By Nick Catoggio
Thursday, February 19, 2026
Tucked away yesterday amid the usual important political
developments involving late-night
comedy and White
House ballroom construction was this headline from Axios: “Trump
moves closer to a major war with Iran.”
Say what now?
Headlines are prone to hype, but not this time. Axios’
sources are whispering about “a massive, weeks-long campaign” with help from
Israel that would involve multiple U.S. aircraft carriers, assorted other
warships, and hundreds of jets. “I think there is [a] 90 percent chance we see
kinetic action in the next few weeks,” one adviser to Donald Trump predicted.
If it’s a bluff, it’s a convincing one. An enormous U.S.
military air fleet is in transit to
the Middle East; when it arrives, according to the Wall Street Journal,
it will constitute the
largest array of air power that America has mustered in the region since
2003.
That was the year the United States invaded Iraq, setting
in motion a backlash that would eventually elect an “America First” president
who promised to end the endless wars that hawks in his party found so
enthralling. Fast forward to 2026 and that same
president “is now considering what would be at least the seventh American
military attack in another country in the past year, and his second on Iran,”
the New York Times reported.
His first raid on Iran, you may recall, supposedly “obliterated”
that nation’s nuclear facilities. Eight months later, the White House is back
to negotiating with Iran about … ending
its nuclear program.
Even that doesn’t do justice to the absurdity of the
moment. It wasn’t nuclear brinkmanship that triggered this latest round of
antagonism, after all, it was the president’s enthusiasm for the popular
uprising that shook the country last month. “If Iran [shoots] and violently
kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America
will come to their rescue,” he vowed on January
2. “We are locked and loaded and ready to go.”
The regime did end up “violently killing” protesters—thousands
of them, possibly tens
of thousands. America did not come to their rescue; the demonstrations were
ruthlessly crushed. Trump was made to look weak by the mullahs’ defiance and
probably feels obliged to punish them for it belatedly, an especially risky
form of retribution for a presidency that’s obsessed
with the concept.
And so here we are, on the precipice of the largest war
that the United States will have waged in nearly 25 years without any
clear objective for the mission. “President Trump hasn’t decided … whether
the aim would be to halt Iran’s already-battered nuclear program, wipe out its
missile force, or try to topple the regime,” the Journal noted surreally
in its report on America’s military build-up. War as Mad Libs: We must
attack Iran because [casus belli TBD].
It’s a disaster in the making for the United States, if
not strategically then civically. And certainly politically for Donald Trump
and his party.
Tell me how this ends.
We wouldn’t be in this predicament, I suspect, if the
president hadn’t rashly posted his ultimatum on January 2, causing him to lose
face when it wasn’t heeded. Those who minimize his habit of popping off online
by sighing about “mean tweets” should consider that America is poised to launch
a major conflict partly because of a social media post.
What would a “good outcome” to that conflict look like
for our country?
The best I can do to imagine one is that Iran ends up
surrendering before it begins. Spooked by the U.S. armada amassing offshore,
the mullahs blink and agree to the White House’s terms on denuclearization. No
bombs fall; the president gets a major foreign policy win. The art of the deal,
we might call it.
That’s the optimal outcome—but not a likely one, per Axios,
and it wouldn’t solve America’s long-term challenge with Iran. If anything, it
would entrench the clerical regime in power in the same way that the remnant of
Nicolás Maduro’s regime now seems comfortably
entrenched
in Venezuela. Having turned a hostile government into a compliant one, the
Trump administration would be in no rush to see its new partner deposed. The
mullahs’ capitulation could open the door to normalizing relations and the
White House easing sanctions.
They might even talk the president into letting them keep
their ballistic missile program in the spirit of friendship, a
matter of concern to Israel for obvious reasons.
Trump would declare (for a second time) that Iran’s
nuclear program was kaput. But the same people who developed that program and
slaughtered protesters by the truckload would remain in charge, biding their
time until the political winds in America shifted and made it possible for them
to resume building their nuclear deterrent.
That’s the best outcome, as I say: The regime survives,
murdered Iranians go unavenged despite Trump’s pledge, and the nuclear program
ends up on hold for a few years. At least there’s no war, though.
What if there is a war?
Destroying what’s left of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure
would be useful but would leave us in essentially the same situation I just
described except with American servicemen potentially wounded or killed.
Targeting members of the regime like Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei would change
that, but it’s
anyone’s guess what would follow the current government or how much
friendlier it might be to the United States.
“Many analysts believe the Islamic Revolutionary Guard
Corps leader would likely take control” if Khamenei were killed, the Journal
notes, which is a bit like replacing Hitler with the head of the SS. It’s probably
an improvement? Maybe? I guess?
Maybe no one takes control. The country descends, à la
Iraq, into civil strife and warlordism as a fledgling central government
struggles to keep the peace. The economy collapses and refugees head for the
border en masse. The White House ends up facing precisely the sort of dilemma
it sought to avoid in Venezuela by keeping Maduro’s deputies in charge, forced
to decide whether to insert American soldiers to impose order or sit back and
be blamed for the chaos and misery it has unleashed.
Things could go the other way. Once the U.S. air campaign
concludes and our forces leave the region, Revolutionary Guard forces that had
gone to ground might reemerge and lay waste to the population to snuff any
nascent efforts at deposing the regime that had been rekindled by America’s
offensive. The bloodletting might be worse than it was last month as Islamist
goons set about defiantly showing Iranians—and the White House—that they’re
still in charge. What does Trump do then?
The basic problem in all of this is, well, basic: Real
enduring change in Iran requires ending the Khomeinists’ grip on power but
there’s no way realistically to do that through the air. Even if our campaign
disarms them temporarily, we’ll likely need to do it again in a few years.
That’s an “endless war.”
And an expensive one for America and the president.
The end of the republic, and of Trump.
If Trump orders an attack on Iran without lifting a
finger to build political support for it, it will be the end of the United
States as a republic in any meaningful sense.
Never has America fought a war this substantial without
some form of buy-in from Congress and the general public. We’ve all grown numb
to watching presidents unilaterally order lesser interventions, from Trump’s
bombing run on Iran last year to Barack Obama joining the international air
campaign in Libya to the first George Bush sending U.S. troops to Panama to
seize Manuel Noriega. But the longer a conflict looks likely to last, the more
servicemen it might potentially involve, and the greater the repercussions of
the outcome for the United States, the more we expect the president to seek
legislative authorization.
That’s how representative democracy is supposed to work.
There’s no graver act of government than ordering citizens to kill and be
killed on a grand scale, so there’s no act of government that requires the
consent of the governed as urgently. That’s why Article
I reserves the power to declare war to Congress, and why the War Powers Act
of 1973 limits the president’s power to initiate hostilities on his own
authority to “a national emergency created by attack upon the United States,
its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.”
Not only has Trump not sought the consent of the governed
through their congressional representatives for this potentially “massive,
weeks-long campaign,” he hasn’t said a word to try to convince Americans that
it’s necessary. Scratch that: Unless I missed it, he hasn’t alerted Americans
to the likelihood of war at all. The United States might be involved in
a major conflict in the Middle East as
soon as this weekend, and news of it will come as a complete
surprise to much of the population.
In no real way is a country that functions like that a
republic. It’s Caesarism, the total unmooring of executive accountability from
law in matters of life and death. When the president can launch major conflicts
with impunity, when Congress’ power is reduced to trying—futilely—to stop a war
that he started without so much as warning
lawmakers what was coming, we’re in a full-blown autocratic perversion of
the constitutional order. That’s the catastrophic civic price that the United
States will pay for an Iran attack on the scale that Axios envisions.
Which is not to imply that that conflict would be good
for Caesar. On the contrary.
As noted a
few weeks ago, there’s a silver-bullet explanation for why Trump is growing less
popular. It’s not the state of the economy or the way he’s enforcing
immigration law—or at least, not directly. It’s his priorities. In poll after
poll, Americans complain that he’s focused on the wrong things. They reelected
him to ease the cost-of-living crisis that began under Joe Biden and not only
hasn’t he done it, he seems disinterested in the subject.
The president is like a cat chasing whichever shiny
object happens to be in his field of view at a given moment, one Dispatch
colleague told me this morning: “Two weeks ago it was immigration enforcement.
Two weeks before that it was Greenland. Now it’s back to Iran.” It’s one thing
for Americans to feel disappointed by the White House’s record on
affordability, it’s quite another for them to feel like Trump isn’t trying.
How do you suppose they’ll feel when he greets their
latest pleas for kitchen-table relief with a big new war in the Middle East
that they didn’t even know was in the works?
I’ll answer my own question: It’s hard to imagine any
scenario in which Trump becomes more popular after attacking Iran and easy to
imagine him becoming less popular, potentially ruinously so. A Quinnipiac poll taken
early last month, at a moment of maximum sympathy for Iranian demonstrators,
nonetheless found 70 percent of Americans believed the U.S. shouldn’t get
involved there militarily. The same percentage said that presidents should seek
approval from Congress before taking military action against another country.
Among independents, 80 percent and 78 percent,
respectively, agreed with those propositions. That alone should make war with
Iran, especially one without congressional authorization, politically
radioactive for the White House eight and a half months out from a midterm
election.
But when combined with the public’s existing exasperation
with Trump for losing focus on affordability, I think the conflict could
incinerate much of what’s left of his political capital. If you thought
Americans were angry with him for getting distracted before, imagine how
they’ll feel when his latest distraction turns out to be the last thing they
expected when they reelected a guy who spent the final weeks of the 2024
campaign complaining
about the “warmongers” on the other side.
His approval might sink below 40 percent under the weight
of disaffection
among MAGA doves and right-wing
Israel skeptics and never recover—and that’s assuming the military campaign
goes reasonably well. If it goes poorly, with America taking casualties while
blowing up a bunch of Iranians to no obvious end, Trump might grow unpopular
enough to loosen his decade-long grip on congressional Republicans at last.
Caesarism begets Caesarism.
To put that another way, by next week many voters who
haven’t yet grasped our national predicament might suddenly be shocked into
recognition.
It will dawn on them that they elected a man who believes
he’s entitled to do anything he likes, up to and including starting major wars,
without asking anyone’s permission or even letting the public know beforehand.
And there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Given the cultish tribal realities
of Republican politics, even a weakened Trump will easily fend off any effort
in Congress to remove him.
Americans are at his mercy and will remain so for just
shy of three more years. I can’t imagine they’ll take the news well.
His polling will slip further. Anxiety about the midterms
will spike inside an already anxious White House. The president’s frenetic
campaign to pre-spin
a November election disaster as the product
of Democratic cheating will suffer a setback: If he’s polling at 33 percent
on Election Day, good luck convincing Americans that a liberal landslide was
due to a vast conspiracy among illegal immigrants to vote unlawfully rather
than earnest public discontent.
Faced with an electoral debacle, Trump will decide that
he needs to be proactive about “stopping the steal” this time and will connive
to tamper with the midterms directly rather than stick to selling his
sore-loser fans a soothing narrative to rationalize defeat. He already hinted
at doing so last week, in fact, but a severe popular backlash to war with
Iran will increase his urgency.
As unlikely as it seems right now that Republicans will
still control both chambers of Congress next year, it’s not impossible. If the
president’s approval takes a sharp war-related hit, to the point that it does
seem impossible—and, especially, if the Senate suddenly looks like it’s in
play—Trump will give up on the half-measures he’s taken so far to influence the
election process and connive to intervene directly. What that looks like
specifically I don’t know, as I’m not a fascist. But some sort of overweening,
illegal executive ploy to seize control of vote-counting in swing states is a fait
accompli.
Caesarism in how America wages war will lead to Caesarism
in lieu of fair elections, or at least a determined attempt at it. Soon voters
will realize what they’ve done to themselves and their country.
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