Unauthorized

When the May 1 deadline passed for Donald Trump to make his case to Congress to continue the war in Iran, the outcome was fairly predictable. A Republican majority backed Trump and Democrats again decried the President’s usurping of Congress’s authority. In any event, the war in Iran will likely continue. The failure to contain that conflict is not just a political one; it is a constitutional failure.

Under the Constitution, the President acts as Commander in Chief of the United States Armed Forces while Congress raises, maintains, and funds them. Only Congress has the constitutional authority to declare war. Yet despite decades of American military engagements abroad, Congress has not actually declared war since World War II.

Since then, both Republican and Democratic presidents have committed American troops to what qualifies as war. As the Vietnam War limped on with no clear goal or end in sight, and to reign in the administration’s disregard of the Constitution, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution. It requires the President to notify Congress within forty-eight hours of committing troops and to regularly report on the hostilities. It also sets a sixty-day deadline for Congress to authorize that intervention, whether or not Congress declares it a war. May 1 marked sixty days since the United States joined Israel in launching attacks on Iran.

Republicans in the House and Senate have since repeatedly rejected Democratic efforts to withdraw forces. Some lawmakers are playing tit-for-tat by pointing out how previous presidents launched military offenses without Congressional approval. Others echo Trump’s claims the War Powers Resolution is itself unconstitutional. The Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, and the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, now claim the current ceasefire obviates Congressional approval. Ceasefire, blockade, peacekeeping mission, offensive, war. They are all still military interventions.

While the war of words continues to play out on Capitol Hill and on the President’s social media platforms, an actual war rages on in Iran, and by extension, the broader Middle East. Human lives, economic stability, and the legitimacy of the US government are all being lost each day. Iran now appears like military entanglements that came before it, with no clear goal or end in sight.

The United States should take note from another liberal democracy when it comes to military interventions abroad. Once France was liberated from Nazi occupation during World War II, it adopted a new constitution committing the country to the new international order. France began to shed its colonial ambitions for good. One by one, former colonies gained their independence or, as in the case of Vietnam, were taken over by the Americans in a fool’s errand to conquer in the name of freedom.

A few years later, France nearly succumbed to civil war over the independence of Algeria, a territory it claimed for over a hundred years. Rising out of that crisis, France adopted another constitution, which rebalanced power between its executive and legislative branches, the very problem that plagued its previous republic. That constitution is still in force today and is the backbone for France’s most stable and peaceful regime of the modern era. Further, it retains the key preamble from the previous constitution, which states that the French Republic “shall undertake no war aimed at conquest, nor shall it ever employ force against the freedom of any people.”

France even borrowed from the War Powers Resolution when it revised its constitution in 2008. Like the US Congress, French Parliament is the branch of government responsible for declaring war. Parliament now also requires the executive branch to report on any foreign military interventions and their objective. The importance of this cannot be overstated. France has inscribed into its constitution its commitment to uphold international law, avoid wars of conquest, and require its executive branch to be accountable to the legislative branch for any foreign military intervention.

More importantly, France has actually been upholding these words. Surely, it has joined multiple military operations under the aegis of international organizations like the United Nations and NATO, but has not unilaterally declared war against another country. Moreover, Parliament has authorized all of the French government’s foreign military interventions since the constitutional revision.

Meanwhile, the United States has been steadily moving in the opposite direction as its sister republic. The United States flouts the very international laws it helped create and conquers any people who get in the way of its national interests, however real or imagined threats to them may be. Worse, the United States now appears to simply ignore the words of its own constitution and related laws when it comes to military conflicts. The President can launch them at will and with little to no accountability to the American people through their representatives in Congress.

May 1 passed as just another date on Trump’s calendar. Meanwhile, there are over two more years of his term left and the midterm elections, and a potentially realigned Congress, are still months away. Besides, hoping for elections to change things will not solve the underlying problem of constitutional failure. Instead, Americans should place a more crucial deadline on their elected officials: either honor their oath to uphold the Constitution or perhaps consider rewriting it.