Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., said Sunday that the only meaningful alternative to President Donald Trump’s handling of the war with Iran would have been a different occupant of the White House altogether, arguing that the conflict itself was avoidable and that the administration’s exit from it has left the United States in a weaker position than before the fighting began. Booker’s comments, made during an appearance on NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” echoed remarks former Vice President Kamala Harris made days earlier on an international stage, where she said without hesitation that the war would never have happened under her presidency.
Speaking with host Garrett Haake, Booker was asked directly what alternative path existed for ending the war with Iran, given his stated opposition to the memorandum of understanding the Trump administration signed in Islamabad earlier this month. His answer reframed the question entirely, locating the failure not in how the war ended but in the decision to enter it.
“Well, the alternative is not having a president that led us into this war, that’s surrendered all of our leverage, that is giving Iran everything they want and achieving none of the specific goals that he said he wanted,” Booker said. “We have a disaster for a commander in chief who is leaving us with less and less good choices. What the world needs now is leadership. But from our Middle East allies to our NATO allies, I’m hearing over and over again, your president is a danger to the world, and obviously we at home are paying the cost of that.”
Booker’s framing places the origins of the war, rather than the terms of its conclusion, at the center of his critique — a position consistent with statements he has made since the conflict’s earliest days. Following the initial U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran in late February 2026, Booker, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the military escalation had been “ordered unilaterally, without Congressional authorization or meaningful consultation,” and called Trump’s decision to strike Iran “a consequential, dangerous gamble.” He argued at the time that the war represented “a glaring failure of President Trump’s diplomacy,” pointing to Trump’s withdrawal from the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement during his first term as the root of the crisis that followed.
That argument found a parallel voice days before Booker’s appearance, when Kamala Harris addressed the same question during a conversation with former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger at the R20 Regions of Climate Action Summit in Vienna, Austria. Asked directly by the summit’s moderator whether the war would have happened had she won the 2024 election, Harris answered without qualification. “Absolutely not,” she said. “Absolutely not.”
Harris went further, predicting that any deal emerging from the current negotiations would ultimately mirror the diplomatic framework the Trump administration abandoned in 2018. “Whatever is being negotiated, this president is going to declare victory and will end up where we were after the JCPOA and called that a victory — the JCPOA that he withdrew from — the Obama nuclear agreement,” she said. Harris had said earlier in the conflict that she was “opposed to a regime-change war in Iran” and that U.S. troops were being put in harm’s way “for the sake of Trump’s war of choice.”
Booker’s Sunday remarks reflect months of sustained legislative effort aimed at the same underlying argument — that Congress, not the president alone, should have determined whether the United States went to war. Booker led or co-sponsored multiple War Powers Resolutions throughout March, April and May seeking to withdraw U.S. forces from hostilities with Iran absent congressional authorization. In May, the Senate advanced one such resolution, led by Booker and Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., along with Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer and seven other Democratic senators. “I’ve been proud to work with my Senate Democratic colleagues to use every tool and power we have in the Senate to stop this war, and tonight, we secured the first real step towards ending it,” Booker said at the time.
Earlier attempts had been blocked. In March, after Senate Republicans declined to advance a war powers measure Booker introduced alongside five Democratic colleagues, Booker said the Senate had a constitutional duty it was failing to meet. “We are at war, a war the American people never asked for and Congress is doing nothing,” he said. “No oversight, no hearings, no checks and balances as this administration spends freely and recklessly.”
Booker’s emphasis on alternative leadership comes as questions swirl over the Democratic Party’s path forward, both in the 2026 midterms and beyond. Harris’s Vienna appearance has fed continued speculation about a potential 2028 presidential bid; she has said publicly that she is “thinking about” running again, and political prediction markets have shown her name recognition translating into single-digit standing in a still-undefined Democratic field, with California Gov. Gavin Newsom currently leading those markets. When asked directly in Vienna whether her appearance signaled an intention to run in 2028, Harris demurred, joking about wanting “to get a soccer tort to take home” before declining to elaborate further.
Booker, for his part, has kept his focus on the current legislative calendar rather than speculation about the next presidential race. Asked separately during the same “Meet the Press” interview about renewed Democratic debate over Joe Biden’s 2024 reelection decision, Booker said his attention was fixed on the upcoming midterms rather than relitigating the past. “My urgency and my focus is not looking at the past, it’s doing everything I can in the present to secure a better future for America,” he said, citing planned campaign travel to Texas and Ohio in the week ahead.
The broader argument Booker and Harris have each made — that the war was a function of presidential choice rather than strategic necessity — has taken on renewed significance as the Islamabad memorandum’s terms continue to face bipartisan scrutiny. The agreement commits the United States to a $300 billion reconstruction plan for Iran and to lifting sanctions on an agreed timeline, provisions that have drawn criticism from lawmakers across the political spectrum even as the Trump administration touts the agreement as an end to active hostilities.
For Booker, the existence of that criticism — paired with continued instability on the ground, including Iran’s claim that Israeli strikes in Lebanon had once again closed the Strait of Hormuz — reinforces his core argument that the war’s costs were never necessary in the first place. “What the world needs now is leadership,” he said, a line that captured both his assessment of the war’s conduct and his broader case for why a different presidency, in his view, would have avoided the conflict altogether.