THE NEW YORK TIMES: War and peace cannot be left to one man, especially not Donald Trump

Eight minutes.

That’s the length of President Donald Trump’s social media video announcing his war with Iran. He didn’t go to Congress. He didn’t obtain a U.N. Security Council resolution.

Instead, he did perhaps the most monarchical thing he’s done in a monarchical second term: He simply ordered America into war.

I take a back seat to no one in my loathing of the Iranian regime. I am not mourning the death of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in an airstrike Saturday.

My anger at the Iranian regime is personal. Men I knew and served with during my deployment to Iraq in 2007 and 2008 were killed and gravely injured by Iranian-supplied weapons deployed by Iranian-supported militias.

But my personal feelings don’t override the Constitution, and neither do anyone else’s. As I mentioned in a roundtable conversation with my colleagues Saturday, I’m worried that all too many people will say: Well, in a perfect world Trump should have gone to Congress, but what’s done is done. That is exactly the wrong way to approach this war.

Here’s the bottom line: Trump should have gotten congressional approval for striking Iran, or he should not have struck at all. And because he did not obtain congressional approval, he’s diminishing America’s chances for ultimate success and increasing the chances that we make the same mistakes we — and other powerful nations — have made before.

To make that argument is not to sacrifice our national interests on an altar of legal technicalities. Instead, it’s to remind Americans of the very good reasons for our country’s constitutional structure on matters of war and peace.

The fundamental goal of the 1787 Constitution was to establish a republican form of government — and that meant disentangling the traditional powers of the monarch and placing them in different branches of government.

When it came to military affairs, the Constitution separated the power to declare war from the power to command the military. The short way of describing the structure is that America should go to war only at Congress’ direction, but when it does, its armies are commanded by the president.

Perhaps the most important aspect of this constitutional structure is that it creates a presumption of peace. Our nation cannot go to war until its leaders persuade a majority of Congress that war is in our national interest.

This framework applies both to direct declarations of war and to their close cousin, authorizations for the use of military force, such as the authorizations for Desert Storm in the first Gulf War, Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and Operation Iraqi Freedom in Iraq.

But the constitutional structure, when followed, does much more than that. It also helps provide accountability. To make the case to Congress, a president doesn’t just outline the reasons for war; he also outlines the objectives of the conflict. This provides an opportunity to investigate the weaknesses of the case for the conflict, along with the possibility of success and the risks of failure.

I’m getting a disturbing sense of deja vu for example, from the idea that degrading regime forces from the air will give unarmed (or mostly unarmed) civilian protesters exactly the opening they need to topple the Iranian government and effect regime change.

By the end of Desert Storm, the United States had devastated the Iraqi military and inflicted casualties far beyond anything that Israel or the United States has inflicted on Iran this weekend.

When the Iraqi people rose up, there was a wave of hope that the dictator would be deposed and democracy would prevail. But Saddam Hussein had more than enough firepower — and enough loyalists — to crush the rebellion, retain power for more than a decade and kill tens of thousands of his opponents.

The Iranian regime deserves to fall, but I’m concerned that we’re creating the conditions for more massacres of more civilians, without offering the protesters any reasonable prospect of success.

But if the regime does crack, there is no guarantee that we will welcome the eventual results. From Iraq to Syria to Libya, we’ve seen how civil war sows chaos, fosters extremism and terrorism and creates waves of destabilizing migration.

In a real public debate before a real Congress, these points could have been addressed. The administration could have prepared people for the various contingencies, including casualties and economic disruption. Instead, near the end of Trump’s cursory speech Saturday, he said, “The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost, and we may have casualties. That often happens in war.”

Well, yes, that’s certainly true. But that’s not the full extent of the risk; not even close. The American people needed to hear more. They deserved to hear more.

There was a case for striking Iran.

As my colleague Bret Stephens has argued, the Iranian regime is evil, hostile to the United States and militarily aggressive. It has engaged in a decades-long conflict with the United States.

Beginning with the hostage crisis in 1979 — when Iranians seized and held U.S. diplomats and embassy employees for 444 days — Iran has conducted countless direct and indirect attacks against the United States.

Iranian-backed terrorists are responsible for the Marine barracks bombing in Lebanon in 1983 that killed 241 Americans. Iranian-backed terrorists killed 19 Americans in the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996. Iran-backed militias killed hundreds of U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

Since the second Iraq War, Iranian-backed militias have continued their attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq. In fact, it’s fair to say that Iran’s efforts to attack and kill Americans have been relentless for decades.

Beyond its attacks on Americans, Iran is one of the most aggressive and destabilizing regimes in the world. It has supported Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis — three of the world’s most powerful terrorist militias — it has attacked Israel with ballistic missiles, and it has supplied Russia with drones to use in its illegal invasion of Ukraine.

Iran is deeply repressive at home. It stifles dissent, deprives women of their most basic human rights and massacres its own people by the thousands when they protest against the regime.

If you’re going to list foreign countries that should not obtain access to nuclear weapons, Iran would be at or close to the very top. Blocking Iran’s ability to develop and deploy nuclear weapons is among our most vital national interests.

But there was also a case against an attack.

As my newsroom colleague Eric Schmitt has reported, Gen. Dan Caine, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has warned Trump that there is a high risk of casualties and a risk that a campaign against Iran could deplete American stockpiles of precision weapons — at the exact moment when we need those weapons to deter any potential Chinese manoeuvres against Taiwan.

In addition, Iran may now believe that it should not restrain its response to an American attack but instead prioritize inflicting as many casualties as possible on U.S. forces (and perhaps even on American civilians). Iran has already lashed out at multiple nations in the Gulf. Its attacks haven’t inflicted much damage so far, but it’s too soon to simply presume that Iran won’t be able to hurt the United States or our allies.

And if we suffer those losses without eradicating a nuclear program that Trump already claimed to have “obliterated,” without ultimately changing the regime (despite the death of the supreme leader), or without even protecting civilian protesters, then for all practical purposes we will have lost a pointless, deadly war.

Don’t let anyone tell you that modern presidents simply don’t go to Congress, that we’re trying to impose a standard on Trump that we didn’t impose on anyone else.

In 2002 the Justice Department told President George W. Bush that he had “sufficient constitutional and statutory authority to use force against Iraq,” even in the absence of a direct congressional authorisation or a new U.N. Security Council resolution.

Yet Bush pressed for (and obtained) an authorization and a resolution anyway, just as his father did when he went to war with Saddam during Operation Desert Storm.

Regardless of any person’s feelings about Operation Iraqi Freedom (I supported it then and still do), when our troops went into combat, they knew they were supported by a majority of the American people. They knew politicians on both sides of the aisle had voted to send them into battle.

Now, many millions of Americans are bewildered by events. There is no national consensus around the decision to deploy Americans into harm’s way. There isn’t even a Republican consensus.

There’s only a personal consensus, the personal consensus of a mercurial man so detached from reality that he actually reposted on Truth Social an article with the headline “Iran Tried to Interfere in 2020, 2024 Elections to Stop Trump, and Now Faces Renewed War With U.S.”

Are Trump’s conspiracy theories making him more amenable to war?

In 1848, at the close of the Mexican-American War, a first-term member of Congress named Abraham Lincoln wrote:

“Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object.

This, our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.”

Those words were true then, and they’re true now. No matter what he thinks, Trump is not a king. But by taking America to war all on his own, he is acting like one.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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