Sen. John Fetterman says nuclear ‘negotiations’ with Iran should come in the form of bombs and the Israeli military
Fetterman said the U.S. should ‘provide our comprehensive military support and whatever else Israel requires to destroy Iran’s capabilities.’
Sen. John Fetterman doubled down this week on his stance that the Trump administration should end nuclear negotiations with Iran and instead support Israel’s desire to attack the country’s nuclear facilities.
“You’re never going to be able to negotiate with that kind of regime that has been destabilizing the region for decades already, and now we have an incredible window, I believe, to do that, to strike and destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities,” Fetterman told the conservative blog The Washington Free Beacon on Wednesday.
Fetterman (D., Pa.) said in a post on X last Friday that the United States should “provide our comprehensive military support and whatever else Israel requires to destroy Iran’s capabilities.” In the Wednesday interview, Fetterman said that “the negotiations should be comprised of 30,000-pound bombs and the IDF,” referencing Israel’s military.
Fetterman is a fierce ally of Israel and the country’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who wants Iran’s nuclear facilities destroyed.
President Donald Trump discouraged Netanyahu from soon pursuing planned attacks on Iranian nuclear sites to make way for U.S. negotiations, the New York Times reported.
Netanyahu last month gifted Fetterman a silver pager inspired by Israel’s September attack on Hezbollah, a militant group in Lebanon backed by Iran that is against Israel. In that attack, pagers used by members of the group exploded. Fetterman gifted Netanyahu a photograph from Philadelphia during that visit.
Fetterman argued both on X last week and in his Wednesday interview that the only purpose of Iran’s nuclear program is to make weapons.
“We can’t allow that or negotiate with this regime,” he said on X.
Iran has insisted for decades that its nuclear program only has peaceful goals, but its officials increasingly threaten to use it to pursue a nuclear weapon.
Ali Larijani, an adviser to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, has warned in a televised interview that his country has the capability to build nuclear weapons, but it is not pursuing it and has no problem with the International Atomic Energy Agency’s inspections. However, he said if the U.S. or Israel were to attack Iran over the issue, the country would have no choice but to move toward nuclear weapon development.
Iran enriches uranium to near weapons-grade levels of 60%, and is the only country in the world without a nuclear weapons program to do so. U.S. intelligence agencies have assessed that Iran has yet to begin a weapons program, but has “undertaken activities that better position it to produce a nuclear device, if it chooses to do so.”
Fetterman dismissed foreign policy experts who have warned that striking Iran would lead to a regional war, according to the conservative blog that interviewed him. In that interview, Fetterman criticized the abilities of militant groups Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis.
He said that Hezbollah “couldn’t fight for [expletive],” that Hamas fighters “are just a bunch of tunnel rats with junkie rockets in the back of a Toyota truck,” and that the Houthis “have been effectively neutered as well.”
“So what’s left?” Fetterman added. “You have Iran, and they have a nuclear facility, and it’s clearly only for weapons.”
Fetterman said that he understands why Trump withdrew from former President Barack Obama’s 2015 deal with Iran during his first term in 2018 and now “can’t understand why Trump would negotiate with this diseased regime.“
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in an interview released Wednesday with journalist Bari Weiss that Iran must give up all nuclear enrichment if it wants to make a deal during talks with the Trump administration and head off the threat of armed conflict.
“I would tell anyone we’re a long ways from any sort of agreement with Iran,” Rubio said. “It may not be possible, we don’t know ... but we would want to achieve a peaceful resolution to this and not resort to anything else.”
Rubio also said that “any military action at this point in the Middle East, whether it’s against Iran by us or anybody else, could in fact trigger a much broader conflict,” as the region is already embroiled in war.
Trump’s lead representative in the recently revived talks, Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, initially suggested the U.S. was open to allowing Iran to continue low-level uranium enrichment before saying that “Iran must stop and eliminate its nuclear enrichment and weaponization program.”
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi responded that his country must be able to enrich. “The core issue of enrichment itself is not negotiable,” he said.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.