used as a justification by the first Trump administration to take strikes against targets in Iraq that had nothing to do with the Saddam Hussein regime, Sunni led-
Jake Sullivan:
Oh, right. Right.
Jon Finer:
... government of Iraq that was deposed by the Bush administration, but actually were against Shia militia targets, including Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian leader of the IRGC Quds Force who sponsored and organized those militias. This was obviously not the rationale behind the 2002 AUMF, other than geographically. It was focused on Iraq, but on a totally different adversary. So-
Jake Sullivan:
They saw the word Iraq and were like, “All right, I guess-”
Jon Finer:
Yeah. They got that part mostly right.
Jake Sullivan:
Right. Right.
Jon Finer:
Anyway, so yes, although here we are again with the United States going to war using force and Congress not even putting itself on the hook to take a vote for whether to authorize it, at least not yet.
Jake Sullivan:
So should we turn to where we are in the war in Iran?
Jon Finer:
Yeah. We spoke last time about the options that the administration faced, and we laid out three of them. The first basically was to declare victory and get out of this entirely. That sort of seemed to be where Senator Gallego was coming down when we asked him what the administration should do.
The second was what we called escalate to deescalate. Essentially, some significant show of force or use of force intended to create the pretext for claiming victory and then basically shift back to option one and say, “This is over and we won.” The risk though of option two is that it could slide it to option three, which is go big, essentially try to achieve a military victory, massive amount of force. Where do you think we are on this option spectrum at this point?
Jake Sullivan:
I think the president has basically set himself up for a sharp choice, largely between option one and option two. Although Ruben made the very good point that option two can quickly become option three, right? That once you go down the path of escalate to deescalate, you can end up in escalate to just keep escalating. He called the chasing the dragon, which I thought was a really interesting reference to how war can play out the way addiction plays out.
But right now, what the president has done is try to generate an indirect negotiation with the Iranians that possibly allows him an off-ramp, that gets the strait back open, that lets him say, “We won,” whatever that means. But he’s also setting himself up, by moving forces into the region, to take some kind of military action to try to set the conditions for then declaring victory. And that military action, as we’ve discussed, could have a range of different flavors to it, including trying to seize some islands, including trying to forcibly reopen the strait with the Navy, maybe even including trying to go get that highly enriched uranium from Isfahan. And I think he doesn’t know yet where this is going to go because he’s improvising and he’s playing this by ear over the next few days.
And of course, the Iranians have a vote in this as well. They’re sitting on the other side of this negotiation, essentially saying publicly there is no negotiation. I think you and I probably agree that there’s some form of indirect dialogue-
Jon Finer:
Somebody’s talking to somebody. Right.
Jake Sullivan:
... happening here, whether it’s through business people or through the Pakistanis or through the Turks or through ChatGPT, who knows? There’s some way in which messages are being communicated.
And I think Iran itself is setting itself up for a choice between basically wanting to get to an end of the military operation here and potentially coming to an agreement about reopening the strait. And thinking, “Hey, we got a lot of leverage. Let’s keep teaching the US and others a lesson that we can hold the strait at risk and that attacking us has huge costs.”
So on both sides, I think they’re sitting at an intersection and are trying to decide essentially between turning one way towards an off-ramp and the other way towards continuing and potentially escalating this thing, but how are you seeing it?
Jon Finer:
Two parallel tracks sort of bumping along or speeding along. One is clear, the United States is building up to at least preserve for itself the option of some significant action, potentially even including a ground action. We’ve talked about what that could look like, grabbing the highly enriched uranium, seizing either Kharg Island or some other set of islands in the Gulf somewhere.
Jake Sullivan:
Everyone’s becoming an island expert in the Gulf, I’m noticing.
Jon Finer:
I know, it’s funny.
Jake Sullivan:
Lots of discussion of the-
Jon Finer:
Rapid Googling going on of random Iranian islands. Or a forcible naval reopening of the strait. They are buying themselves that option by deploying these Marine expeditionary units and elements of the 82nd Airborne, maybe more of the 82nd Airborne in the days to come, while simultaneously talking up at least the idea of negotiations.
But as you say, the demands that have come out of both sides, the Trump administration has leaked, somebody has leaked 15 demands, the vast majority of which I think the Iranians are going to reject out of hand because they’re just sort of non-starters in absent a greater level of military defeat and degradation than they currently face. The Iranians demands are similarly unrealistic.
Jake Sullivan:
Yeah, right, right.
Jon Finer:
Remove all US forces from the Middle East or whatever, which is not going to happen. So as long as there is basically no Venn diagram between the two sides, the negotiation does not seem like it has great prospects for succeeding.
Jake Sullivan:
But Jon, don’t you think we’re seeing these maximalist demands put out by each side?
Jon Finer:
Yeah, opening positions, public positions. That’s sometimes how this goes.
Jake Sullivan:
My guess is somehow, whether they can get inside that Venn diagram is one thing, but the actual passing of messages probably involves something a bit more realistic than those maximalist demands. Maybe not, but my guess is that we’re seeing something happen publicly here that is different from what is likely happening behind closed doors.
Jon Finer:
And then it becomes essentially a messaging fight over who got the better of the conflict, who gets the better of the resolution. And that, interestingly, I think is already sort of playing out in real time.
The other factor, you asked what else is going to influence how all this plays out and how all this is seen, you’ve got some pretty intense messaging going on out of the White House, out of the Gulf countries increasingly, certainly out of Israel, and also out of Iran in the current moment. It may be just worth dwelling for a minute on those different pieces because they’re shaping, I think, how the conflict is viewed. And we’ve talked about the sort of historic levels of unpopularity this early in a war for well over 50% of Americans to be opposed to this conflict at this time is highly unusual. Even the very controversial, ultimately, widely perceived as a failure, Iraq invasion had an initial phase of popularity up to 75% of people in the early days supported it.
Jake Sullivan:
I was surprised to see that looking back, right?
Jon Finer:
Yeah.
Jake Sullivan:
Because our experience has been so colored by how it played out. But yeah, three quarters of Americans supported that for weeks and weeks and weeks. We’re not even a month into this one. And as you said, it’s really underwater already and these wars don’t tend to get more popular over time.
Jon Finer:
Now, where the White House has been more successful, I think, has been talking down what could be, could have been, could still be an explosive market reaction to what is playing out in the Gulf. I think while energy prices have risen significantly, particularly the price of oil, but also spot price of natural gas in Europe and Asia and elsewhere, maybe less so in the United States, if you told the average energy expert before this conflict, “You’re going to have a basically full or nearly full blockage of the Strait of Hormuz for some number of weeks with no obvious end in sight, what do you think that will do to gas prices?” I think most people would have said, or oil prices, it would at least spike well beyond what happened in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine where you got to $120 a barrel and no actual physical barrels of oil ever came off the market.
Here we’ve had millions of barrels a day coming off the market and not the sort of spike you’ve seen, you’d expect to see. And I think that’s in large part because President Trump has gone out and told the markets over and over again, “This might not last that much longer,” and people either believe him or want to believe him.
Jake Sullivan:
Yeah. And you and I have had very personal experience with the centrality of gas prices to sustaining political support for foreign policy in our time in the White House. It was one of the most striking lessons I learned as national security advisor, is how much this weighs upon a president’s political advisors.
And an example of that was the debate that we had over what to do about trying to sanction Russian oil. And a lot of people asked us, “Why aren’t you taking millions of Russian barrels off the market and thereby squeezing Putin’s revenues and thereby decreasing the cash he has for his war machine?” And the answer basically was that if you take millions of Russian barrels off the market entirely, you spike gas prices for Americans and all of a sudden your ability to sustain political support for the very large investments we were making in providing weapons and material to Ukraine, that would have evaporated. The American people would have said, “We don’t want any part of this.”
So it was a balance for us between sustaining political support for the very significant resources we were providing to Ukraine on the one hand, while on the other hand, trying to deal with squeezing down Russian revenues. And we came up with this concept of the price cap to keep the barrels online, but to reduce the amount of actual revenue Russia would get out of them.
But that was a tension that we had to confront and deal with every day. And the White House Chief of Staff and other senior White House advisors were in our suite, in our offices regularly saying, “Guys, you’ve got to keep an eye on this.” And I’m certain that day in, day out right now, this question of the price at the pump, what it means for average Americans is very much on the mind of people in the Trump White House up to and including the president.
And his effort to talk the markets down has worked to a certain extent, but people still are feeling the pinch. And I think that factor is certainly going to play a role here in the coming days and weeks. It may not be dispositive, but it certainly is going to be something that they will have to contend with.
Jon Finer:
It’s funny because I remember it just the same way. All of a sudden people who didn’t always pay tremendous attention to what we were doing on foreign policy wanted to stop by and kind of talk about how things were going and maybe mention that we might want to be a bit focused on this one dimension of what we were trying to do.
Oh, by the way, not lost on the Iranians either, who at least believe sometimes that they understand our politics and try to mess around with them. I would just point to, we’ve talked about Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister who we both have negotiated with at various points. His messaging on this conflict has been quite interesting. So some of it has been the sort of rah-rah gung ho stuff about how the war is going for Iran, but a lot of it has been aimed at an American audience, I doubt particularly successfully, but he’s trying.
He tweeted at one point in the conflict, “US officials are posting fake news to manipulate markets. It won’t protect them from inflationary tsunami they’ve imposed on Americans. Markets are facing biggest shortfall in history, bigger than Arab oil embargo, Iran’s Islamic Revolution and the Kuwait invasion combined.” He also tweeted at one point about Americans having voted overwhelmingly to end involvement in costly foreign wars, surging gas prices, costlier mortgages.” This is the Iranian foreign minister trying to message Americans about their mortgages. Pummeled 401ks and that the blame for that lies with Washington and Israel.
So I think he does realize on some level, Iran realizes that the best way to deter the United States is to make this conflict seem as costly as possible to the American people so this president and future presidents don’t contemplate doing something like this again. That seems to be their strategy.
Jake Sullivan:
It’s interesting. You and I have both spent many, many hours with this guy, Abbas Araghchi, who our listeners and viewers will have seen being interviewed on American television quite frequently. Actually, he was just taken off apparently the hit list for a few days. They’ve decided to say he’s not being targeted because he’s one of the people apparently the Trump administration is talking to at least indirectly. He’s a canny operator, a seasoned diplomat, somebody who kind of knows how to put himself in the other person’s shoes, and you can see him doing that with this quite sophisticated messaging strategy. I think he’s probably also availing himself of some chatbot that is producing words like 401k and mortgage and so forth.
Jon Finer:
Yeah, exactly.
Jake Sullivan:
So yeah, quite striking, something to watch closely.
Just one last observation, you made the point about people who didn’t otherwise care about foreign policy otherwise becoming quite interested. Our first experience with this, most people have basically forgotten this, was in May of 2021, just a few months in when the Colonial Pipeline went down because of a cyber attack, carried 45% of the East Coast fuel. And after just a few days, gas stations in the DC area, which affected the literal people in the White House, were just entirely out of gas. Motorists were famously trying to fill plastic bags with fuel during this. And that was my first quite harrowing lesson of how important this is from the perspective of the domestic and political advisors to the president. And it was a lesson that we saw play out throughout our time in government and is back with us now.
So whether this becomes the thing that leads President Trump to say, “I need to get an off-ramp here soon,” or whether he feels, “No, I have to take a seriously dramatic military action before I call it.” And he certainly is physically setting up for a significant military action. That is the question, that is what I think the next few days will bring. And we’ll be back on next week, for the first time in a while without a guest, Jon, you and I are just going to be stuck talking to one another like old times, like a few months ago. And I think we’ll have the opportunity then to review where things are and also cover a range of other issues. But for now, maybe we should reprise wrap and do a quick wrap and call it a day for today and then come back next week.
Jon Finer:
You want to start with a recommendation if you’ve got one?
Jake Sullivan:
Yes. I have a book recommendation even though I’m not all the way through the book. I am reading a book called Lost by Rachel Hartigan, who is a National Geographic writer. And Lost examines the multiple theories for what happened to Amelia Earhart on her ill-fated attempt to circumnavigate the globe. And this of course is near and dear to my heart because when I was working for Secretary Clinton at the State Department, Secretary Clinton took a deep interest in trying to answer this mystery. Our friend Kurt Campbell was very much seized with this issue, remains to this day.
Jon Finer:
That story is almost worthy of its own podcast, Kurt Campbell, Amelia Earhart,
Jake Sullivan:
We will come to that.
Jon Finer:
... et cetera.
Jake Sullivan:
But this book is really fascinating, so that is my recommendation.
Jon Finer:
All right, I’ve got a book recommendation as well that you could have probably made because I think this recommendation was made to us by a mutual friend. But the book is called The Hour of the Predator. It’s by an author named Giuliano da Empoli, which has apparently become quite an influential read in Europe. But it’s basically mostly anecdotal, somewhat theoretical short, which is a virtue, story of what he calls Encounters with the Autocrats and Tech Billionaires Taking Over the World. So it is a good read. It is extremely evocative and I think insightful about our current moment given how prominent autocrats and tech billionaires are in American politics as well. So I recommend it highly, still not finished, but almost done.
Jake Sullivan:
So I have read Engineers of Chaos, which is a book of his from a few years ago. I’ve not yet had the chance to read this one though, as you said, a mutual friend of ours told us we must read it. I’m just deep in islands in the South Pacific where Amelia Earhart’s plane might have gone down.
Jon Finer:
That’s good stuff.
Jake Sullivan:
Something you’re watching for in the world right now that may not be getting enough attention?
Jon Finer:
Yeah. Oh, I don’t know about not getting enough attention, but we had been watching for President Trump’s next encounter with Xi Jinping. It had been on the calendar, it was taken off the calendar in large part because the president was focused on other things, like what we’ve been discussing over the past hour. It is now back on the calendar, at least for now, for mid-May. So we will have a lot more to say about the preparations for that meeting, what is likely to happen during those engagements. But this is going to be a big geopolitical moment, the first perhaps of several meetings between the two leaders in 2026.
Jake Sullivan:
And we should spend some time in advance of that also talking about the implications of what’s happening in the war in Iran for China’s view of the world and its considerations, including its considerations relative to Taiwan.
I’ve got a more maybe prosaic one than the grandiosity of the US-China relationship, and that’s Polymarket or betting markets on geopolitical events. And these extraordinary stories of bets being placed immediately before the Maduro raid, the action against the Supreme Leader, most recently massive trades being made in the run-up to the president’s tweet about how the US and Iran were talking.
I would note that actually Donald Trump Jr. formally serves as an advisor to Polymarket and Kalshi, two of these major betting markets. He’s also talking about launching his own prediction cryptocurrency based platform called Truth Predict.
Our friend Rahm Emanuel has come out with a proposal to ban any government official of any kind from betting in these markets. That’s currently not banned. I think this is a big deal. It’s not really something we had to contend with, it’s kind of exploded on the scene in the last year or so. But really interesting topic that probably deserves some more attention as we watch how this plays out over the coming weeks.
Jon Finer:
I love that one. And by the way, the sort of thematically related topic of these bizarre stock trades being made right in and around geopolitical announcements by the president, which in a normal time, the SEC would be, I would assume, all over issuing subpoenas to find out who actually made these trades and whether they were privy to information they shouldn’t have been. We have not seen that, maybe for reasons that are too obvious to go into here, but these two phenomena are sort of brand new and I think worthy of a lot more attention than they’re getting.
Jake Sullivan:
All right. So we’re not going to talk about all the things we’ve gotten wrong because that would take us too long.
Jon Finer:
Too many.
Jake Sullivan:
Yeah. But maybe next week we can add that back into wrap. But for today, I think that’ll do it.
Jon Finer:
Well, that’s all for today. We’ll be back next week with a new episode of The Long Game.
Jake Sullivan:
In the meantime, send us your questions and comments at longgame@voxmedia.com. And find us on Substack at staytuned.substack.com. The links are in the show notes.
Jon Finer:
That’s it for this episode of The Long Game.
Jake Sullivan:
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Jon Finer:
For updates and more analysis in your inbox, join the community at staytuned.substack.com.
Jake Sullivan:
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Jon Finer:
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Jake Sullivan:
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Jon Finer:
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Jake Sullivan:
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Jon Finer:
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Jake Sullivan:
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Jon Finer:
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Jake Sullivan:
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Jon Finer:
Music is by Nat Wiener. We’re your hosts, Jon Finer.
Jake Sullivan:
And Jake Sullivan. Thanks for listening.