After a series of false starts, the United States and Iran announced on Sunday that they had reached a memorandum of understanding that will reportedly extend the current ceasefire for another 60 days and reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
As the Trump administration claims victory for the diplomatic deal, Democrats in Congress are scrambling for an appropriate response. Some are flatly criticizing the terms as “surrender,” others are welcoming the agreement as a necessary step, and many are trying to navigate a more delicate political path: how to register dissatisfaction with the president without appearing to prefer continued war over compromise.
In a thread on X, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) offered the most comprehensive version of this reasoning, calling the deal “essentially surrender” while acknowledging that Americans “should be glad about it.”
The deal negotiated by Trump is on “Iran’s terms,” according to Murphy. “They made one single concession – opening the Strait. And it’s not even a concession because the Strait was open before the war. Trump has humiliated America. He accomplished none of his goals. He was forced to surrender on Iran’s terms.”
In a statement, Rep. Brad Schneider (D-Ill.), a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said he was waiting for more details on key questions. These include whether the MOU will “block, and then permanently close any path for Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon” and whether it will “put us on a path to address Iran’s proxies,” indicating that any agreement that falls short of these criteria would be a “bad deal for the American people.”
Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) was even sharper in his criticism of Trump’s deal, calling it “an utter disaster” because the U.S. will be “releasing billions of dollars” to an “enemy” in Tehran who can use it to rebuild its military and fund proxy groups in the region.
Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) similarly ripped the reported agreement as “a terrible deal” and “basically a surrender document from Donald Trump to the Supreme Leader of Iran.”
Some progressive strategists view this approach as wrong-headed. “Democrats should make clear they are the anti-war party by pressuring Trump and Netanyahu to end the Lebanon war and ensure the US-Iran deal is sealed,” Erik Sperling, executive director of Just Foreign Policy, told RS, adding that it is “ dangerous to close political space while the deal still hangs in the balance,” which could help neoconservatives who have a launched a campaign to try to kill the agreement.
“Whether intentional or not, that kind of messaging aids people like Mark Levin and others actively trying to undermine the deal, and serves the interests of Netanyahu and the extremists around him,” Sperling says.
On social media, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) agreed that his party should support the deal. “[T]oday, we can be relieved that gas and food costs will start coming down for Americans. And that no more American or civilian lives will be lost,” he wrote.
Other antiwar groups on the left urged members of the Democratic Party to welcome the news.
“This diplomatic agreement is critically needed to bring the disaster to an end, and must be fully and swiftly implemented,” the Center for International Policy’s Matt Duss said in a statement. “US lawmakers from both parties should support the agreement to end this historic and completely avoidable foreign policy disaster.”
The Democratic Party’s approach to this war has been muddled since before its start in late February, when the party’s leadership reportedly slow-walked a war powers vote that could have delayed the march to battle. Earlier signs of an imminent deal were greeted with a similar mix of statements, with some Democrats saying that the reports of an agreement with Iran were “concerning.”
But the party largely coalesced around opposition to the war, eventually garnering near unanimous support for war powers votes in both chambers of Congress. Both the House and the Senate recently passed or advanced measures that would limit the administration’s ability to wage war absent congressional approval. In his post on X, Khanna said that this was evidence that legislative pressure, even absent the force of law, could be a productive tool for ending the war.
“It also shows that when the Congress votes to end war –as we did last week — it can be a wake up call for the President to listen to the anti-war sentiments of the American people,” he wrote.
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