As Trump stumbles in Iran, congressional Republicans need to step up

President Trump has a serious international messaging problem.  

If Republican members of Congress do not stage a timely intervention in accordance with their constitutionally prescribed powers, Trump’s flawed strategic communications portend severe consequences, both for international peace and stability and for U.S. national security.

The danger is illustrated by just the latest in a series of public statements and actions from the commander in chief, and at a time when the U.S. is engaged in a long-term, all-domain cold war with China and Russia, two near-peer nuclear powers that are open strategic partners with the Islamic Republic of Iran and that materially support its existential struggle against the U.S. and the West.   

Trump said last week that unless Iran agreed to negotiations about its fate, he would obliterate every bridge and every power plant in the country: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

Carrying out such a cataclysmic threat would constitute a massive war crime, and world leaders, including the first American pope, recoiled in horror and disgust that an American president would make such an obscene threat. If put into effect, that plan would destroy much of the civilian population that all U.S. administrations have sought to distinguish from the evil regime that oppresses its population and threatens the world. It would severely punish further the very people that, just weeks ago, the president urged to rise up and attack the clerical regime’s institutions, assuring them that “help is on its way.”  

Trump has periodically changed his rhetoric, veering between denying that regime change was ever an actual objective of America’s intervention and claiming that it has already been achieved. His Cabinet members assert that Iran’s key officials, including the Supreme Leader, who were all killed on the........

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