War

When it comes to war, does the president have too much authority? The Framers of the US Constitution had a rather dark view of human nature and went to great lengths to restrain, divide, and decentralize power. In particular, they believed that it was in the nature of executive power to be unduly prone to war. For this reason, they very deliberately placed the power to take the country to war in the Congress. At the Constitutional Convention James Wilson argued, 'This system will not hurry us into war; it is calculated to guard against it.' Yet the presidency has over the years gathered more and more of the war powers unto itself, and at present intense political conflict is tearing at the fabric of the Constitution.

Donald Trump says that America could ‘end’ Iran, and no doubt we could. The US could launch an air campaign that would destroy the Islamic Republic’s most important military assets. But it’s hard to see exactly how. With a diminishing number of useful allies, not to mention a military exhausted from 18 years of war on terror, America is not in the position it once was to exert great force in the Middle East. Ever since the push to invade Iraq, the US has been shedding allies. We have become increasingly dependent for help on an unimpressive handful of wannabes. Turkey sat out the Iraq War: so did France, Germany and Canada, three of our most potent military supporters.

Excited speculation is mounting in Washington tonight as rumors circulate that President Trump may use his State of the Union to announce a state of emergency to secure the funding Congress has denied his border wall with Mexico. But Trump has a historic, monumental opportunity to give the American people a more significant lasting legacy – not a wall, but a permanent end to America’s policy of forever-war. Afghanistan is now the longest war in US history, yet Sen. Mitch McConnell deemed it necessary to move against what he called a ‘precipitous withdrawal’ from Afghanistan and Syria this week. ‘How do you leave precipitously after 17 years?’ asked Sen. Rand Paul. ‘We are no longer fighting anyone who attacked us on 9/11.

Donald Trump is the only peace president the United States has had since the end of the Cold War, and his enemies hate him for it. ‘Peace president’ is a relative term, of course, but as yet there is no Trump war comparable to George H.W. Bush’s Persian Gulf War, Bill Clinton’s war against Yugoslavia, George W. Bush’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and Barack Obama’s gruesome regime-change bungle in Libya. Instead, the most conspicuous foreign-policy achievement of the Trump administration to date is de-escalation on the Korean Peninsula, along with the stamping out of ISIS.