On the sixty-fourth day of what Washington and the press have variously called the “Iran war” or the “Iran crisis,” President Trump sent a letter to congressional leaders declaring that hostilities with Iran had “terminated” because of the ceasefire that began in early April, and that he therefore did not need congressional authorisation to continue the campaign. The move came on the eve of a statutory sixty-day War Powers Resolution deadline. The same week, Tehran passed what the White House called an unsatisfactory peace proposal through Pakistani mediators, US Central Command was reportedly briefed on fresh strike options, Brent crude topped $126 a barrel, and the US Navy was still boarding tankers in the Gulf — a posture the president himself described, without apparent embarrassment, as “like pirates.”
The received wisdom
The dominant framing, congenial to both establishment Democrats and the liberal commentariat, is that this is another episode in the long decline of congressional war powers: an imperial presidency, a pliant Republican caucus, and a public numbed to open-ended military adventures in the Middle East. On this reading, the ceasefire is a legal fiction, the blockade is a de facto act of war, and the letter to Congress is a transparent attempt to run out the clock on the War Powers Resolution. The Guardian, reporting the letter to congressional leaders, notes Democrats pushing back on precisely this point, and an earlier piece on Senate Republicans blocking a war-halt measure slots the story into the familiar narrative of partisan collapse in the face of executive overreach. The prescription is predictable: censure, litigation, perhaps an impeachment resolution no one expects to pass.
A different read
The progressive critique is not wrong, exactly. It is just incomplete, and in its incompleteness, it is self-serving. The truth is that the erosion of the war powers clause is a bipartisan achievement of forty years’ standing, and Democrats who are suddenly aghast at a Republican president’s creative lawyering should remember their own party’s role in bringing us here.
The BBC, in a useful sidebar on presidential war-making, reminds readers that the record is genuinely mixed: the Bushes and Reagan sought and obtained authorisation; Clinton’s Kosovo campaign and Obama’s Libya intervention did not. It was the Obama administration’s Office of Legal Counsel that produced the now-infamous theory that airstrikes short of “sustained fighting” did not constitute “hostilities” under the 1973 statute. Trump’s lawyers have simply taken that argument and run with it. The difference is one of register, not of principle.
What makes the current moment more dangerous is not the letter but the blockade. A president who describes his own navy as behaving “like pirates” in the Strait of Hormuz — a phrase reported by both Al Jazeera and the Guardian — is signalling, deliberately or otherwise, that the legal architecture of the post-1945 maritime order is optional. One can favour hard pressure on the Iranian regime (I do) and still notice that a blockade enforced by seizures and condemnations of “tolls” is, in every classical definition, an act of war. Saying otherwise is the kind of rhetorical sleight that corrodes the rule of law from within.
There is a conservative case, in the Burkean sense, for restoring the war powers bargain. It rests on three points. First, fiscal prudence: open-ended Gulf deployments, with oil at $126 a barrel and the Bank of England warning of a fresh inflation shock, are not costless, and voters should be asked to authorise the cost before it is incurred, not after. Second, institutional self-respect: a Congress that will not defend its Article I prerogatives in wartime will not defend them in peacetime either. Third — and this is where conservatives should be most uneasy — the precedent cuts both ways. Every doctrine of unilateral presidential war-making that is built today by a Republican White House will be inherited, intact, by the next Democratic one.
None of this requires sympathy for Tehran, whose regime has spent decades exporting violence and whose latest “peace proposal,” according to Al Jazeera’s day-64 summary, apparently contains demands the White House calls non-starters. It requires only the older conservative conviction that means shape ends, that process is substance, and that a republic which lets its executive define away the word “hostilities” will eventually find it has defined away more than that.
What to watch
- The War Powers vote, if one happens. Whether Senate Democrats can peel off the handful of traditionalist Republicans — the remnant that still cares about Article I — will tell us how much of the old bargain survives.
- Oil above $130. A sustained break past that level will change the political economy of the conflict, because it will change the household economy of every voter in every G7 country.
- The next tanker seizure. If a flagged vessel from a NATO ally is boarded, expect a diplomatic rupture that the “terminated hostilities” theory cannot paper over.
- Tehran’s back-channel. Whether the Pakistani-mediated proposal survives or is replaced tells us whether there is still a landing zone short of wider war.
— J