Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., said Sunday that he does not support President Donald Trump’s new memorandum of understanding with Iran, calling the agreement an “abject surrender” that delivers sweeping financial benefits to Tehran while leaving American taxpayers to absorb the costs of the war. Booker’s remarks, delivered during an appearance on NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” came days after the Trump administration announced it had reached an interim agreement with Iran aimed at ending months of military conflict between the two countries.
Host Garrett Haake opened the interview by noting that Booker had voted eight separate times in favor of measures intended to end the war, then asked the senator directly whether he supported the memorandum of understanding that brought hostilities to a halt. Booker’s answer distinguished sharply between his long-standing opposition to the war itself and his assessment of how the Trump administration ultimately moved to end it.
“I’m proud to be leading the effort to stop Donald Trump from leading our country into further and further disaster, but the way he is trying to bring us out of this war not only speaks to the failures of the war in total, but it also speaks in a bipartisan way to how bad of a leader he is,” Booker said. He pointed to a wave of bipartisan criticism of the agreement, noting that lawmakers from both parties had used terms like “capitulation,” “surrender” and “catastrophe” to describe its terms.
“When you have Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and progressives, all coming out, talking about capitulation, surrender, catastrophe, you know how bad this deal is,” Booker said. “Iran gets all of the benefits, literally billions and billions of dollars, and America continues to hurt and see the losses from the hundred billion dollars we spent in the war, so every American citizen seeing their costs skyrocket. This has been a cataclysmic failure of his making.”
Haake pressed Booker on what appeared to be a contradiction — supporting an end to the war while opposing the agreement that achieved it. Booker rejected the premise outright. “Let’s be clear. I do not support this deal that he made, which was an abject surrender,” he said. “This is a guy who said he was a great negotiator, but right now Iran has billions and billions of dollars of benefits. It’s almost as if American dollars, American resources are now going to be used to help rebuild Iran, while we are continuing to carry the bill for it.”
Booker’s criticism centers on the financial architecture of the agreement itself. The memorandum of understanding, signed in Islamabad and read aloud to reporters on a conference call on June 17, commits the United States to developing, alongside regional partners, a reconstruction and economic development plan for Iran worth at least $300 billion. The text specifies that “all required licenses, waivers and permissions needed for the relevant financial transactions will be granted by the United States of America.” The agreement also obligates the U.S. to terminate sanctions on Iran — including United Nations Security Council resolutions and IAEA Board of Governors measures — on a schedule to be finalized within 60 days, and to make Iran’s frozen or restricted funds and assets fully available for use.
The agreement followed months of military conflict that began in late February 2026, when the United States and Israel launched strikes against Iran. According to figures Booker has cited previously, the war cost American taxpayers tens of billions of dollars and resulted in the deaths of 13 U.S. service members. Booker, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was among a group of Democratic senators — dubbed the “Senate Six” — who spent the opening months of the conflict filing War Powers Resolutions in an effort to force a vote on ending the war without congressional authorization.
Booker’s position reflects a consistent argument he has advanced since the war’s earliest weeks: that the conflict was avoidable, costly, and conducted without proper congressional oversight. In a statement issued after the initial U.S. strikes, Booker said the military action represented “a consequential, dangerous gamble” that put American lives at risk and “dramatically heightened the danger of an expanded US military entanglement.” He argued at the time that Trump had not eliminated Iran’s nuclear threat despite claims of having “completely and totally obliterated” the country’s nuclear facilities, and that the administration had since acknowledged uncertainty about what the strikes had actually accomplished.
The senator has repeatedly tied his opposition to the war’s financial toll on American households. In March, after Senate Republicans blocked one of the war powers resolutions he had introduced with Democratic colleagues, Booker said that $25 billion had already been spent on the conflict “with zero accountability,” and noted that the same sum could have insured millions of Americans or funded school lunch programs nationwide.
Booker’s Sunday remarks also reflect a broader bipartisan unease with the memorandum’s terms. Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana said on the same broadcast that Iran is “left stronger” by the agreement, while Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas called the prospect of sending billions of dollars to Iran “a mistake.” Trump himself, speaking about the deal, said that if the agreement does not hold within 60 days, “we go back to bombing,” and remarked separately that he would take credit if the deal succeeds and would blame Vice President JD Vance if it does not.
The interview took place against the backdrop of continued instability in the region. Iran said Saturday that the Strait of Hormuz had closed again following Israeli strikes in southern Lebanon, despite a provision in the memorandum requiring the strait to remain open and toll-free for commercial vessels for 60 days. Vance arrived in Switzerland on Sunday to continue negotiations toward a final deal, telling reporters there had been “great progress over the last couple of days in ensuring that the ceasefire holds in Lebanon.”
Booker’s assessment of the deal stands in contrast to that of some Democratic voices who have offered Trump partial credit for bringing the conflict to a close, a divide that surfaced repeatedly throughout the “Meet the Press” interview. For Booker, however, the financial terms of the agreement — and the broader trajectory of a war he says should never have been fought — leave no room for praise. “This has been a cataclysmic failure of his making,” he said, a judgment he returned to throughout the broadcast as he laid out his case against both the war and the deal that ended it.