-Only way to take a nation to war
is with the informed consent of the American people.
The informed consent of the American people.
-President Trump has made it much harder
for the next president to achieve that goal.
By gutting the Iran nuclear deal,
one that, by the way,
the Trump administration itself admitted was working,
certified that it was preventing progress toward a nuclear Iran.
-My issue is that because of the actions of Donald Trump,
we are in a situation where they are now starting --
Iran is starting to enrich uranium again,
in violation of the original agreement.
-Obviously, Mr. Trump has no strategy.
He is going from crisis to crisis,
from escalation to escalation.
-What we need to do is have an international coalition.
We cannot keep acting unilaterally.
As you know, the nuclear deal with Iran was worked on
with a number of our allies.
We have got to undo what Trump did,
bring that coalition together,
and make sure that Iran never gets a nuclear weapon.
-We have to think about cyber. We have to think about climate.
We also have to think about how we spend money.
We have a problem with a revolving door, in Washington,
between the defense industry
and the Department of Defense and the Pentagon.
That is corruption, pure and simple.
We need to block that revolving door
and we need to cut our defense budget.
We need to depend on all of our tools --
diplomatic, economic, working with our allies --
and not let the defense industry call the shots.
-Donald Trump is taking us pell-mell toward another war.
We have a very important resolution.
We just found out today that four Republicans are joining
Democrats to go to him and say,
"You must have an authorization of military force
if you're gonna go to war with Iran."
-And we're now isolated.
We're in a situation where our allies in Europe
are making a comparison between the United States
and Iran, saying,
"Both ought to stand down," making a moral equivalence.
We have lost our standing in the region.
We have lost the support of our allies.
The next president has to be able to pull those folks back
together, re-establish our alliances,
and insist that Iran go back into the agreement,
which I believe, with the pressure applied
as we put on before, we can get done.
-We are spending dramatically too much money on defense.
The money that we're spending there we could spend
in the other parts of the budget.
And it's time for someone from the outside
to have a strategic view
about what we're trying to do and how to do it.
-The next president is going to be confronted
with national-security challenges different in scope
and in kind from anything we've seen before.
Not just conventional military challenges,
not just stateless terrorism, but cybersecurity challenges,
climate security challenges,
foreign interference in our elections.
It's going to take a view to the future,
as well as the readiness
to learn from the lessons of the past.
And for me, those lessons of the past are personal.