Commentary: What a Democratic Congress means for Iran, Israel and Ukraine

It’s not a stretch of the imagination to say that last week’s midterm election was one the most embarrassing moments of President Donald Trump’s political life. At the time of writing, Democrats have flipped 44 House seats and seven Senate seats, earning a commanding majority in both houses of Congress for the first time since 2020. The results have ushered in a slew of commentary about the state of Trump’s Make America Great Again movement, how last week’s outcome could impact the political future of Vice President JD Vance heading into the 2028 presidential election cycle and whether the United States is returning to a sense of normality after a decade in which Trump upended American political life.

However, the immediate question is even more important: How will the new Democratic congressional majority use its newfound power to impact policy? U.S. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, who is likely to be the next speaker of the House, has already outlined a preliminary list of go-to items for the Democratic Congress to tackle in its first 100 days, from combatting unaffordability to undoing Medicaid cuts. But reforms will go beyond the water’s edge. Foreign policy, which is traditionally viewed as a prerogative of the president, is going to come in for massive scrutiny. Given Trump’s record to date, oversight is sorely needed.

The ongoing war with Iran will be item number one when the new Congress is gaveled into session in early January. Rep. Gregory Meeks, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee is likely to become the next chairman and has telegraphed what the panel will focus on under his leadership. “Immediately” ending the Iran war, now in its ninth month, is at the top of the list. This is not surprising; the war, which Trump claimed would be over in four or five weeks, is arguably the least popular conflict Washington has waged since the Iraq War nearly a quarter-century earlier. In fact, it’s even less popular — the American people never thought bombing Iran was necessary, were deprived of any halfway convincing argument from the administration when the bombing started, and have been left to deal with the economic fallout in the form of gas prices that have nearly doubled since February and diesel prices that have ballooned by 67% over the same time period. It turns out that launching a conflict with no end date, muddled objectives and no preparation for the fallout is both bad policy and bad politics. According to the Institute for Global Affairs, 44% of respondents said the war made them less likely to vote for a candidate running for federal office this year.

Democrats will hammer this point home repeatedly in the months to come. The upcoming government funding fight is an opportunity for lawmakers to actually do something about it. If Republicans and Democrats don’t come to an agreement on funding the government by Dec. 11, Washington will shut down. Although Democrats aren’t in the majority until Jan. 3, some of their members are open to flexing their muscles before then by prefacing their support for keeping the government open to cutting off funds for the conflict. Such a stance would put the war’s remaining supporters in a tough position after the American people repudiated it weeks earlier. This legislative scenario will become even more plausible when Democrats claim power next year.

Washington’s Israel policy will be under the microscope too. Support for Israel used to be one of the few things Republicans and Democrats could agree on. No longer. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has poisoned the well in the United States by turning Israel into a partisan issue. The Israeli military’s war in Gaza, the expansion of settlements in the West Bank, settler violence against Palestinians and Netanyahu’s lobbying effort with Trump to go to war in Iran have cost Israel significant amounts of support in a town where Israeli prime ministers past and present typically received the benefit of the doubt.

A growing number of Americans and a bigger list of elected officials are now questioning why Israel deserves unqualified support across the board. The Chicago Council on Global Affairs finds that Israel’s favorability rating inside the United States has fallen from 55 in 2002 to 44 today. Forty-six percent of Democrats think U.S. military aid to Israel should be stopped completely compared to 20% who felt the same way in 2014. U.S. officials are starting to listen; in July, nearly half of the House Democratic caucus voted to withhold U.S. military aid to Israel, a position Trump ironically endorsed last week when he announced that Washington would no longer be giving Israel billions of dollars every year in security funding. Expect similar votes in the not-so-distant future.

Ukraine will be a central foreign policy topic in the next Congress as well. Democrats are utterly disgusted by Trump’s stance on the five-year-long war and are especially disturbed by his tendency to levy pressure on Kyiv rather than Moscow. While the new Democratic majority won’t be opposed to the Trump administration’s peace talks on principal, they will likely push back on how the White House is conducting those negotiations and attempt to strengthen Ukraine’s negotiating position by, perhaps, passing supplementals on its behalf. Some reports have suggested that Democrats are eying $15 billion in military aid to the Ukrainian army next year. Would Trump put his Mr. Veto hat on and block this money from going through? And if he didn’t, would a resumption of U.S. defense aid to Ukraine truly move the needle on the battlefield or merely propel Russian President Vladimir Putin to withdraw from peace talks?

The GOP’s political analysts will be spending their days determining how the party can prepare for 2028 after one of the biggest humiliations in midterm election history. Meanwhile, observers of U.S. foreign policy will be getting ready for changes, maybe even big ones, on the horizon.

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Daniel DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a foreign affairs columnist for the Tribune.

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