Military Action without Urgency or Legitimate Purposes
Trump’s Iran war sidesteps Congress and revives unchecked executive power.
March 2, 2026
President Donald Trump had time to lecture Congress for more than an hour and a half during a rambling State of the Union address, but he has not found the need to provide a consistent rationale to the people’s representatives for why he started a war of choice with Iran that was likely to and has already inflamed the entire Middle East region.
Basking in his triumphalist snatching of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro from that country, Trump sent a vast armada of U.S. military forces to the Persian Gulf region directed at Iran because of [fill in the blank]. Over time, Trump’s musing about the reasons for using the U.S. military to attack Iran has changed.
Initially, the president claimed he was supporting the protests against the repressive Iranian regime. Yet since then, the protests, suppressed by that government, had subsided. He then alluded that the forces were going to the Gulf to pressure Iran to end its nuclear program—a program that he had earlier boasted, after previous surgical U.S. air strikes, already had been “obliterated,” thus eliminating the primary threat to the U.S. from Iran. Yet Steve Witkoff, Trump’s lead conflict negotiator, recently preposterously speculated that Iran could be within a week of enriching uranium into bomb-grade fuel for nuclear weapons.
Also included in Trump’s list of demands on Iran had been the termination of Iran’s ballistic missile program (which had been high on the Israeli wish list of possible U.S. targets) and the ending of Iranian support for Islamist groups in the Middle East (difficult targets for the U.S. military to hit). At other times, he has talked about “regime change” and, more recently, about a ground assault.
The only goal Trump seems sure about is a desire to keep potential adversaries off balance with his own unpredictability. However, the problem with that schtick is that it is one an authoritarian dictator might usefully employ, but it is not well-suited to a republic at war. The U.S. Constitution was not written to provide efficient government but to prevent tyranny by diffusing power among the three federal branches of government. Because the nation’s founders had seen European monarchs take their countries to war for selfish reasons—with the death and taxes resulting from such adventures raining down on the common citizenry—they purposefully deviated from the British way by taking the initiation of war from the executive and putting it into the many hands of the legislature.
The founders clearly gave Congress the power to declare war so that no one person could unilaterally take the nation to war. As commander in chief of U.S. forces, the founders intended that the president be the commander of forces used in battles after Congress initiated war (except in emergencies of self-defense against a direct surprise attack on the United States). The first war demonstrated this intent. The United States fought the Quasi-War against France in 1798. Congress passed more than 20 laws to limit the conflict and avoid escalation against a much stronger opponent.
But over the almost two-and-a-half centuries of the Constitution, Congress unfortunately has accepted severe encroachments by the president on its war powers. In the last century and a quarter, the executive has been allowed to take major military actions overseas without the constitutionally required advanced congressional approval. Sometimes, for recent larger wars, presidents, claiming an extra-constitutional power to initiate unilateral war, have only asked for Congress’s authorization before hostilities start as a “courtesy.”
Any major American attack on Iran, unlike Trump’s attack on Venezuela, could have and has resulted in wider Iranian retaliation: against U.S. military bases throughout the Middle East, strikes on oil infrastructure in the Persian Gulf region, or maybe even “sleeper cell” attacks in the United States or allied nations. Thus, Trump not only needs to inform the American people about why he is taking the nation into a potentially escalatory war in their name but also to get their representatives in Congress to approve it, even now that it has illegally commenced. (Before the war started, American public support for an attack on Iran was only about 20 percent.)
Trump will point to past bad presidential precedents to claim that he doesn’t need to do this—a ready opening for an authoritarian-leaning president that has been widening for some time. Congress needs to protest loudly and, finally, at long last, begin to rein in a rogue executive, but it probably won’t. Republican enthusiasm for Trump’s misleading State of the Union claims demonstrated the high probability of that prediction.