Every recent president who has launched a war of choice while sidestepping or subverting Congress’s constitutional authority to declare war has at least attempted to cloak the action in some pretense of legislative authorization, from the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964 to the increasingly contorted Authorizations for Use of Military Force that rationalized American unilateralism in Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond.
These authorizations, especially the 2001 and 2002 AUMFs, were repeatedly invoked by successive presidents to justify military operations far removed from their original purposes, contributing to the steady erosion of congressional war-making authority.
But even when acting hyper-aggressively, presidents have typically acknowledged the need for at least symbolic congressional cover.
Trump himself, during his first term, justified the strike that killed Iranian General Qasem Soleimani under existing AUMF authority and his Article II commander-in-chief powers, while vetoing congressional attempts to restrict his ability to act militarily against Iran.
More recently, in Venezuela, Trump & Company justified military strikes and the capture of Nicolás Maduro by characterizing the operation as part of a broader counternarcotics campaign and law-enforcement effort, asserting that Maduro and associated groups were engaged in “narco-terrorism” directed at the United States. The administration argued that drug cartels linked to Venezuela constituted hostile actors and even asserted that the United States was in an “armed conflict” with drug-trafficking organizations distributing narcotics into the country.
This legal framing, however strained, at least reflected an effort to situate military action within some recognizable statutory or constitutional rationale, portraying regime removal not as war but as an extension of law enforcement.
Today, however, in following Benjamin Netanyahu down the rabbit hole of potential regime change in Iran, Trump has crossed a further constitutional threshold. Unlike prior interventions, the ongoing U.S.–Israeli strikes against Iran have proceeded without any new congressional authorization, without a formal declaration of war, and without the administration even pretending to seek one. Congress has neither debated nor approved a resolution equivalent to Tonkin or the AUMFs that presidents of both parties have relied upon for the past two decades.
This is the logical institutional end point of the Vietnam era. The founders vested the power to declare war in Congress precisely to prevent a single executive from dragging the nation into prolonged conflict based on unilateral judgment. Vietnam demonstrated how easily that safeguard could be eroded when Congress ceded its authority through ambiguous resolutions. Iraq and Afghanistan showed how those resolutions could be stretched beyond recognition. Venezuela illustrated how even criminal indictments and counternarcotics rhetoric could be invoked to justify military intervention against a sovereign state.
Now even that pretense appears to be disappearing.
If this precedent is allowed to stand even as Israel declares its own objectives achieved, we may finally have to abandon the comforting illusion that constitutional checks and balances still function, in matters of war and peace, as the founders conceived them.