Foreign Policy > Iran

There Is No Need For Congress To Declare War Because We’re Already At War

Although multiple U.S. presidents have ignored this fact, we’ve been at war for 47 years—the only difference is that President Trump is finally taking it seriously.

Ted Noel | March 3, 2026

The usual suspects, plus Thomas Massie and Rand Paul, seem apoplectic about Donald Trump giving the order to obliterate a sworn enemy of the US. They all seem to land either on the 1973 War Powers Resolution or Congress’s power under Article I, Section 8 to “Declare War.” Somehow, they insist the President must be on the wrong side of the Constitution. At the same time, they all seem to be unaware of history.

Thomas Jefferson, a contemporary of the conventioners who wrote the Constitution, seems to be of a kind with Trump. Now the threat to America wasn’t as blatant as the nuclear winter threatened by the Ayatollahs, but he faced off against some of their ideological kin in the Barbary pirates.

Those Muslim corsairs were happily capturing American ships and putting American sailors into slavery. This was a war. They had cut down a flagpole and demanded tribute from the US, in effect declaring war by asserting sovereignty over US assets.

Let’s get one thing clear about this. The Barbary pirates were not a manifest threat to the US mainland in the context of military attempts to conquer territory. Nevertheless, this still was war. A territorial threat is not required for a state of war to exist. President Jefferson knew this and sent a task force of Marines to eliminate the threat. He did not go to Congress to get a declaration of war, and Congress did not complain at this “oversight.”

And we should recall that large numbers of sitting Congressmen and........

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