Virginia senator on protests in Iran and military action in Venezuela and Greenland

(CBS, KYMA) - Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) spoke with Margaret Brennan on Face the Nation Sunday about the protests in Iran.

According to Brennan, President Donald Trump has been briefed on military options, leading her to ask if Sen. Kaine would support military action in the Middle East, and he said:

"U.S. military action in Iran would be a massive mistake. It would have the effect of giving the Iranian regime the ability to say it's the U.S. that's screwing our country up. Right now, Iranians are blaming, appropriately, the regime for screwing up the country. This Iranian regime has spent years focusing outside its borders on fomenting terrorism and aggression in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Gaza, instead of listening to the needs of its own citizens, and much like Syrian citizens, finally threw off the yoke of Bashar al-Assad and that brutal regime without U.S. military intervention, it looks to be that Iran is doing the same. So let's celebrate their freedom loving spirit. Let's keep up the sanctions pressure, which helped in Syria and is helping, I think, dramatize the misdeeds of this regime. But U.S. military action would just bring back the painful history of the U.S. toppling the Iranian prime minister back in the 1950s and would give the regime the ability to blame their own failures on the United States."

During the interview, Brennan and Kaine talked about military action in Venezuela, with five Republican senators joining Kaine's effort to restrict President Trump's actions where he would require a new congressional approval before conducting military action in the country.

This prompted Brennan to ask Kaine if the Republicans who voted with him will stay, given that the president openly threatened them, to which the senator said:

"I think they will, and I think more may join. The five republicans who voted with me, let's be clear what they were voting for. The Trump administration has waged war, first against Venezuelan boats in international waters, then covert action in Venezuela, and now an attack on Venezuela to depose its leadership, to establish a new government that we chose, not that the Venezuelan people chose, to seize Venezuela's economy and even say we're going to set the terms of economic and political transition for the next few years. What my Republican colleagues voted for is, let's get this out of the classified and put it before the American public and actually debate this use of the U.S. military on the floor of the United States Senate. Four months into it, hundreds of Venezuelans dead, American troops injured, let's finally debate this publicly. That's all they voted for, and the fact that the president is going against them just for wanting to have this debate before the public, shows how nervous the president is about both his legal authority, but also the wisdom of what he's doing."

Brennan and Kaine then talked about Greenland, with Trump saying, "I want to make a deal for Greenland the easy way, but if we don't do it the easy way, we are going to do it the hard way."

This led Brennan to ask Kaine if there was anything to stop the president from doing it "the hard way," and Kaine said:

"I think Congress will stop them, both Democrats and Republicans. This would be disastrous. It wouldn't just be 'America First.' It wouldn't just be the end of NATO, it would be America alone. If we take our best allies, and Denmark has been an ally for a very long time, and we decide that we have the military ability to seize territory for them, you will see the United States, instead of being the world's chief diplomat and a leader in the world, you'll see the United States isolated as a pariah. And I've talked to my Republican colleagues, they watch what the president has done in Venezuela. They hear the threats against other nations. I can tell you this, we will force a vote in the Senate about no U.S. military action in Greenland or Denmark. If we need to, we will get overwhelming bipartisan support that this president is foolish to even suggest this. We're not going to do it the hard way, and we're not going to do it the easy way, either we're going to continue to work with Denmark as a sovereign nation that we're allied with, and we're not going to treat them as an adversary or as an enemy."

To watch more of Brennan's interview with Kaine, click here.