Despite what historical analysis warns about militarily force regime change, Trump chose to ignite a war on Iran. What’s worse, even his own advisors told him not to do it.
Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) has been in multiple, classified briefings regarding America’s actual position in Iran. Now, he joins Jen to tell us what we all feared: the U.S. may be posed to continue another forever war in the Middle East. As Sen. Coons explains, there was no imminent nuclear threat coming from Iran, so this costly war is a completely, self-made plight.
Chris Coons is serving as the senior United States senator from Delaware. Chris serves on the Senate Appropriations, Foreign Relations, Judiciary, Small Business and Entrepreneurship, and Ethics committees. He is the vice chair of the Ethics Committee and the ranking Democrat on the Defense Appropriations subcommittee.
The following transcript has been edited for formatting purposes.
Jen Rubin
Hi, this is Jen Rubin, Editor-in-Chief of the Contrarian. We are delighted to have back with us Senator Chris Coons from Delaware. Welcome Senator.
Senator Chris Coons
Thanks, Jen, great to be on with you again.
Jen Rubin
Massive confusion about why we’re in Iran, what we’re doing, how long it’s gonna take, whether there are gonna be ground troops. What is your current best understanding of what is going on?
Senator Chris Coons
So, President Trump launched this war of choice against Iran, despite advice he got from a number of senior planners and military leaders to be conscious of the potential for it to widen into a much deeper, broader, and more costly war. President Trump did so based on his gut feeling, that he and he alone understood the imminent security threat to the United States. And some of his senior folks, including his Director of National Intelligence in testimony here on the Hill, agreed that there was no imminent nuclear threat to the United States or our allies. I’ll remind you, Jen. Last summer, President Trump authorized Operation Midnight Hammer, which he claimed obliterated Iran’s nuclear enrichment program. And what was left of its potential, weapons program. And there was no evidence given that they had made any serious attempts to restart it.
So the narrow military goals sink their navy, destroy their ability to launch ballistic missiles, reduce their ability to project power through their proxies in the region. The military has been getting at, and they’ve dropped tons of ordnance, fired off thousands of missiles. And made real progress, because this is what they do against those targets. I think our real problem is that the President and the Secretary of War have both talked repeatedly about much broader goals. Regime change. ensuring that Iran can never again have any nuclear enrichment capability. And as a result, because Trump said this is a regime change war, the Iranian leadership A murderous and brutal regime that has killed lots of its own people and lots of Americans is fighting as if this is existential, and using every tool they’ve got. That’s why they are hitting civilian targets, oil and gas infrastructure, many of our allies in the region, and making the costs for us of this war go up rapidly.
Jen Rubin
So, just to clarify, the president was told all of these things might unfold. It should not be a surprise to him, although he has said otherwise, that Iran has retaliated, has hit our neighbors, has bottled up the Strait of Hormuz. Did the president simply not believe them, or he wasn’t paying attention? Do you have any sense…
Senator Chris Coons
Jen, I will not guess what went through that man’s mind, but I’ll say this. Senior military and intelligence planners have, for decades. predicted that whenever Iran felt they really had their back to the wall, and it was existential, that they’d close the Strait of Hormuz, they would strike regional allies of the United States. And they would use some of their many tools. Ballistic missiles, drones, cyber attacks, and a global network of distributed terror cells. We’re seeing all of that come true now, and whether Trump ignored them, didn’t believe them, or just wasn’t focused. I think his National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, certainly was well aware of these challenges.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs certainly was well aware of these challenges. And, again, I can’t tell you what Secretary Hegseth thinks on any given day, but it was willful blindness to historical analysis. I think part of what happened, Jen, was that Trump took two bold strikes against Iranian interests in his first administration, killing the head of the IRGC, Qasem Soleimani, and last summer, bombing their nuclear infrastructure. And both times, Iran did not respond with everything they had. That’s because he didn’t say those were wars of regime change. Once he made it clear, and Israel’s actions made it clear, that we were intending to, and did, kill the, Kill Ayatollah Khomeini, kill all of the senior leaders of the IRGC and their intelligence services, they concluded that, yes, this was intended to be a war of regime change, and they’re doing everything they can to make it as costly as possible.
Jen Rubin
That is the most cogent explanation we have heard yet of what is going on. The military is doing its job, as they always do brilliantly. They have dropped a ton of, munitions, and yet Iran retains the ability to strike our Gulf allies, to use drones. Can the military prevent that? In other words, is this going to go on indefinitely because Iran has some storehouse of, capabilities that we really can’t eradicate completely?
Senator Chris Coons: We should be learning the lessons of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. The Ukrainians have fought bravely and with great determination and skill, and one of the things the Ukrainians have demonstrated is that they’re able to build drones and use them in combat, not from some big centralized factory, but from garages and basements scattered all over eastern Ukraine. They have innovated the best-in-class drones in the world using that base. So, when I’ve been briefed, and when the public’s been told by Secretary Hegseth, we’ve got them on the ropes, we have bombed their industrial base, their capacity in Iran to keep innovating and building cheap, light, lethal drones is almost limitless.
They retain thousands of drones that are able to be launched from almost anywhere by the IRGC and by the remainder of the Iranian military. It is true that we’ve carried out huge numbers of strikes against their ballistic missile launchers and against some of their drone sites. But they’ve been preparing for this moment for years, and they have literally hundreds of buried, tunnels and storage sites where they retain ballistic missiles and drones, and my concern. as we’ve just seen in the last day, is that as Iran gets more desperate, they will launch drones at softer sites, like the gas field that Qatar has, that is one of the major sources of natural gas in the world, like the oil and gas infrastructure in Saudi Arabia, like hotels and airports in Dubai and Abu Dhabi that have been hit. These countries are very close, Jen.
It’s very easy for them to use their cheap Shahid drones that are between $20,000 and $50,000. And we’re spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, at least, on every interceptor that we and our allies are sending to try and stop them. So in this war of attrition. I don’t currently see a path where we will successfully either prevent Iran from having the ability to strike us and our facilities and our men and women at arms and our allies, or lead to a collapse of the regime. I’ve heard nothing that suggests that that’s going to happen in the short term.
Jen Rubin
That is deeply, deeply disturbing, Senator. We now hear that there may be plans, for massive numbers of troops, to be relocated. For what purpose? It’s not exactly clear, but to the island, and Donald Trump has talked about occupying, Carg Island and the rest. What is your understanding of what is going on, and what would that accomplish exactly?
Senator Chris Coons
So, I think there’s 3 potential purposes to which President Trump might deploy thousands of American troops. First would be to occupy Karg Island, which is an island quite a bit offshore from Iran. from which they export the vast majority of their oil exports, which is the principal source of revenue. By the way, Iran is still exporting oil. They’re actually exporting more oil now than at the start of the war, which is striking, because they’re still making revenue off of oil tankers that they’re letting get through the strait. That would be a very costly and difficult campaign, largely because of the topography. There is a rugged and elevated coastline, onshore in Iran, and Karg Island, which is flat and out in the ocean. would be an easy target for drones and for strikes from IRGC units.
It would take a lot of our troops to occupy it permanently, and then to take over the oil exports from Iran, and obviously they’d be easy targets. A second purpose that’s actively been discussed is securing the nuclear enrichment sites at Isfahan, Natan’s Fordeaux, principally Isfahan. That were bombed last year. We have no idea, publicly, about exactly how much is left of the 400 kilograms of 60% highly enriched uranium that Iran had before those strikes. Where are they? What kind of condition they’re in, and how we would recover them is not something, at least I, so far, have been able to learn. I am certain that that would be a very difficult mission, because it’s in the center of Iran.
So, very difficult to get in and get out without our troops being targets. And then last would be an overthrow of the regime, an exceptionally difficult challenge. I’ll just remind you and your viewers briefly, Iran is four times the size of Iraq. It is mountainous. It has a very large army and intelligence and security apparatus, and even though they’ve been bombed badly and they’ve lost their senior leadership, the IRGC is particularly good. at having the next level, and the next level, and the next level of their cadres step forward, willing to continue the fight. That’s what we saw in Hezbollah, in Hamas, in Lebanon, and in Gaza, and that’s the fighting style that the Iranians taught their proxies in those two countries. So I’m very worried that if we introduce first a few thousand troops, and then a few more thousand troops, and then a few more thousand troops. In pursuit of a goal that is very difficult, that we are going to find ourselves enmeshed in a long-term and very costly war.
Jen Rubin
This is beginning to sound not like Iraq, but like Vietnam, quite frankly. Two questions before I do want to get to the SAVE Act briefly. First of all. Are our goals aligned with Israel? And secondly, they now want $200 billion from Congress that has not been briefed publicly. They have not testified. under oath. What does Congress, to do about that?
Senator Chris Coons
So, Jen, I’m the Senior Democrat on defense and intelligence appropriations in this Congress, so I’m directly involved in this. I have not received any notification from the Pentagon or the White House about this request. All I’ve learned is from press reports. $200 billion is a staggering amount of money, and suggests they are preparing for a longer and more costly war. I will not vote to authorize this war by voting for a supplemental, which previously has been taken as an authorization of war. Our president owes it to the American people to give a coherent and focused address about why he thinks this is the right use of our troops, and we in Congress have a clear role under the Constitution.
The American people are going to be asked to pay the cost of this war. They already are. We’ve already lost 13 service members. We’re already paying dramatically more at the pump, and the consequences for our alliances, our security, and the risk of terrorist attacks here at home and abroad are going to be high. The president should make the case and Congress should vote before we proceed with anything. So I’m going to be demanding public hearings and clarity from the administration about what they’re asking for and why.
Jen Rubin
And Israel, do we align with their goals? Do we know what their goals are?
Senator Chris Coons
I’ve not been fully or well briefed on that, but it seems clear to me that Prime Minister Netanyahu’s goal is regime change, and that is a much tougher goal in Iran. He is not interested in negotiating at all with the senior leaders of the Iranian regime, those that remain. And you’ve heard President Trump say publicly. We thought we had someone we could negotiate with, but now they’re all dead, and we don’t know anything about this next layer. Well, that says something, because it was mostly Israeli strikes that killed the second and third layer of leadership in Iran, and the idea that… I mean, this was President Trump speaking publicly in a recent press event.
The idea that Trump had thought there was a path For an off-ramp for negotiations, and that’s been… shut down by military strikes, at least to me, suggests that there may be a difference in our core goals, and that Israel, specifically Prime Minister Netanyahu, may think it’s impossible and pointless to negotiate with the Iranian regime. It will be very difficult to overthrow this regime. The Iranian people rose up when President Trump encouraged them to, and thousands and thousands of them were massacred by the IRGC. There is not an organized, funded, armed. or capable opposition within Iran.
And frankly, I think the idea that we’re gonna somehow impose a crown prince as an opposition figure or leader who hasn’t been to the country in decades and does not enjoy a broad base of popular support is a difficult fantasy. The idea that we would train and arm and send in resistance movements from the Kurdish population, or the Baluuk population, that are outside the country in Pakistan and Iraq, I also think will simply lead to chaos. It may serve Israel’s goals for there to be collapse and chaos, but it certainly doesn’t support the goals of our allies in the region, who I’ve heard from, the Emiratis, the Qataris, the Saudis, the Kuwaitis. who really want this war to end and want stability. It’s their civilian sites and their economies that are being most dislocated. And frankly, you know, UAE and Saudi have built their futures for their countries on the idea that they’re stable and they’re safe, they’re places where people can come for shopping or vacation or banking or for religious pilgrimages, and the idea that there’s going to be drones raining down on them for several years, or a huge civil war in Iran that will not resolve for years. Really undermines their vision for the region.
Jen Rubin
This is terribly disturbing, because… Sorry. Yes, but very clarifying, because we cannot reach the ultimate goal Trump’s… set out, and there’s no easy ramp off because Iran and Israel get votes as well. Let me switch gears in just a few minutes we have left, and talk about the SAVE Act. Apparently the Republicans have decided they’re not going to deal with affordability, they’re not going to deal about the war, they’re not going to reform ICE. Instead, they’re going to stop people from registering to vote and vote by mail. what is going on? How long is this going to go on? And do you think the Republicans really are going to throw away the filibuster on something as constitutionally suspect as this?
Senator Chris Coons
So, Jen, we’ve spent the last two days on the floor debating and opposing each other. Trump keeps insisting that he will force the Republican majority to break the rules, to end the filibuster, and to pass this act. Now, the way Republicans are talking about it, this is a simple voter ID bill. Look, I have to show ID when I vote in Delaware. I have no problem with the idea that people should show some government document that shows they’re able to vote and what their name and address is. But that’s not what this bill does. This is a voter disenfranchisement bill.
My wife and my mother would be thrown off the voter rolls because their birth certificate and their current name of registration are not the same. It would force tens of millions of Americans who regularly use vote-by-mail to lose that ability to vote. It would force them to either go get an expensive passport, I think it’s $165 on average, and can take months, or to go find their original birth certificate, and then go make court filings about their name change. this close to an election that Republicans are very concerned they’re going to lose badly because of the soaring cost of living. This is an effort to purge the voter rolls and to disenfranchise, in particular, married women in the United States. It would have an impact more broadly than that on veterans, on seniors, on people who’ve moved, on people who’ve changed their name, but the SAVE Act is a solution in search of a problem.
There are very, very few cases of people who are not citizens voting in American elections over the last few decades. And this is a Trojan horse. They’re saying that Democrats don’t support voter ID? I do. What they are doing with this bill is disenfranchising tens of millions of Americans. Thankfully, there are enough Republicans opposed to ending the filibuster that I do not think this will pass, but this is a moment when we should all reflect on how terrible policy could have been advanced by 51 votes if we didn’t have that protection.
Jen Rubin
And I can imagine if the filibuster does go away, there will be things on Democrats’ to-do list in the future that they would want to pass by 51 votes that Republicans are very much opposed to. Yes. Senator, I cannot thank you enough. A voice of reason, logic, and insight, which is something we have been sorely missing from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. So, we thank you, we will check back in with you in the future, and we really do appreciate the time you spent with us. Thanks so much.
Senator Chris Coons
Great. Thanks, Jen.
