Why the Iran war feels like 'deja vu' (with Sen. Ruben Gallego)

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Ruben Gallego** (0:25)
People right now are really hurting, and we're going to be throwing more money at a war that we should never have gotten involved in in the first place. This wasn't properly planned out.

**Dasha Burns** (0:34)
Hello, hello, and welcome to The Conversation. I'm Dasha Burns, Politico's White House Bureau Chief, and every week on this show, I invite one of the most compelling and sometimes unexpected power players in Washington and beyond in for a chat to find out how they're navigating and shaping this incredible era of American politics. And this week, I spoke with Democratic Senator Ruben Gallego. Gallego represents Arizona, which is a very purple state. In fact, when he won the election in 2024, Gallego flipped his Senate seat from independent to Democratic, and on the same ballot, Arizona also elected President Trump. Now that he's in Washington, Gallego's background is particularly relevant in this moment. With the Iran war intensifying, Gallego brings his perspective as an Iraq war veteran to this new conflict. And as a Hispanic Democrat Senator of a border state, Gallego has a unique perspective on immigration with criticism for his own party as well as for the GOP. There was so much for us to talk about, including voter ID, the 2028 election, and if he thinks that Democrats can become the fun party again. Senator Ruben Gallego joins The Conversation.
Senator Ruben Gallego, thank you so much for joining The Conversation.

**Ruben Gallego** (1:56)
Well, thank you for having me.

**Dasha Burns** (1:57)
I do want to start with the war in Iran. You have such a unique perspective, especially given your own service, which we'll talk about in a little bit. But I want to know how you see this conflict, this moment, you have acknowledged that Iran is the world's leading sponsor of terrorism. America and its allies have failed to solve this problem for decades now. Now supporters of President Trump's actions argue that this campaign has decimated Iran's military capabilities, eliminated dozens of top leadership, destroyed its terrorist infrastructure. They say the world is a safer place now. But I know that you disagree with the action that this administration has taken. So I'm curious, if you don't think what the president is doing is the right thing, what do you think is the solution to Iran?

**Ruben Gallego** (2:46)
I think first of all, I recognize that it's been a couple of administrations that have not dealt with the Iran problem correctly. In some ways we have. I think, for example, the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal, was a really good first step solution for us to make sure that Iran does not get a nuclear weapon. The secondary portion of that is how to deal with Iran in terms of their support for proxy militias, terrorism, things of that nature. The area that I think was not invested on fully enough by Obama, Biden, Trump, is figuring out how to fight Iran and how to diminish Iran's capabilities without going to what we're doing right now. And what we're doing right now, I don't believe it's going to work for a couple of reasons. Number one, regime change is happening, but you're only replacing some of these people that are potentially people we work with, with some very hard line and hardliners that do not want to have compromise and may actually only crack down further on their own people. Number two, I think there was a very good opportunity for us. Again, not that Iran is a great country that we could 100 percent trust, but certainly we could have had a better guarantees in terms of limiting their nuclear capabilities. I think we have set back their ability to make a nuclear weapon. They weren't anywhere near, by the way, to actually create a nuclear weapon that would be of any danger to us or our regional partners. But now we have totally reset the standard basically by any country that you're better off just rushing to build a nuclear weapon, dig deeper and deeper away so our bombs cannot get to you. And it's going to be harder and harder for us to stop some of these countries from proliferating their nuclear capability.

**Dasha Burns** (4:20)
So do you think that Iran should have been allowed to just keep operating as they were?

**Ruben Gallego** (4:25)