The American King Goes to War

America has been at war for nearly a week, but the president who started the war can’t explain why.

Either Iran’s nuclear program needed to be destroyed because Iran was “probably a week away” from having the material for a bomb, according to the Trump adviser Steve Witkoff, or Iran was “not enriching” uranium, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, or maybe Iran was threatening the United States and its allies bases in the region, according to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. One adviser told CNN that there was “evidence” Iran was preparing to strike U.S. forces in the Middle East, but Rubio later said Iran was an “imminent threat” because it would respond if attacked by Israel, which is not what “imminent threat” means. The U.S. is going to war to force regime change in Iran, or maybe it isn’t—it depends who you ask and when. The operation will be short—or maybe it won’t be.

A simpler explanation is that the administration did not plan well before attacking another country and igniting a regional conflagration in the Middle East, nor has it planned for what comes next. The potential consequences are devastating, including both the cost in individual human lives and the long-term implications for the region and its people. The economic aftereffects, given Iran’s oil production and its control over the Strait of Hormuz, could be also substantial. The American government had no plan for evacuating its citizens from the region, let alone for who would take over Iran once its leadership had been deposed or killed. No one has any idea what the fallout here will be, nor does anyone in a position of authority seem to be particularly concerned.

[Listen: Trump’s war with Iran and a new danger at home]

In the aftermath of President Trump launching an unprovoked attack on Iran with no immediate justification, plan, or exit strategy, many Democrats have called for a vote on a war-powers resolution that could restrict military operations in Iran. The procedural objection is a perennial Democratic favorite. It allows Democrats to complain about Republicans having broken the rules, while letting them avoid taking a position on the actual conflict—a position that might later turn out to be unpopular, if voters end up thinking that the war went well. In this case, the vote also papers over Democrats’ internal divisions, given that the caucus is divided between hawkish Democrats sympathetic to attacking Iran and those who reject the attack outright.

As tempting as it may be to dismiss this vote as typical Democratic timidity, the procedure is nevertheless extremely important here. Who can decide when a country goes to war is one of the crucial distinctions between a republic and a monarchy. The Founders’ decision to give Congress the authority to declare war is not a coincidence. It was one of several deliberate moves to limit the ability of an executive to wage war based on grudge, impulse, or personal profit. The restraints on the executive branch’s ability to wage war exist to ensure that if the nation makes a choice to go to war, it does so only after careful planning and deliberation. That is to say, the opposite of what happened here.

Republicans supposedly worship at the cult of the Founders, but they do not actually venerate the Founders’ beliefs and democratic principles. Rather, they see the Founders as symbolic figures to be deployed in favor of whatever the current GOP talking point is. In quasi-religious fashion, as the representatives of the Founders on Earth, Republicans are allowed to project their contemporaneous views backwards onto men who have been dead for centuries.

As the constitutional scholar Akhil Reed Amar writes in America’s Constitution: A Biography, dividing the authority to wage war between the executive and the legislature was a deliberate innovation because “in England, the king had the power to both declare war and command troops.” The king was seen as the embodiment of the people, and therefore his decisions regarding war and peace did not require their consent. America is famously founded on the opposite proposition. A monarch can take their nation to war for petty or personal reasons; a president should not be able to.

The authority that Trump has asserted in taking America to war against Iran is, like many of his other power grabs, an expression of the very tyranny the Framers were seeking to prevent.

“Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object,” a young congressman named Abraham Lincoln wrote in 1848. This was “understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.” This quote, incidentally, is immortalized on the House’s website, if any members of Congress are looking for it.

James Madison and Alexander Hamilton famously disagreed about how strong an executive should be. Nevertheless, they both saw Congress’s authority to declare war as a constraint on the president’s authority to engage in it, as Damon Root noted in Reason after Trump struck Iran last summer.

[George Packer: Hubris without idealism]

Proponents of the “imperial presidency” generally point out that the belief that the president would always need to ask Congress for permission to use military force ran into complications very early. The second president, John Adams, entered into the undeclared “quasi-war” with France from 1798 to 1800, after Revolutionary-era France targeted American merchant ships at sea. The third, Thomas Jefferson, fought the Barbary pirates without a formal declaration. But in both cases, these conflicts were limited and defensive in nature.  

Despite that, presidents from both parties have asserted the authority to act unilaterally—such as President Obama’s decision to intervene in Libya’s civil war. The Founders did not anticipate that lawmakers, instead of jealously guarding their legislative authority, would prefer to leave the president holding the bag in case military action turns out to be unpopular. Although the War Powers Resolution of 1973 was passed to limit unilateral presidential war making, presidents have often ignored it and Congress has frequently allowed them to.

Still, those past presidents attempted to articulate why they were taking the country to war—even if many of their reasons were unconvincing. With Iran, Trump hasn’t bothered. The president blew past the constitutional restraints erected to prevent Americans from being drawn into a military conflict they do not support or want. Yet that is happening, because Congress is too weak and supplicant to assert its constitutional power against an unhinged executive.

The procedural objection to Trump’s war in Iran is not a minor, or superficial, issue, despite how it may appear. The objection is central to the Constitution’s design for heeding the consent of the governed: Presidents are not allowed to take the country to war, to commit its power to the inevitable mass destruction of human lives, without the people’s permission.

That is what kings do. America is not supposed to have one of those.

*Illustration sources: The New York Historical / Getty; GraphicaArtis / Getty; Leon Neal / Getty.