By Nick Catoggio
Monday, March 02, 2026
The thing to understand about America’s newest war is
that it would be happening even if the opposition party controlled Congress.
Play it out. Imagine that Democrats held narrow
majorities in the House and Senate, as narrow majorities are all the American
electorate is able to muster anymore. How would the legislature have stopped
the president from ordering a massive air attack on Iran, as he
did late Friday evening?
A Democratic Congress might have moved a war-powers
resolution before Donald Trump struck, forbidding any hostilities without
legislative approval, but that resolution would have been filibustered by
Senate Republicans. Democrats could have countered by eliminating the
filibuster (at least in matters of war), assuming they managed to find 51 votes
to do so. But had they succeeded and passed their resolution, the president
would have vetoed it and begun bombing anyway.
The House and Senate would have been forced to try to
override his veto, which requires a two-thirds majority in both chambers. They
would fail.
Waiting until after the war had begun to move a
war-powers resolution would have been even more futile for our hypothetical
Democratic majorities. Some Democrats would be skittish about pulling the plug
on a conflict that’s in full swing, with America’s armed forces in harm’s way.
The realistic best that Congress could do under the circumstances would be to
impose a deadline on Trump to end hostilities, essentially granting him a
time-limited authorization to use military force retroactively.
And that too would be vetoed.
If you have a truly robust imagination, you might
consider a scenario in which Congress does somehow supply the
two-thirds majorities needed to overcome a veto. “Cease hostilities
immediately,” the legislature declares. Do we think Trump would comply? Or do
we think he and his team would mutter something about inherent authority under
Article II and order the military to keep bombing?
The point of this thought experiment is to drive home to
you that, with respect to the most awesome and frightening power that the
government wields, America is a full-fledged autocracy. Trump might not be the
first president to initiate hostilities without congressional approval, but he
is the first to do so without any sort of excuse about how puny the enemy is or
how limited American operations will be.
He’s not Barack Obama, “leading from behind” by lending
U.S. jets to a multinational turkey shoot against tiny Libya, which was no
threat to America in 2011. This is Iran, a nation of 90 million with real
military capabilities and decades of expertise in international terrorism. If
the president can start a conflict with an enemy as formidable as that on his
own say-so, and the people’s representatives are so powerless to stop him
that it doesn’t matter which party controls Congress, the age of
America as a republic is truly over.
And I think Americans know it. A week or so before the
attack, YouGov polled adults on whether they support or oppose
military action against Iran. The result was 27-49. It also asked those same
adults whether they believe military action against Iran is at least somewhat
likely over the next month. That result was 56-12.
The people no longer expect their government to heed
their opinion in matters as momentous as war. A mafioso with delusions of grandeur is
using the world’s greatest military to reenact the end of The Godfather—Cuba is next, apparently—and not only have Americans been
reduced to spectators, we’re resigned to the role. We’re an audience in a
theater, watching a screen, aware that the scenes unfolding are completely
beyond our control. That’s life under autocracy.
And so I think I owe Trump an apology. Two apologies, in
fact.
Unaccountability.
The first is for believing that
he’d pay a steeper political price for this war if he failed to make the case
for it before attacking.
I stand by what I said in that earlier newsletter about
the peril to him and his party in preoccupying Americans yet again with
something other than the cost of living. Unless this conflict is over quickly,
Republicans will be punished by voters who backed Trump in 2024 hoping he would
restore the supermarket prices of five years ago and instead got tariffs, wars,
goon-squad immigration enforcement, and a shiny
new ballroom on the White House grounds.
But if the president is willing to run that risk for the
sake of attacking Iran, he actually did the smart thing by declining to explain
himself, no?
Explaining himself would have amounted to conceding that
he should be accountable to the public for his decisions. He
doesn’t believe that and Americans no longer expect it, as I’ve said. It would
have been the height of foolishness for an authoritarian to risk rousing us
from our stupefied civic paralysis by suggesting that his actions depend on our
preferences.
If he wants the public to understand that it’s powerless
to stop him from doing what he likes, the shrewder approach was to treat them
like spectators. That’s what he did. And I think it paid off: Despite the putrid
pre-war polling on a new attack on Iran, there’s been no great popular
outcry since the bombs began falling on Friday night.
He didn’t explain himself to Congress or seek that body’s
permission to attack, presumably because he knew that a bill authorizing the
use of military force would have failed in the Senate and possibly the House.
Another way to put that is that the current war is less a case of the president
acting without seeking the legislature’s approval than the president acting in
a way that bypasses the legislature’s disapproval—an altogether
more draconian form of autocracy.
Trump didn’t explain himself to Americans either,
touching on Iran only briefly in his recent State of the Union speech despite
the opportunity it presented to justify his thinking to a huge national
audience. As I write this three days into the conflict, he and his team still
haven’t managed a coherent justification for the operation. Were we preempting
some sort of Iranian attack? No, according to U.S. intelligence. Was Iran on the brink of developing
nuclear weapons? No, per Ted
Cruz. Could Iran have been putting the finishing touches on ICBMs targeting
the continental United States? Definitely not.
The Pentagon held its first public briefing in three
months this morning, yet Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seemed vaguely offended that
anyone would ask him to explain the White House’s war strategy. Some of
the dimmer Republicans in
Congress have gone as far as to insist that what’s happening shouldn’t be
thought of as a “war” requiring explanation at all (a “special military
operation,” perhaps?) although Hegseth and the
president himself haven’t yet reached that stage of unaccountability.
It felt right that the first sorties were launched in the
dead of night between Friday and Saturday, when most Americans were asleep,
even though the timing was apparently driven by circumstance. If you want your constituents to
feel like subjects, not citizens, let them discover that they’re combatants in
a major new conflict in the Middle East when they wake up and grab their phones
to scroll the latest NBA highlights.
So I was wrong and Trump was right. As a matter of pure
Machiavellian politics, it’s in his interest to normalize the idea that wars
might start without warning, simply because the king desires it. Nations
operated that way for most of human history with relatively little popular
disquiet. Now ours does too.
The fact that the president’s own
stated rationales for war have been all over the place in his brief
comments to reporters since Friday night feels like a sly joke in context—as
if, by refusing to make a pretense of logical consistency, he’s mocking the
idea of a monarch having to account for himself. Iran’s regime might need to go or it might not; the war will last for weeks
or longer or perhaps no more than two or three days; we’ve identified three people who might become the next leader
except they’re all dead.
When asked how the regime could feasibly be dislodged, he
told reporters from the New York Times that its armed elements might
“surrender to the people, if you think about it.” (The same fanatics who
machine-gunned Iranians by the thousands two months ago are going to hand over
their weapons to their victims? Not bloody likely.) Later the president told
the same Times reporters that “What we did in Venezuela, I
think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario.” The Venezuela scenario would be
the opposite of regime surrender, though: America let the Maduro thugs in
charge in Caracas remain in charge in exchange for their cooperation on oil.
None of it makes sense because it doesn’t need to. In a
postliberal country, Trump doesn’t owe anyone an explanation and Americans
don’t seriously expect one. The probable truth is that he wanted to hit Iran to
prove that he’s willing to do Big Things, even potentially catastrophic Big
Things, that the weaklings who preceded him as president weren’t willing to do
and he smelled vulnerability in Iran’s debilitation by Israel over the past two
years. The regime was a target of opportunity to secure his own royal legacy.
Everything that’s been said to backfill a justification for the war on
traditional foreign policy grounds is designed to paper over that fact, a
feeble half-hearted nod to America’s republican past.
Which brings me to the second apology.
Unprincipled.
I tend to take the president’s voters seriously while the
president himself does not. Once again, he’s right and I’m wrong.
When I say that I take them seriously, I mean that I tend
to take their stated beliefs at face value. That’s silly of me, as it’s been
clear for a long time—witness the shockingly easy transition from the Tea Party
to Trump—that most right-wingers believe in nothing except hating the left and
resenting immigrants. But when a new right-wing faction springs up, like
“America First” nationalism, it’s seductive to a writer to treat them as
principled and coherent. Politics is about ideas, the naive
commentator intones, and this new faction has new ideas.
Trump knows better. “Considering that I’m the one that
developed ‘America First,’ and considering that the term wasn’t used until I
came along, I think I’m the one that decides that,” he told The Atlantic last year amid criticism from
right-wing isolationists shortly before his first attack on Iran. He was
correct. He decides what “America First” means and, apart from a few determined
isolationist ideologues like Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene,
sheep-like Republicans eagerly assent.
This weekend he decided that “America First” means
neoconservatism for populist dummies.
“All I want is freedom for the people,” he told the Washington Post in a brief phone interview,
offering one of his many different rationales for the war. “I want a safe
nation, and that’s what we’re going to have.” To be clear, the “people” to
which he was referring weren’t Americans but Iranians.
The idea that America’s security might depend on freedom
for foreigners feels … familiar. Where have I heard it before? Ah, right: “The
survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty
in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of
freedom in all the world.”
That was from George W. Bush’s second inaugural address in 2005, an infamously
idealistic ur-text of neoconservatism connecting America’s national interests
to liberalism abroad—imposed at gunpoint if need be, as the then-president was
attempting to do in Iraq. Now here’s Trump, the anti-Bush, resorting to a
similar argument to justify attacking Iran in lieu of admitting the truth,
which is that the war suits his sense of heroic grandeur.
It is certainly the case that genuine freedom in Iran
would produce a regime less hostile to the United States and that replacing the
regime with a friendlier one is the only way to solve the Iran problem durably.
But Trump using the U.S. military to do so is as supreme a betrayal of the
supposed principles of “America First” nationalism as one could imagine,
literally antithetical to the movement and an astounding turnabout for an
administration that sold itself as “the pro-peace ticket” in 2024.
How angry do you suppose America-First-ers will be at the
president for that betrayal and for his very weird attempt to smuggle
neoconservatism into Trumpism?
Not very, I’m guessing.
We’ll see what this week’s polling says, but in the past
self-described MAGA Republicans have reliably supported the president’s
bellicosity in foreign policy at a higher rate than other Republicans do.
Various populist opinion-makers who’d dutifully criticized attacking Iran in
the past dutifully pivoted this weekend to praising Trump’s new war,
a likely sneak preview of what to expect from the wider right. A few members of
the president’s own Cabinet who’d been outspoken about
the recklessness of Middle East wars of choice years ago
found themselves in
the Situation Room on Friday night, overseeing the bombing of Tehran.
A ridiculous claque of fascist bootlickers suddenly has
to act jazzed about fulfilling John McCain’s fondest foreign policy fantasy,
and they don’t even get to pretend it’s in service to some made-up postliberal
goal. It’s for freedom, says the president.
At moments like this, it falls to social media
intellectuals like Will Chamberlain to try to define nationalism as meaning
something other than “whatever Trump wants.” It’s not easy. “The point of being
against regime change wars was not that regime change is inherently bad but
rather that our political and military leadership couldn’t pull it off in an
efficient and effective manner,” he wrote.
“When the facts change you should change your mind.”
Regime change was bloody and difficult in the past but,
after less than three days of combat with the most dangerous
Islamic country in the Middle East, Trump has proven so deft at it that it’s
fine for “America First” to support regime change now. See why I feel obliged
to apologize to the president for taking his fans seriously?
The most remarkable reaction to the war that I saw came
from Republicans on the House
Foreign Affairs Committee, who posted a tweet captioned, “President Trump
is ending the FOREVER WAR that Iran has waged against America for the last 47
years.” It felt like taunting: The term “forever war” is commonly used by
right-wing isolationists to deride whatever new military adventure the
so-called “uniparty” is cooking up. By using such a loaded term, the tweet
amounted to rubbing those isolationists’ faces in their credulity about Trump’s
promises to stay out of foreign conflicts. Remember when he promised to
end “forever wars”? He meant ending them via carpet-bombing, suckers.
Most Republican voters will buy it. And if you think
they’re excited now, wait until the president undertakes the forever war that
Castroists have been waging on America for nearly 70 years the same way. For
freedom!
Conscience.
To say that the war is the biggest constitutional
catastrophe since January 6 and that its MAGA supporters are frauds to their
marrow is not to suggest that nothing good can come of it. One perk of having a
mafioso as president is that he will, occasionally, whack someone who deserves
it.
To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, one must have a heart of stone
to read of the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei without laughing. It’s
strange to think of a war being civically abhorrent yet morally just, but if
ever there was such a thing, Trump going ham in trying to take out the terror
mafia that runs Iran is it.
Have a laugh too at the expense of Vladimir Putin, who
continues to lose thousands of men in his fight for inches of Ukrainian soil
while the United States goes about knocking over Russian cronies like Khamenei
and Nicolás Maduro with ease. Between their downfall and Bashar al-Assad’s
ouster in Syria, the worthlessness of being a Kremlin proxy has never been
clearer.
China might also have been chastened by this attack. Its
missile systems don’t seem to have done much for Iran’s defenses, which
will give their military something to think about as it eyes Taiwan.
And whatever else happens, we’re guaranteed to end up
with a government in Tehran that’s much less capable of threatening America in
the medium-term and, in all probability, considerably less willing.
There are upsides, you see. But I’ll remind you in
closing of one more thing the president was right about. In January, when the Times asked him if he perceived any
limits on exercising his power abroad, he replied, “Yeah, there is one thing.
My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
The military is at his mercy. Congress won’t stop him
from doing what he likes with it, as Republican quislings in the House and
Senate will prevent it. Republican voters won’t stop him either, as they have
no beliefs independent of what Trump desires. For all intents and purposes, the
American people have lost control of their armed forces.
Being ruled by a mafioso means that Big Things can
happen, and happen quickly. Enjoy the upside of it this week. It won’t last.
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