The Senate’s Most Useful Midterm Ad

If you are a Republican strategist looking for a clip to play in competitive congressional districts from Virginia to Nevada this fall, Sunday’s Meet the Press delivered a useful one. Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, appearing to discuss the Iran war, offered his fullest assessment yet of how the conflict began — and he did not search for diplomatic phrasing.

“The president got dragged into this war,” Van Hollen said. “Prime Minister Netanyahu said that he’d been waiting 40 years for somebody to go to war with him in Iran. He found a president stupid enough to do it.”

He added: “I blame Donald Trump for that decision, but here we are.”

The word “stupid” is going to follow Van Hollen for a while. Not because the senator’s argument about Netanyahu’s influence over American decision-making is without serious academic support — former NCTC Director Joe Kent and others have made versions of that case in considerably more measured terms — but because calling the President of the United States stupid on a national Sunday show is the kind of thing that clips easily and travels fast. The clip has already spread widely on social media, and Republicans are unlikely to forget it heading into an election cycle where the Iran war’s costs are an active political liability.

The Argument — And Why It’s More Complicated Than Van Hollen Made It

Van Hollen’s claim that Trump was “dragged” into the war deserves to be engaged seriously, even if his framing was ungenerous. The White House has consistently maintained that Operation Epic Fury was launched on the basis of intelligence showing an imminent Iranian threat to American personnel and interests in the region. Critics, including Kent, point to pre-war NCTC assessments that Iran was not actively developing a nuclear weapon at the time of the strikes, and argue that Trump had sufficient leverage over Tehran to negotiate a superior deal without military action.

Where Van Hollen’s critique runs into trouble is his prescription. He argued that the U.S. doesn’t need China’s help to end the war — simply stopping what he called “digging a hole even deeper” would suffice. “I don’t think we need China’s support,” Van Hollen said. “I think the fastest way to end the war in Iran is just to stop digging a hole even deeper, and that’s what we should do right now.”

The implication — that halting U.S. military and naval pressure would produce an Iranian concession on its nuclear program — runs contrary to decades of experience with Tehran’s negotiating behavior. The JCPOA itself, which Van Hollen invoked approvingly, came together only after sustained economic pressure through sanctions. The Trump administration’s position is that the current military pressure is the most effective form of that pressure available — and that without it, Iran would have little incentive to agree to anything.

On the JCPOA, Van Hollen’s defense was characteristically partisan. “The JCPOA prevented Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. It dramatically contained its nuclear enrichment program, and it had the world’s most intense inspection regime,” he said. What he did not say: the JCPOA’s sunset clauses would have allowed Iran to resume full unrestricted enrichment within a decade. Netanyahu, for his part, told CBS’s 60 Minutes last week that Iran’s nuclear material still has to be physically removed — not merely limited. “You go in, and you take it out,” he said. The gap between that position and Van Hollen’s preferred framework is not bridgeable by diplomacy alone.

The Political Cost Of The Word Choice

The administration pushed back on Van Hollen’s characterization with a statement noting that Trump “took decisive action based on strong evidence which showed that the terrorist Iranian regime posed an imminent threat.” Whatever history eventually concludes about the wisdom of Operation Epic Fury, the characterization of the Commander-in-Chief as “stupid” for responding to national security threats will not age well in any district where patriotism and military respect remain significant values.

Van Hollen is not running this cycle. But Democrats running in competitive House seats this fall now have one more statement they’ll have to be asked about — and one more demonstration of exactly the kind of coastal-elite condescension that James Carville has spent the past two years warning his party away from.