Two Mass. military vets in Congress break from Democratic consensus of outrage over Trump's Iran strike

Boston Globe

5 hours ago

'I think the world is safer after these strikes than before, but it's also more complicated,' Auchincloss
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In an interview with the Globe, Auchincloss stood by that assessment, and acknowledged he is in a different place from Democrats who believe that a strike should not have happened. He lamented the lack of any congressional input which made the process worse, but said that if Trump had presented the military plan to Congress, backed up with a clear plan for a diplomatic resolution to Iran's nuclear threat, he would've voted for it.
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Moulton, the Salem Democrat, reserved judgment in the wake of the attacks. 'One of the reasons I was reticent to just immediately condemn the strikes is because anything that gets us back to the negotiating table is helpful — that's where we need to be at the end of the day,' he told the Globe. (Trump said on Wednesday that the US and Iranian sides would talk directly next week.)
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Congressman Seth Moulton speaks during a town hall event at Tewksbury High School on June 16, 2025, in Tewksbury.
Danielle Parhizkaran/Globe Staff
Asked if he would have voted for the strikes had Trump sought congressional approval, Moulton said, 'I would not; I can't say why.' (The ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services subcommittee with jurisdiction over nuclear arms control, Moulton said he met privately with General Michael Kurilla, the head of the US Central Command, before the strike on Iran.)
But Moulton said that one of the lessons he learned from serving in Iraq was 'you should not rush to judgment before you have all the facts… sometimes, something that looks bad turns out to be helpful at the end of the day.'
That Auchincloss and Moulton have offered distinct interpretations of the Iran strikes is not especially surprising. Both are generally more pro-Israel than their Democratic colleagues — particularly Auchincloss — and more vocal on the urgency of blocking Iran's path to a nuclear weapon.
Both have also been willing to use the phrase 'regime change,' which is politically toxic in many corners following Iraq and Afghanistan. Auchincloss said he did it as a way to 'purposefully poke the bear a little bit and force a conversation' about the role America could play helping Iranians toward self-determination without using force.
Moulton also spoke about the desire to see the regime in Tehran gone and advanced that idea in a Wednesday interview, but worried that the strikes might have galvanized support for the Islamist government after speaking with an Iranian-American contact in Boston.
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Still, both Democrats are far from uniformly supportive of any of Trump's other moves on the world stage. Both have been critical of the administration's handling of a number of foreign policy issues on substance and on execution.
Asked about the potential difficulty of balancing openness to more aggressive action on Iran with deep opposition to the way Trump handles military and foreign affairs, Auchincloss said, 'everything in Washington is harder with this 'very stable genius' that we're dealing with.'
Most Democrats, meanwhile, responded with apprehension and alarm over virtually every aspect of the strikes. Senator Elizabeth Warren summed up the feelings of many in a
This divergence in Democrats' reactions to the strikes reflects the party's broader challenges to find a united front not just on their stance on this particularly thorny geopolitical issue, but on Trump in general.
Matters could get more complicated as the initial shock of the attack wears off. While fears of a wider war including the US have not materialized—with Trump taking credit for brokering a ceasefire between Iran and Israel that has held—it's still unclear how effective the strikes were. A leaked US intelligence assessment found that the strikes did not obliterate Iran's nuclear program, as the Trump administration has repeatedly suggested.
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Some top party leaders, however, have long navigated a similar balancing act of concerns between Israel, Iran, and Trump, like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, a longtime Iran hawk and supporter of Israel. (Schumer has refrained from commenting on the strikes themselves, instead focusing on criticizing Trump's rejection of congressional approval.)
But in some ways, Democratic opinion on the issue is narrower and more muted compared to the internal division on display when President Obama pushed to enact the Iran nuclear deal in 2015. A number of Democratic lawmakers opposed the deal—a signature initiative of their own president—when it came to a vote in Congress, fearing it would make Israel less safe.
There is far more unity on these questions now than a decade ago, said Ned Price, a former State Department spokesman under President Biden and a National Security Council aide under Obama.
'To the extent there is a lack of consensus' right now, said Price, 'it is on tactics rather than strategy.'
'Yes, there are a couple of outliers—we are a big tent, especially on matters of war and peace,' he continued. 'Not everyone is going to be singing from the same sheet music.'
Looking ahead, Auchincloss argued it's too early to say whether the strikes are a success 'because as it stands right now, there is an opportunity, but not a victory.' The opportunity, he said, is for the US to push 'coercive diplomacy,' pushing for a new agreement like the 2015 nuclear deal while also getting tougher on Iran's funding of terrorism through proxy organizations.
That's where he and Moulton are in lockstep with the entire Democratic caucus. 'The only way to ensure long-term that Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapon is through a diplomatic deal that allows intrusive inspections,' Moulton said.
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The fact that both Auchincloss and Moulton served in wars in the Middle East doesn't entirely explain their views, but it did impart them with lessons.
'I wanted a clear mission as a Lieutenant. I did not want a garbled chain of command, but that wasn't the problem,' Auchincloss said of his time in Afghanistan in 2012. 'The problem was the mission, and Congress needed to help, and we should help now.'
Moulton offered a different point. 'I can't tell you how many times I've been surprised in the Middle East,' he said, 'when something we expect to be good turns out to be bad, and something we expect to be bad turns out to be good.'
Sam Brodey can be reached at