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How much difference nearly a quarter century can make. Twenty-three years ago, then-U.S. President George W. Bush repeatedly sent his secretary of state, Colin Powell, into the U.N. Security Council to do rhetorical battle with key allies, as well as Russia and China, over his planned Iraq invasion.

Bush, mind you, was a staunch unilateralist who had little affection for the U.N., or Europe, or NATO. (“Preserve the myth, and laugh,” one Bush official said then of the trans-Atlantic alliance.) But Bush felt compelled to invoke international law and win over skeptics at home and abroad—who were strident, and often eloquent, in their opposition to his “preemptive” Iraq war.

How much difference nearly a quarter century can make. Twenty-three years ago, then-U.S. President George W. Bush repeatedly sent his secretary of state, Colin Powell, into the U.N. Security Council to do rhetorical battle with key allies, as well as Russia and China, over his planned Iraq invasion.

Bush, mind you, was a staunch unilateralist who had little affection for the U.N., or Europe, or NATO. (“Preserve the myth, and laugh,” one Bush official said then of the trans-Atlantic alliance.) But Bush felt compelled to invoke international law and win over skeptics at home and abroad—who were strident, and often eloquent, in their opposition to his “preemptive” Iraq war.

“In this temple of the United Nations, we are the guardians of an ideal, the guardians of a conscience,” France’s foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, perorated before the invasion, calling on Washington “to give priority to peaceful disarmament” of Iraq.

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell addresses the U.N. Security Council in New York on Feb. 5, 2003, urging the council to say “enough” to what he said was Iraq’s defiance of international attempts to destroy its chemical and biological weapons. Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images

Today, U.S. President Donald Trump appears to be planning what is, if anything, an even more flimsily justified preemptive war than Bush’s invasion was, having dispatched aircraft carriers, fighter jets, and surveillance planes against Iran in the biggest display of U.S. force since the Iraq War. But the silence from across the Atlantic is nearly deafening. The Europeans seem to be so snakebit over Trump’s threats to invade Greenland and abandon Ukraine—the two issues they’ve fought Trump hardest on—that they’re fearful of voicing too many objections about Iran. European officials have urged diplomacy and restraint but have not openly condemned the possibility of a U.S. attack.

“The Europeans are gun-shy. They don’t want to get into yet another fistfight with Washington,” said Charles Kupchan of Georgetown University, an expert in transatlantic relations and former national security official in the Clinton and Obama administrations. “I think part of it is that nobody is bothering to call them, so the Europeans have no idea what Trump is up to. In 2003, there was an enormous amount of diplomatic engagement.”

The U.N., meanwhile, is seen less as a “temple” than a leper colony—at least by the White House. Trump appears to pay no attention to the Security Council, where his exiled former national security advisor, now-U.N. Ambassador Mike Waltz, delivers little-publicized statements out of the headlines.

“I don’t need international law,” Trump said in January, and he has repeatedly dismissed the U.N. as all but useless while more recently setting up a dubious “Board of Peace” as an alternative, with himself as lifetime chairman.

Democrats are, for the most part, rather meekly demanding more details about and justifications for what Trump plans. But at the same time, few of them are seriously questioning the legality of the imminent Iran war or turning it into a major issue—even though the midterm elections are just eight months out. Senators complain that the Trump administration has........

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