Democrats who won control of Congress in Tuesday’s midterm elections need to be “very careful” about using the budget to cut off funding for the war with Iran, veteran U.S. diplomat Ryan Crocker said Wednesday, warning that a U.S. retreat would hand Tehran effective control of the Strait of Hormuz and encourage “further Iranian adventurism.”

“If, for example, they vote to withhold funding for the war, that is going to precipitate a crisis domestically, and it would also run the risk of handing Iran an absolute victory,” Crocker told MBN’s editor in chief, Leila Bazzi, in an exclusive interview.

He hopes an administration “sobered by the defeats they suffered in the midterm” and Democratic leaders who understand that “Americans voted against the Republicans, not so much for the Democrats” can have “a conversation” on policies that avoid “further kinetic action” without handing Iran that victory.

The White House will have to move, too. Even the narrow deal he proposes to reopen the strait would require President Donald Trump “to basically acknowledge that the war was a mistake in the first place. That would be hard for him, but the midterms were even harder.”

Crocker, a former U.S. ambassador to Lebanon, Kuwait, Syria, Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan, is the chair of MBN’s board of directors.

Crocker spoke on the 47th anniversary of the 1979 seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, the day he said Iran’s war with the United States arguably began. He has a personal stake in that history.

On April 13, 1983, a suicide bomber exploded a car bomb at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing 32 Lebanese, 17 Americans and 14 visitors and bystanders. Crocker was one of the lucky ones.

“Iran has been at war with the United States for almost half a century,” Crocker said. “It certainly reached its apex in 1983 with the bombings of the American embassy in Beirut and the Marine barracks. I’m a survivor of the embassy bombing.”

He said military strikes will not deter Iran’s leaders, all “battle-hardened veterans” of the Iran-Iraq War. “We may get a truce, we may get a ceasefire, but we’re not going to get an end to this war.”

“Kinetic action is not going to change or deter them,” he added. “It will, if anything, just make them even tougher to deal with.”

Washington should start small, he said. A narrow deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz with the hardest issues left for later is possible. Also, the U.S. should aim for a limited war in Yemen and, in Lebanon, the best chance since the Reagan administration to finally defang Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Shiite militant group, which the U.S. State Department has designated a foreign terrorist organization.

A narrow door on Hormuz

Crocker would start small. He proposes a “minimalist outcome”: A return to the situation before the war with Iran, with an end to the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports in exchange for “an unconditional and complete reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.”

Iran has shown it can close the strait by threat alone, driving up insurance rates and making the current state of affairs unsustainable for everyone. If both sides took a step back, he said, they could get to stable ground, meaning relief for a stretched U.S. Navy and the resumption of Gulf trade for Iran. Negotiations on lifting sanctions and Iran’s nuclear program would come later.

The Iranians, he said, would give up nothing, making them more likely to accept a minimalist deal. “They could always reclose the strait,” he said.”

After a recent visit to Doha, Crocker said he found Qatar, which he called the main go-between for Washington and Tehran, “not very optimistic about the chances for success.”

The war has also exposed the limits of Gulf security. The United States remains indispensable to the Gulf, Crocker said, but “we are not sufficient.”

He would like the Gulf states to coordinate their defenses more closely, but the 2017 embargo of Qatar left a legacy of suspicion, and Saudi-Emirati disputes over Yemen and Sudan run deep.

“There is no amount of American urging or American pressure that is going to overcome the differences among Gulf states,” he said.

The new Mecca Defense Pact among Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey is “a political, not a military, understanding,” he said. “Whatever the Mecca agreement is, it is not NATO.”

Washington is also hobbled by its own absence. It has no embassy in Syria and no ambassadors in more than half the countries of the Middle East and North Africa.

“You can’t do diplomacy on a sustained basis without diplomats,” Crocker said.

He urged the administration to nominate qualified ambassadors and the Democratic-controlled Senate “to move swiftly to confirm them.”

The Houthis: ‘A partner, not a proxy’

The Houthis in Yemen, also designated as a terrorist group, are often described as an Iranian proxy. Crocker disagrees.

“In my estimation, they are a partner, not a proxy,” he said.

The Houthis, a Zaydi Shiite movement, are rooted in Yemen’s own politics, he argued, going back to the civil war of the 1960s, when their forebears fought with Saudi backing to defend the Yemeni monarchy.

“They are all about Yemen,” he said. “They are not about an alliance with Iran unless and until it serves their purposes.”

His evidence is the timing of this year’s war. The Houthis did not join Iran’s fight when the war began Feb. 28, he said. They waited until they were ready to move on the ground and acted only “when it suited their purposes, not whether or when it suited Iran’s.”

The relationship now runs both ways. “Clearly, Tehran has influence in Yemen, in Sanaa,” he said. “But Sanaa also has influence in Tehran, perhaps more so now than ever,” with Iran’s allies in Hamas and Hezbollah, both U.S.-designated terrorist groups, substantially weakened.

That doesn’t rule out, at least in theory, the kind of Hormuz agreement he proposes, he said, as long as Yemen is kept separate. Washington can do little about the Houthis’ fight to rule all of Yemen, he said, but it can keep the conflict “centered on Yemen and not affecting the entire region,” including shipping.

Lebanon: ‘Stars are better aligned now’

Lebanon is where Crocker sees the clearest opening. Iran no longer bankrolls Hezbollah as it once did, he said, and Syria has closed the weapon smuggling routes to the group because President Ahmad al-Sharaa’s government treats it like an enemy.

“The stars are better aligned now than at any point since the rise of Hezbollah,” he said.

Israel has now taken Beaufort Castle, the Crusader fort above the Litani River, twice during Crocker’s career: in 1982, when he was a young diplomat in Beirut, and again this spring. The first time “did not exactly solve the problem of security for the northern border,” he said.

Disarming Hezbollah, he said, will take “fortitude on the part of the Lebanese government” and “a U.S. role, not least with Israel, to prevent overreach there.” Israel has “tried overreach before in Lebanon,” and “it had tragic consequences for them as well as for Lebanon.”

With the exception of Hezbollah, Lebanon has disarmed its militias before. Crocker became ambassador in 1990, as the Taif Accord, which ended the civil war, was taking effect. Under Taif, every Lebanese and non-Lebanese militia was to disband and hand its weapons to the state.

In April 1991 the Lebanese Forces, Amal and Druze leader Walid Jumblatt’s Progressive Socialist Party gave up their heavy weapons. Hezbollah did not. The government in Beirut, by then under the sway of Syria, which had joined the U.S.-led coalition against Saddam Hussein, classed the group as a “resistance” against Israel’s occupation of the south rather than a militia.

As ambassador, Crocker oversaw the restarting of U.S. aid to the Lebanese Armed Forces, which he calls “the one critical institution for the future of Lebanon.” The aid is “vital,” he said, but the army alone cannot resolve the question of an armed militia holding power in the south. That will take political decisions from Lebanese President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam.

The Irish precedent

According to Crocker, Jumblatt, whom he and Bazzi met on a recent trip to Lebanon, has called for decommissioning Hezbollah’s arms along the lines of the Northern Ireland settlement. “That is, I think, worth pursuing,” Crocker said.

Sequencing—who would give up what and when—blocked progress in Northern Ireland for years. Unionists loyal to Great Britain wanted the IRA’s guns gone before Sinn Féin, the IRA’s political arm, entered government. The IRA saw handing them to the British as surrender.

What eventually worked was an independent international commission, chaired by retired Canadian Gen. John de Chastelain, and an IRA pledge to put its arms “completely and verifiably beyond use” rather than hand them over. Even then, the IRA did not begin destroying weapons until after the 9/11 attacks, when the United States signaled that it had would no longer tolerate any private militia. The commission did not certify its disarmament complete until 2005.

“I hope we’re prepared to exert that effort with able diplomats on the ground, and that we continue to remind the Lebanese government, if they need reminding, that they’ve never had a better opportunity than now to resolve the problem of Hezbollah’s arms,” Crocker said.

However, the issue is not one for Washington to solve, he said.

“We, as Americans, can’t do it,” Crocker said. “It has to be the Lebanese themselves.”

“It has to be, ultimately, a Lebanese decision arrived at through Lebanese consultations and negotiations,” he said, “but with a clear resolve on the part of the government that the current status quo is not acceptable.”

With Great Power…

Crocker played down the announced end of roughly $3.8 billion in annual U.S. military aid to Israel at the start of 2028.

The cutoff was reached by “mutual agreement” after months of negotiation, he said, and while the timing of the announcement was driven by U.S. politics, it does not affect the U.S.-Israel relationship in any meaningful way.

Asked what three priorities he would give Trump for the next two years, Crocker named getting the Iran conflict into a stable status, shoring up alliances in NATO, the GCC and Asia, and consistency.

“Smaller powers can be inconsistent,” he said. “For great powers to be great, consistency is required.”