As President Trump considers pulling American forces into a risky and unpredictable new war in the Middle East, it’s time for the legislative branch to step up. U.S. lawmakers should insist the president obtain a new war authorization from Congress before U.S. forces take any military action against Iran.
While Mr. Trump has so far refrained from committing U.S. military support to Israel’s air campaign, he also hasn’t ruled it out. On Tuesday he called for Iran’s “unconditional surrender,” and mentioned the open possibility of killing Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in a statement posted to his social media site.
The Pentagon has already been moving military hardware, including ships and aircraft, toward the Middle East to give Mr. Trump a wider range of options should he decide to join the war. The United States is supporting Israel through other means as well, including defending against Iran’s drone and missile attacks.
But it is Congress’ constitutional right to declare war — not the president’s — despite the wide latitude given to the White House in recent decades to use military force during the war on terror. As Mr. Trump seriously considers joining Israel in this war, it is essential for elected lawmakers to reclaim their responsibility and put their names on record with a vote as to whether they’re willing to send American troops in harm’s way in yet another war in the Middle East.
Since Sept. 11, 2001, presidents have depended on open-ended legal authorizations from Congress to use military force against a wide array of militant groups in at least 22 countries. Days after the attacks on the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon and elsewhere, Congress passed a law known as an Authorization for Use of Military Force, or A.U.M.F., that President George W. Bush used to invade Afghanistan; a second A.U.M.F. was passed by Congress in 2002 to invade Iraq. President Barack Obama used those authorizations to expand the drone wars to places like Syria, Yemen and Somalia. President Joe Biden later used them to attack Iranian-backed groups in Iraq and Syria nearly a quarter-century later.
In all of those cases, the decisions on when and how to wield U.S. military forces and assets were made unilaterally by the executive branch, sometimes decades after Congress provided its consent, which defies how our constitution was designed. Through the founding document, the president derives the power to direct the military after a formal congressional declaration of war. And yet Congress hasn’t officially declared war since World War II, in 1942.
“The founders expected the United States to comply with international law and for Congress to check a president’s lawless rush to war,” said Mary Ellen O’Connell, a University of Notre Dame law professor and an expert on international law. “Without a discussion and vote in Congress, this restraining mechanism is lost.”
Mr. Trump has already spent days publicly contemplating whether or not to join Israel in the conflict. Dr. O’Connell compared the situation to the past decisions to go to war in Afghanistan in 2001 and against Iraq in 2003. In both cases, Congress passed a war authorization law.
Those laws granted the commander in chief sweeping powers to send troops into combat and launch military operations with few restrictions, putting the United States on an open-ended war footing ever since. It’s unclear what legal rationale the Trump White House would use if it does decide to take military action against Iran, but legal scholars are skeptical that current legislation is sufficient.
“He absolutely needs congressional authorization if he intends to use military force against Iran,” said Oona Hathaway, a former Pentagon lawyer and professor at Yale Law School. “That clearly would not fall within either of the existing A.U.M.F.s.”
The U.S. Navy is now moving the aircraft carrier Nimitz, along with the warships that sail with it, from the Pacific region into the Middle East. Over the weekend, more than two dozen aerial refueling tanker planes started flying from the United States to Europe to give U.S. commanders increased capacity to gas up fighter and bomber jets. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted on the social media site X that the military moves were “intended to enhance our defensive posture in the region.”
So far, Tehran has limited its military strikes to Israel, but U.S. forces stationed throughout the Middle East have spent the past week taking precautionary measures. Military dependents, spouses and families were asked to voluntarily leave bases in the region, in case Iran attempts to attack them.
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said military action was essential to stop Iran before it had the ability to build a nuclear weapon. U.S. intelligence agencies’ assessment is that Tehran has not yet decided to weaponize its nuclear program, and they believe the country remains years from having the capability to do so.
Mr. Netanyahu has been lobbying Mr. Trump to attack Iran for months. The president has thus far resisted, opting instead for diplomacy to rein in Iran’s nuclear program, but U.S. military support is widely considered almost essential to debilitate Tehran’s path to developing the bomb. The U.S. Air Force possesses a weapon uniquely designed for such a mission: a 30,000 pound “bunker buster” bomb, known formally as the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or GBU-57. Weighing 15 tons, the bomb is nearly five tons heavier than anything in America’s conventional arsenal.
It was engineered to destroy deeply buried targets, such as the secret nuclear enrichment facility at Fordo, south of Tehran. Located under a mountain, Fordo is where Iran is believed to conduct its most important nuclear work. Israel does not possess the GBU-57, nor does it have the B-2 bomber, the only plane capable of carrying it. Any effort to damage Fordo would require trained American pilots to carry out a series of strikes with the oversized weapons, which have never been used in combat. Analysts contend such strikes could delay Iran’s program by several years at most.
Mr. Trump has hesitated to authorize strikes, fearful of starting a destabilizing new war in the Middle East, but that could change. Anticipating a possible about-face, Sen. Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, introduced a resolution on Monday that would require Mr. Trump to obtain congressional authorization or a formal declaration of war before the U.S. military could attack Iran. It invokes the 1973 War Powers Resolution, which aimed to stop a president from entering an armed conflict without congressional notification. “It is not in our national security interest to get into a war with Iran unless that war is absolutely necessary to defend the United States,” Mr. Kaine said in a statement announcing the resolution. Rep. Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, introduced a similar measure Tuesday in the House.
Mr. Kaine faces a difficult challenge in persuading Republicans that it’s necessary to check Mr. Trump’s war-making powers, but lawmakers should heed his call. Congress has abdicated its responsibility for too long. It should not continue to cede its war authority to the White House. The world has witnessed enough American participation in forever wars.
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W.J. Hennigan writes about national security, foreign policy and conflict for the Opinion section.
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