Can the United States defend its allies and interests from military aggression and remain a republic at the same time? On the surface, those two goals would seem perfectly consistent, even reinforcing. But a tension is coming into view.
The problem is that U.S. interests — such as the independence of Taiwan, the openness of the Strait of Hormuz and the security of NATO countries, to name a few — are extensive and increasingly under threat. Credibly upholding all of them at the same time would require a gigantic military, significantly larger than the one the U.S. has now.
But when a country creates a vast, world-spanning armed force and grants one person unilateral control over it, labels other than “republic” may start to apply, with justice, to that country’s form of government.
America’s Constitution, of course, had a solution to this: It splits control of the military between the commander in chief and Congress — including, crucially, by reserving for Congress the power to declare war. As James Madison wrote to Thomas Jefferson in 1798, using shorthand for the executive and legislative branches: “The constitution supposes, what the History of all Govts. demonstrates, that the Ex. is the branch of power most interested in war, & most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care, vested the question of war in the Legisl.”
That part of the framers’ design is unfortunately on its way to being rendered a nullity. As Harvard Law School’s Jack Goldsmith observed: “The practice over almost 250 years has been growing unilateral presidential uses of force, more or less in lockstep with the larger and larger and more and more powerful now-global standing armies that Congress has provided the president.”
Case in point: President Donald Trump’s current war with Iran, sometimes labeled the “third Gulf war.” Congress voted to authorize one Gulf war, in 1991, under President George H.W. Bush and another, in 2002, under President George W. Bush. The 2026 war in the Persian Gulf is a unilateral presidential expedition. That’s a sign of the constitutional times; the imperial presidency has come into full flower in the 21st century.
Now comes Trump’s eye-popping defense budget request of $1.5 trillion for 2027, compared with just over $1 trillion in 2026 military spending. The 40-plus percentage point leap from 2026 is aimed at, among other things, growing the U.S. naval fleet, building out the Pentagon’s missile arsenal and expanding the Space Force.
That additional $445 billion would translate into a historic surge in military power, but the truth is that at current spending levels U.S. defense commitments are not entirely credible. Just a few weeks of war with Iran, a second- or third-tier power, made a huge dent in the Pentagon’s stockpiles of air defenses and missiles; in a fight with China in the western Pacific, they’d be consumed much faster.
This brings us back to the dilemma. Much more defense spending is needed to keep America’s global position from becoming “insolvent.” But much more defense spending, under current conditions, also means a much more powerful president. While courts can constrain the president within the U.S., military action abroad is generally beyond their reach.
The Trump administration’s January threats to seize Greenland were taken seriously by the Europeans for good reason. Seizing Greenland from Denmark would have been an act of war, of course, and Congress would never approve — but since when does Congress need to approve wars? The commander-in-chief power, in practice, means unilateral control over the military that Congress has funded.
One alternative is to constrain the president by depriving him of an abundance of boats, missiles, planes and drones. That would limit his freedom of action because of the need to ration scarce resources. Presidents might decide against adventurism in one theater because of the risks it would create in another. That would also, of course, erode American deterrence of rivals such as China and Russia.
The best way to safeguard both America’s strategic interests in the world and its republican form of government, then, is simply for Congress to take back its constitutional share of the war power. The biggest Defense (er, War) Department spending hike in three-quarters of a century would be a fitting occasion for such a reform effort.
Congress can condition the historic spending increase on binding language forbidding the use of the appropriated weapons on unauthorized, preventive wars (while of course allowing their use if the U.S. is under attack or facing imminent attack). That would be stronger medicine than the War Powers Act of 1973, which allows Congress to disapprove of a war after the fact in a resolution the president can veto anyway.
The Supreme Court has evolved into the most visible check on presidential power within the U.S. That model doesn’t work for matters of war and peace. The one constitutional force that can check the commander in chief is Congress’s power of the purse.
If legislators decide to lavish the executive with a much larger military, they also need to find ways to put hard limits on its use. That’s the only path to upholding America’s strategic interests in the world consistent with the form of government the Constitution created.
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