“The reason we lost is the war,” declared Vice President JD Vance in a lengthy post on X. And, he’s right. The 2026 midterm elections were an unquestioned rebuke of the forces that drive America into foreign wars, with 74% of voters citing the Iran war as a crucial or major factor in their vote.

The question now is: What will these newly-minted representatives who rode in on this anti-war wave actually do about it? To fulfill voters' desire to silence the voices that drive America into forever wars that bankrupt Americans at home here are three simple legislative priorities Congress should enact.

First, end the Iran war. While President Donald Trump said there’s no immediate plan to strike Iran the day after the election, just two days before the election the U.S. launched strikes on an Iranian island. This is just the latest evidence that Trump simply can’t be trusted to find a path to peace. While Congress can (and has) passed war powers resolutions, demanding a halt to the Iran war, Trump can (and has)ignored them.

But, Congress has an opportunity to tie the president’s seemingly war-prone hands in the lame-duck session of Congress when government funding expires on December 11. In any negotiation over the next government funding bill anti-war Democrats and Republicans alike must dig their heels in to ensure that any government funding package does not include additional funds to prolong the Iran war. Stopping war funding will go a long way to stopping the war.

Second, the new Congress should oppose the powerful force that drove the U.S. into the Iran war to begin with: the Israeli government. The State Department itself confirmed that Israel did play a significant role in dragging the U.S. into the Iran war when it declared the U.S. “is engaged in this conflict at the request of and in the collective self-defense of its Israeli ally.”

The government of Israel has gone to extraordinary lengths to manipulate U.S. public opinion surrounding the Iran war and the atrocities its forces have committed in Gaza, including paying influencers for pro-Israel content, manipulating AI chatbots, and even setting up a fake think tank to distribute propaganda. PACs affiliated with the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) also contributed more than $84 million dollars to pro-Israel candidates–most of whom lost.

Congress has an even more straightforward opportunity to ensure the Israeli government can’t drag the U.S. into another war: end U.S. military assistance to Israel in all its forms. On election day, Trump himself agreed to end the $3.8 billion in U.S. military assistance that goes to Israel every year, which is an important start. But, Congress must also reject Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to further integrate the U.S. and Israel military industrial sectors. A provision to do precisely this is embedded in both the House and Senate versions of the defense policy bill, along with a provision in the intelligence bill that would require the U.S. to share sensitive intel with Israel. These provisions should be stripped out before they become law and the U.S. military and intelligence community is inexorably intertwined with Israel.

Finally, Congress should mandate transparency of the money behind the foreign policy experts that regularly and vociferously argue for pushing America into wars abroad. This can be done by reforming the Truth in Testimony rules that should require experts testifying before Congress to disclose their conflicts of interest. It can also be accomplished by passing bipartisan legislation like the Fighting Foreign Influence Act which, amongst other commendable provisions for combating foreign influence, would require think tanks–which employ many of the foreign policy pundits you see on TV–to publicly disclose funding they receive from foreign governments.

These simple reforms are just a start, but they’ll go a long way towards stopping the forces that propel the U.S. into deadly and costly foreign wars. This would pave the way for Congress to devote our taxpayer dollars to the things that matter most to Americans–like good-paying jobs, affordable groceries, and quality healthcare. If enacted, this could be the start of riding an anti-war electoral wave into a pro-America future.

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Ben Freeman is the director of Quincy Institute’s Democratizing Foreign Policy program and the co-author of the book "Trillion Dollar War Machine: How Runaway Military Spending Drives America into Foreign Wars and Bankrupts Us at Home."

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