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Democratic Sen. John Fetterman (PA) called on President Donald Trump to ditch talks with Iran and bomb the country instead.
The Trump administration will conduct a second round of talks in Rome with Iranian officials regarding Iran’s nuclear program. In his first term in 2018, Trump withdrew the U.S. from a nuclear agreement with the country, which has since ramped up its uranium enrichment program.
Fetterman said negotiations with Iran are pointless.
“Waste that s—t,” he told the Washington Free Beacon on Wednesday. “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.”
The senator denied the possibility that such strikes could trigger a regional conflict, as he downplayed the ability of Iran’s substate proxies to fight a wider war.
“You know, they’ve been saying for years and years Hezbollah was the ultimate badass that kept Israel in check, and we can’t move on anything beyond that,” he said, adding that the group “couldn’t fight for s—t. And Hamas, literally, are just a bunch of tunnel rats with junkie rockets in the back of a Toyota truck.”
Fetterman also dismissed the Houthi rebels in Yemen, which the U.S. has been bombing for years.
“And now the Houthis have been effectively neutered as well,” he said. “So what’s left? You have Iran, and they have a nuclear facility, and it’s clearly only for weapons.”
In a strong field, Fetterman has arguably been Israel’s most vocal supporter in the U.S. Senate. Last year, he accused the Biden administration of “not standing firmly with Israel” despite scores of U.S. arms shipments to the country. During a visit to Washington, D.C. in February, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gifted Fetterman a “golden pager” as an homage to an Israeli operation in which Hezbollah members’ pagers exploded across Lebanon.
