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A top official from the Biden administration has said that he is supportive of President Donald Trump’s attack on Iran from June of last year and suggested that Joe Biden may have done the same if he had been elected to a second term in office.
Amos Hochstein, senior energy adviser to Biden within the State Department, said that the Biden administration had modeled similar scenarios to last year’s strikes, which were condemned as a “dangerous escalation” by the UN at the time. He said that the Biden administration may also have “had” to carry out such strikes, despite last summer’s war having been launched by Israel and having not involved the U.S. at all at that point.
“I was supportive of President Trump joining in, in June, to take the strikes that we had thought internally in the Biden administration, we may have to take if there was a second term,” Hochstein said in an interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday.
“We thought that the spring, summer of 2025 was probably — we may have to be there in the same place,” Hochstein said. “We did war games. We did some practice runs on what it would look like to look into it, because that may have had to happen under our watch as well.”
Hochstein, who was born in Israel and formerly served in the Israeli military, went on to suggest that the Trump administration is conducting negotiations with Iran too “loosely.” But he did not express opposition or support for the current war that has killed thousands of Iranians so far, despite strikes slated to begin again this Wednesday when the current pause in strikes ends.
The statements undercut some liberals’ claims that a Democratic president would not have stoked tensions with Iran if elected this term instead of Trump.
Former Vice President Kamala Harris, who is considering running for president in 2028, came out against the war in a talk on Saturday. But the war is extremely unpopular, and Harris did not levy a substantial critique against the atrocities of the war, but rather spoke only about gas prices and the danger posed to U.S. troops.
This comes on top of the fact that Harris had suggested, during her 2024 run for president, that she may also have taken extreme measures against Iran were she elected. When asked in an interview in October 2024 about the U.S.’s “greatest adversary,” Harris replied: “I think there’s an obvious one in mind which is Iran.”
“What we need to do to ensure that Iran never achieves the ability to be a nuclear power. That is one of my highest priorities,” she went on.
Biden had also imposed dozens of sanctions on Iran during his term, and had given Israel a record amount of military funding despite having internally acknowledged that Israel was committing war crimes in Gaza.
Over the past weeks, there has been a small shift away from Israel among Democrats in Congress. Last Wednesday, 80 percent of the Democratic caucus in the Senate voted to block a transfer of U.S. bulldozers to Israel — a record high.
However, some Democrats have been blaming Israel’s violence solely on far right Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — despite polling consistently showing that the Israeli electorate is overwhelmingly supportive of Israel’s military conquests.
“I hope that it’s not a break in the alliance,” Hochstein said of the Senate vote. “I think this, what it really demonstrates is, for the last several years, Prime Minister Netanyahu has sacrificed Israel’s interest in the United States…. I think this is a lot to do with Bibi Netanyahu and his extremist right-wing government, and not to do with Israel.”
Pro-Palestine advocates have warned that such rhetoric attempting to draw a line between Netanyahu and the country he has led for decades is an insidious way to ensure that Israel continues to enjoy support among Democrats despite its war crimes.
“The writing is on the wall, and we see politicians reacting to the fact that aid to Israel and AIPAC are toxic,” Ahmad Abuznaid, executive director of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, told Mondoweiss last week. “But we have to dig deeper because there is a distinction. We need to control the narrative. We need to end support for genocide and occupation. That’s the moral, ethical, and legal position.”
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