Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith analyze President Donald Trump’s unilateral approach to military action.
The Constitution’s framers clearly aimed to check “the Dog of war,” in Jefferson’s phrase, by ensuring that Congress had a say before a president could commit the United States to a large-scale military conflict.
Whether the framers did so as a matter of constitutional law or constitutional politics, and whether the mechanism was the Declare War Clause or Congress’s control over military appropriations, remains contested. But there’s no doubt that the aim was to ensure a democratic check on unilateral presidential military adventurism.
President Trump’s congressionally unauthorized military action in Iran is not, of course, the first time the framers’ aims have been thwarted. But just one month in, Operation Epic Fury is already among the most consequential unauthorized presidential uses of force in all of American history—probably the second most consequential, after the Korean War. It’s also a new nadir in the decline of Congress’s check on presidential war.
By “consequential,” we mean in terms of geopolitical, military, and economic impact. Our focus on congressionally unauthorized action excludes the five declared American wars and the important conflicts that Congress did authorize—for example, post-Tonkin Vietnam, Iraq I and II, and the post-9/11 “war on terrorism.”
The only unilateral presidential action clearly more consequential than Iran (at least thus far) is President Harry Truman’s controversial and groundbreaking unilateral decision in 1950 to join the fight on the Korean Peninsula. (William Rehnquist in 1970 called it “the high water mark of executive action without express congressional approval,” and it remains so today.)
That major and very dangerous Cold War standoff lasted several years and resulted in tens of thousands of casualties on the American side alone. Truman sent U.S. troops into the battle without congressional authorization, though Congress later arguably authorized it through appropriations to arm and equip the military.
One might also include as a comparison pre-Gulf of Tonkin Vietnam, which laid the ground for the long and very consequential (and later authorized) Vietnam War, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “undeclared” naval war in the Atlantic before Pearl Harbor.
