The specter of war with Iran has injected foreign policy into a U.S. Senate primary that had contained little to no mention of it before New Year’s.
In the days after President Donald Trump ordered a surprise drone strike in Iraq that killed Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani on Jan. 2, Democrats seeking the Senate seat in Colorado criticized the move, and one, Lorena Garcia, marched with protesters in downtown Denver, demanding peace.
“No War on Iran! U.S. Out of Mid-East,” Garcia’s sign read, as she walked down the 16th Street Mall alongside hundreds of other anti-war Coloradans on Jan. 4.
“He has no authority to continue any sort of engagement in Iran,” she said of Trump that day. “He is posturing, and the only thing that will come of this is unnecessary blood spill and destruction. This man is the most dangerous human on the planet right now.”
Democratic candidate Andrew Romanoff, asked by The Denver Post what he would do about Iran if he was in the Senate today, had a more moderate response.
“I would demand the same thing that a bipartisan group of senators is demanding: Evidence of the threat and a required consultation with Congress that the president seems indifferent to,” Romanoff said at a Denver fundraiser Thursday night.
“In the last week, we’ve seen Iran abandon any limits on its nuclear program and the American-led coalition halt its efforts to counter ISIS,” he added. “Those developments make the world more dangerous.”
John Hickenlooper, the front-runner to take on Republican U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner, said he weighs such matters with a simple test: “Is the world safer because of these decisions?”
“And now it seems more dangerous for us, for our troops, and for our allies than it was last week. Now we have to figure out what comes next. We need congressional oversight, real diplomacy, and global engagement going forward to keep us safe,” Hickenlooper said Friday.
In 2019, it would have been hard to imagine the Democratic Senate primary could be dominated by talk of foreign policy. It was rarely asked about at forums and debates and, when it was discussed, usually garnered only broad answers about Iran, such as the need for reinstating a nuclear agreement.
At campaign stops, candidates would spend an hour or 90 minutes taking questions and never hear one about foreign policy. On campaign literature and websites, foreign relations is well below the domestic topics that have dominated the Democratic race: climate change, health care, immigration, guns, the economy.
Now, as the campaigns ramp up after a holiday slumber, there are new topics: authorization for military force, the need for congressional oversight, and the complexities of a volatile Middle East, though there’s reason to believe domestic issues will still dominate 2020. At the private Romanoff fundraiser Thursday night, there were two questions about mental health, one about guns, one about climate and one about pet euthanasia. Iran was not mentioned.
“It’s a shame we haven’t been talking more about foreign policy,” Garcia says. “I think it will become an issue and then it’ll die down, just like every other issue. We start talking more about gun violence when there’s a shooting, and a week later we stop talking about it.”
The Democratic field largely agrees there needs to be a de-escalation of tension with Iran, though they differ on what that should look like.
“Actions have consequences, and while Soleimani is an enemy of the U.S., I fear his assassination — ordered by Trump with no congressional oversight — is reactionary and could serve to escalate tensions in an already fraught region and cost more lives,” said Trish Zornio soon after the Iranian general’s death. “We need strategic plans, not emotions.”
On Twitter, candidate Diana Bray shared a tweet that called Soleimani’s death “an illegal war crime” and predicted “it will begin a world war.” Stephany Rose Spaulding has called on Congress to reclaim its war powers and “repudiate presidential overreaches,” a problem she says did not begin with Trump.
The man every Democrat in the race is hoping to compete against in November, Gardner, has been an outspoken supporter of Trump’s decision to kill Soleimani. The Republican senator from Yuma is a Foreign Relations Committee member and foreign policy is an area of expertise.
“We find ourselves here because the Obama administration failed to deter the Iranian threat,” Gardner said Jan. 3 — a point of disagreement with every Democratic challenger. “The flawed 2015 nuclear deal not only provided a pathway to a nuclear bomb, it emboldened Tehran’s bloody ambitions.”
“I do not want war with Iran, but the president did not take this action in a vacuum,” Gardner said on the Senate floor Thursday, referring to Soleimani’s death. “Contrary to claims by some of my colleagues in this very chamber, it is Iran that has escalated tensions, not the United States.”
Gardner is seeking a second Senate term, five years after narrowly beating incumbent Mark Udall in a race that centered on domestic concerns but touched on foreign policy in its final months. Gardner accused Udall, who voted against the Iraq War in 2003, of being weak on ISIS after it beheaded two Americans. Udall accused Gardner of playing politics with national security and criticized his reticence on Syria.
“Running for a seat like U.S. Senate, you have to be ready to understand foreign policy and take a position on it,” Garcia said, “especially when it comes to war and especially when it comes to a president who is already not trusted to make a decision that would be in the best interest of Americans.”
One foreign policy expert in the Senate race dropped out Sept. 12 and endorsed Hickenlooper. Dan Baer was a U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and a deputy assistant secretary of state under Obama. When he entered the race, he said he looked forward to going “toe to toe” with Gardner on foreign policy.
“One of the interesting things this week was how Gardner decided to hug the president close on a foreign policy issue that was controversial,” Baer said in an interview Friday. “In the past, he’s hugged the president close in a lot of ways but he has, at times, tried to find an independent voice on foreign policy. He’s had strong statements on North Korea, on Russia.”
Baer said the Democratic primary winner should link Gardner to Trump, who is unpopular in Colorado, when discussing foreign policy.
