How Congress Set the Stage for Trump’s Illegal War in Iran

Generations of lawmakers, straying from the Founders’ ideals—and fears—led inevitably to this era of unaccountable warmongering.

President Donald Trump’s military campaign against Iran is an illegal and unconstitutional war. Congress did not authorize military action against Iran. The joint U.S.-Israeli airstrikes that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader, and wiped out a significant portion of the country’s political leadership and military infrastructure, were not proportionate strikes to deter an aggressor, nor were they acts of immediate self-defense.

Trump’s allies have tried to paper over this simple explanation with unpersuasive complexity. Iran, we have been told by CBS News and The New York Times, has been at war with the United States for almost 50 years since the Iranian Revolution of 1979. This is obviously not true in any meaningful sense. If it were, as The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer observed the other day, then a good portion of the Reagan administration committed treason during the Iran-Contra scandal by clandestinely selling arms to Tehran.

Nor do the administration’s actual defenses make sense. Some Trump officials have studiously tried to avoid calling it a war, apparently worried about the reaction it would cause among Americans. (Trump himself has shown no such reticence, and he does not appear to care whether the war is lawful or constitutional in the first place.) Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters earlier this week that the U.S. had been drawn into the war by an Israeli attack.

“It was abundantly clear that if Iran came under attack by anyone … they were going to respond and respond against the United States,” he explained on Monday. “We knew there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that would precipitate an attack against American forces. And we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”

This explanation does not suffice, either. The United States is both a superpower and the single largest supplier of military and economic aid to Israel. It can crush a smaller country’s economy without violence in the blink of an eye. The Trump administration has no shortage of means to coerce or deter Israel from attacking another country in a way that would endanger American lives. Trump and his subordinates, in Rubio’s version of events, apparently chose not to use them.

Just because Congress’s prerogatives were violated by the military campaign, however, does not mean it was blameless in this matter. Congress has chosen for many years to maintain large, perpetual standing armies that can deploy overwhelming firepower to any corner of the globe in a matter of hours. In doing so, it has upended the constitutional checks that determine when and how presidents can wage war.

For most of American history, this country did not maintain true standing armies. Conflicts like the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, and World War I were waged by a mixture of volunteers, conscripts, and/or state militia units. The U.S. Army was, outside of declared wars, a largely vestigial force compared to those maintained by European powers. Armies are expensive things to maintain, and in an age of muskets and artillery, they became more costly than ever.

The Constitution’s drafters also operated from a few basic geopolitical assumptions. In 1789, the United States consisted of 13 newly united colonies along the........

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