US risks leaving 'vengeful' Iran a danger to Gulf allies, former White House adviser Hochstein warns

The US risks leaving the Iranian regime “angry and vengeful” and a lasting threat to Gulf allies unless the conflict is brought to a clear end, a senior adviser in Joe Biden's White House has warned. Amos Hochstein said Donald Trump's administration must push for a negotiated settlement with Iran, or risk leaving Gulf allies in the firing line. His comments in Abu Dhabi on Sunday chime with warnings from the Gulf states that the eight-month war cannot be allowed to rumble on.

Mr Hochstein said he had backed President Trump's June 2025 strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities but opposed the current war, though not out of any sympathy for Tehran. “That is a horrible regime that has killed more Americans and supported those who kill Americans, let alone all the Muslims that they've killed and all the Arabs that they've killed in the region,” he told Hadley Gamble's <i>On the Record</i>, which screens on <i>The National </i>and Sky News Arabia.

“I was against the war because I didn't understand what the goal was.” Without a clear victory or a negotiated settlement, he warned, “you're left with a regime that is weakened but angry, vengeful, and one that has a long memory. And it may not act against us or our allies today or tomorrow, but they may not forget either”. The remarks extend a line of criticism Mr Hochstein has sharpened since leaving the White House in January 2025.

In April, he predicted at a Semafor conference in Washington that Iran would keep control of the Strait of Hormuz however the war ended. Earlier this month, he told Bloomberg Television that the conflict was the Republicans' biggest vulnerability heading into Tuesday's midterm elections, and that an escalation would make more political sense after the vote than before it. Days later he told CNBC he had “stopped understanding” US strategy.

In Abu Dhabi, he argued that Americans were paying for the war at the petrol pump and through the Pentagon budget. “We keep saying the Strait of Hormuz is open and oil is flowing. Well, oil is flowing with two aircraft carriers and a whole military apparatus that is enabling it, that is costing the American public billions,” he said. “So the American public is now paying twice for every barrel or every gallon of gasoline or every piece of plastic.

That's the reality.” He also accused the Trump administration of withholding the war's toll on US forces. “We have bases here that have been damaged … there's been no damage assessment shared or photos shared with the American people or with their publicly elected representatives,” he said. “We need to have that accounting of what this war is costing us.” Mr Hochstein was most pointed about Washington's response to the Houthi campaign against Saudi Arabia, which this month included missile strikes on Riyadh's King Khalid International Airport that killed at least 12 people, among them an American citizen.

He said the US need not go to war in Yemen but should restore some deterrence. “Somehow that doesn't merit any reaction from the United States,” he said. “But a war in Iran that was where we were not threatened at all, where we were not being targeted at all … somehow we did go into that. So I think the region is as confused as the American people are.” He pointed to the Saudi-Houthi truce reached during the Biden years, initially dismissed as a short-lived “Ramadan treaty”, which held for years.

“I do think that Saudi [Arabia] has earned our support, not when they're attacking in Yemen, but when the Houthis are attacking in Saudi [Arabia],” he said. “And civilians. I think that's a place where we should be drawing a line.” Asked about administration officials who speak openly of a US withdrawal from the Middle East, Mr Hochstein said: “I just fundamentally disagree.” He added that he worried “that the isolationism is creeping into … the extremes on both sides and for different reasons.”

Mr Hochstein, a Democrat, said it “looks very likely” his party would win the House on Tuesday, ushering in divided government, which he called “a good thing.” A Democratic House could press the administration through oversight and spending, he said, if not dictate foreign policy. “If the President's going to go to Congress and say, I need $1 trillion to fund this war, I think there'll be questions asked,” he said, invoking the Vietnam War.

“We've learnt a lesson from a war that starts with a few weeks to a few months in a different strait, right, in a different bay, in the Gulf of Tonkin.” On energy, he said Democrats would use that leverage to push back against what he described as the administration's effective ban on new wind and solar power. “Our economy needs wind and solar. It is a cheaper form of energy that works well in the United States,” he said, arguing that the Biden administration handed over record oil and gas output alongside record renewables deployment.

He was equally blunt on artificial intelligence, saying the electricity costs of data centres were already a ballot-box issue. Technology companies, he said, “should be paying so that … the American public consumers are not paying one penny more for electricity and for other costs”. The sharpest disappointment Mr Hochstein voiced was over Lebanon, where he brokered the November 2024 ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah. “There are few issues that really depress me more,” he said.

When the Biden administration left office, he said, Israel had withdrawn from nearly all the territory it captured, keeping only five outposts, and a detailed plan existed for a phased disarmament of Hezbollah. “We abandoned that process,” he said, for what he called “this fantasy that things happen just because people say they do”. He said Lebanon's current president and prime minister both “want to do the right thing”, and that the failure lay with Washington.

“I see the US approach as having failed,” he said, dismissing the recent round of tripartite meetings in Rome and Florida: “I don't know what it's supposed to achieve.” He placed blame on Hezbollah for breaking the truce by defying a Lebanese government order to stay out of the US-Israeli war with Iran, a move the group said was revenge for the killing of Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. “If Hezbollah wants to avenge the death of an Iranian leader, they should go fight in Iran, not in Lebanon, and not drag the Lebanese people into this war,” he said.

“They're a parasite on the Lebanese people. They're a parasite on Lebanon.” But he warned that the Lebanese army could not disarm the group alone. “Hezbollah is too weak to fight Israel, but it is strong enough to fight Lebanon,” he said. His alternative: agree the land border, withdraw Israeli forces post by post as the Lebanese army takes over under US military co-ordination, then push Hezbollah out of the south before tackling disarmament.

He proposed a US-led force with troops from the UK, France, Italy, Germany and Indonesia that would embed with the Lebanese army, rather than relying on UN peacekeepers. Insisting that Hezbollah disarm before any Israeli withdrawal, he said, hands the group exactly what it wants. “As long as they don't disarm, this conflict continues,” he added. The position echoes his warning in April, when a Lebanese truce was folded into US-Iran talks, that Tehran had no business shaping Lebanon's future.

Yet in Abu Dhabi he offered the administration an unusual olive branch. “You know I'm no fan of the Trump administration, but on this issue, I hope they succeed,” he said. “If it's the right moves, I will cheerlead for it.” On Syria, Mr Hochstein backed the administration's support for President Ahmad Al Shara, while urging caution, given the former militant leader's past. Asked whether the US should “trust but verify”, he replied: “Maybe even less trust.”

Still, he called Mr Al Shara “our best shot at giving the Syrians a way back to normalcy.” He rejected the view, common in the region, that the US had lost its sway. Two years ago, he said, few believed Israel would ever leave Lebanon, yet it withdrew from 98 per cent of the territory it held. “You can criticise the US, and I criticise the current US policy, but there is no alternative,” Mr Hochstein said. “I still think the United States has a lot of power to do good here, and I hope it does.”