An Open Letter to Senator Andy Kim

Your March 1st MSNBC op-ed deserves a direct response — not because your concerns about congressional war powers are without merit, but because the piece crosses from legitimate policy debate into reflexive partisan opposition dressed up as national security expertise.

Let’s start with what we agree on. You write that “the Iranian regime poses a substantial threat to the Middle East and to US interests” and that “Iranian influence must be confronted and checked.” Good. But then you oppose the one action that has meaningfully set back Iran’s nuclear program, offering diplomacy as the alternative — the same diplomacy that failed for two decades while Iran steadily advanced toward a nuclear weapon. That’s not a strategy. That’s a talking point.

You frame this as “a war of choice.” That framing deserves scrutiny. Iran seized the US embassy in 1979. Iranian proxies killed hundreds of American service members in Beirut in 1983. Iran supplied the roadside bombs that killed and maimed over a thousand American troops in Iraq. The regime plotted to assassinate former senior U.S. officials on American soil — including, according to a 2024 Politico report, Donald Trump himself. This is not a war the United States chose. It is a war Iran has been waging against us for 45 years. What changed on Saturday is that America finally responded with real consequences. Calling that a “war of choice” gets the history exactly backwards.

Your op-ed also implies you speak for New Jersey. You don’t — not on this. Rep. Josh Gottheimer, your Democratic colleague, warned that a war powers resolution would signal dangerous weakness at a critical moment. Rep. Tom Kean Jr. called the strikes necessary. Even Governor Mikie Sherrill — a former Navy helicopter pilot — acknowledged Iran’s nuclear program as a grave threat. Her objection was procedural. Her tone was measured. Yours was not.

You invoke the War Powers Resolution of 1973 as though it straightforwardly prohibits what the president has done. It doesn’t — and someone with your background knows this. Every president since Nixon, Democrat and Republican alike, has held that the WPR unconstitutionally infringes on the commander-in-chief’s Article II authority. The 2001 and 2002 AUMFs also remain on the books, and successive administrations have applied them to Iran-linked groups given Iran’s material support for designated terrorist organizations. The Kaine-Paul resolution you endorse can force a floor vote, but it has failed before and passing it mid-operation would not automatically halt military action. More pointedly: if you truly believe presidential war powers have been abused, why haven’t you led the effort to repeal those AUMFs in the years you’ve been in Washington? The Kaine-Paul resolution is reactive. Leadership would have been getting ahead of this.

There is also one constituency conspicuously absent from your piece: the Iranian people. While you catalogued American anxieties, Iranians were flooding into the streets — dancing with neighbors in Tehran, Karaj, and Shiraz in celebrations typically reserved for weddings. A doctor who lost his son when the IRGC shot down a Ukrainian passenger jet wrote that spring was finally near. These are the reactions of people who have lived under a theocratic boot for 45 years. Your op-ed contains no acknowledgment that the regime you want shielded from military consequences has brutalized and killed its own citizens — including during the 2022 protests when women were met with bullets. New York Times columnist Bret Stephens — a persistent Trump critic — identified the contradiction plainly: the same voices faulting Trump for abandoning democratic values are now faulting him for going to war in defense of those values. When a principled Trump skeptic reaches that conclusion, it deserves more than dismissal.

There is a version of this op-ed that would have been worth reading: a former national security professional offering a rigorous alternative strategy, holding the administration to specific objectives, building bipartisan consensus. You tell us you spent your career at the Pentagon, the NSC, and the State Department countering the very Iranian terror groups now in retreat. That résumé sets a high bar. What MSNBC published doesn’t clear it — it reads like a campaign document calibrated to a base that has decided, regardless of circumstances, that whatever this president does must be wrong.

Senator Kim, you do not speak for all of New Jersey on this. You don’t speak for the constituents of Gottheimer and Kean and others, for New Jerseyans who remember what Iranian-backed terrorism has cost this country, or for those watching Iranians dance in the streets for the first time in a generation. Your constituents deserve a senator who offers strategy, not just opposition. So does this debate.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)