David French
War and Peace Cannot
Be Left to One Man — Especially Not This Man
March 1, 2026, 1:00 a.m. ET
By David French
Eight minutes.
That’s the length of
President 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 on 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 round-table conversation with my colleagues on
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’s 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 déjà 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 on 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 American 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 American 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, the chairman 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 maneuvers 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 American 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 (in spite of 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 Department of Justice 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 authorization 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 Hussein 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 congressman 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.
