War Happens to the American People

Why the war powers debate matters.

Read by John:

“No one starts a war—or rather, no one in his senses ought to—without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve.”

-- Carl von Clausewitz.

This is why the debate about declaring war is important, though it can seem abstract. Whether a president is legally required to or not, the process—or at least the implied obligation to explain to Congress and the public—forces a president to think before the bombs fall. He must answer questions that cannot be answered after: What is the objective? How will we know when we’ve achieved it? What will it cost, and who will pay?

Clausewitz, the Prussian army officer and military theorist, systematized these obligations in advance for a reason: once the bombs fall, passion and chaos take over. The framework must be in place before the moment that most tempts a leader to abandon the obligations that are not before his eyes.

In the American system the founders matched Clausewitz’s constraints by splitting the war power. James Madison argued that the war power must not be entrusted to a single person because the executive has a “constitutional connection with war” that creates an inherent bias toward it—power, glory, emergency all expand executive authority. Madison wanted the cost of war felt by those who initiated it—Congress—so that their personal stake might sharpen their thinking and hold back a president inclined to act alone.

Thomas Jefferson, despite stretching his own executive authority, wrote to Madison in 1789 expressing this same idea: “we have already given in example one effectual check to the Dog of war by transferring the power of letting him loose from the Executive to the Legislative body.”

Now, suppose this were a case where the emergency required immediate action. Not in evidence, but suppose so for the purpose of this argument, or embrace the idea that official declarations are vestigial-- last one in 1941. Even in those cases, the obligation to explain in a democracy lingers. Here’s what Madison was worried about:

“War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement. In war, a physical force is to be created; and it is the executive will, which is to direct it. In war, the public treasures are to be unlocked; and it is the executive hand which is to dispense them... The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venial love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace.”

President Trump has already shown disdain for the constraints of the Supreme Court (when they ruled against him on tariffs he called them traitors), Congress (he ignores their laws), and the will of the American people (Remember the 2020 election?).

So what guides the decision to go to war? A series of shifting rationales-- regime change, then missile defense, then preemptive cover for an Israeli strike -- suggests the president and his administration are improvising. Or worse: U.S. officials with access to classified intelligence have told The Washington Post and others there was no imminent threat from Iran before the strikes began. That’s not just shifting rationale—it means the “Iran as threat” rationale was constructed after the fact. That’s the Clausewitz violation.

The fog of war is not a surprise. It is the condition Clausewitz wrote for. If the rationales ignore Clausewitz’s commandment, and the President bypasses Congress or the obligations of public debate, then what guides him?

The passions of a passionate president are at the wheel and he admits no impediments.

Here are some reasons Madison wanted to slow down the process or at least get a lot of people to go on the record. Consequences: Soldiers die for objectives that were never defined. Taxpayers fund operations whose costs were never counted. Enemies are made whose hatred will outlast the strikes by a generation—already, in the rubble, the next organization is forming, the next grievance is brewing. Alliances built over decades can get broken in days. And no one in the American government is ever required to say, out loud, that these were acceptable costs in pursuit of a defined and achievable goal. Not because they weighed them and decided yes—but because the process that would have forced that weighing was bypassed entirely. The obligation to explain is not bureaucratic. It is the mechanism by which the people get a say in whether a war is worth the people it will spend.

During the Iraq war, even a corrupted process, created accountability. The predicate—weapons of mass destruction—proved false. And yet because the norms of explanation and Congressional engagement existed, there was a record. It affected the careers of everyone from Colin Powell¹, to John Kerry², Hillary Clinton³, Barack Obama⁴ and Donald Trump.⁵

Voters could judge the people acting in their name because they had gone on the record. People were held to what they said. A flawed, manipulated process still produced more accountability than none.

There is no presentation here. No vote. No record to be haunted by. No one on the floor saying this is the objective, this is the cost, this is worth it. Which means no basis for accountability when the expectations prove wrong—and in war, expectations prove wrong.

The members of the president’s party in Congress who insist this isn’t war, and therefore the president can do as he pleases, may think they are defending him, but they’re arguing for their own irrelevance. Please invite me on your program to talk about war given my standing as a member of Congress, so that I might argue that as a member of Congress I should be ignored when it comes to the serious questions of war.

The public cannot hold anyone responsible for a decision that was never formally made. That is the difference between a war that passes through democratic institutions, however imperfectly, and one that doesn’t pass through them at all.

War happens to the American people instead of with them.

1. Colin Powell stood before the United Nations and made the case in public, formally, on behalf of the United States government. That presentation haunted him for the rest of his life because it was made.

2. Senator John Kerry voted to authorize the Iraq War in October 2002, then voted against the $87 billion supplemental funding to support it. “I voted for it before I voted against it” became the sentence that defined his 2004 campaign—and ended it. Both votes were on the record. Bush needed only to read them back to him.

3. Hillary Clinton had to answer for her Iraq vote twice: first to Barack Obama in 2008, then to Donald Trump in 2016.

4. Obama hadn’t been in the Senate when the resolution passed, but he had done something that served the same function as a vote—he gave a speech in Chicago in October 2002 opposing the war before it began. It was public, on the record, and attributable. He could be held to it, and was. That speech helped lift an obscure state senator to the presidency.

5. Donald Trump who didn’t have to go on the record was able to pretend he was against the Iraq war. (He supported the war but criticized it when it started to go badly).