On a Saturday in late February, President Donald Trump announced that the United States had joined Israel in launching a war against Iran. Standing before the nation—or rather, appearing in a video posted to social media wearing a white “USA” ball cap—he declared that the threat from Tehran was “imminent” and that the operation was an act of self-defense.

Three weeks later, six American service members are dead. Oil prices have soared past $100 a barrel. The Strait of Hormuz, through which onefifth of the world’s oil passes, is a war zone. And the United States Congress—the branch of government the Constitution explicitly vests with the power to declare war—has been reduced to a spectator, its members told by their own leadership that public oversight would be “unhealthy” and “counterproductive.”

This is not how a constitutional republic is supposed to function. This is how a monarchy functions. And it is precisely why the “No Kings” movement—which has brought millions into the streets in the largest singleday protests in American history—is not merely justified but essential. The war in Iran is not an isolated foreign policy decision. It is the clearest, most dangerous expression yet of an executive branch that has decided it answers to no one.

The Constitution is unambiguous: Article I grants Congress the power to declare war. The Framers, having fought a revolution against a king, were determined that no single person would possess the authority to plunge the nation into armed conflict. Yet on March 5, 2026, the House of Representatives voted 219212 against a bipartisan resolution that would have required President Trump to seek congressional authorization before continuing military operations against Iran. The Senate had rejected a similar measure the day before.

The arguments against the resolution revealed the depth of Congress’s selfemasculation. Speaker Mike Johnson called the very attempt to limit the president’s authority “dangerous” and insisted, remarkably, that “we are not at war”—even as American bombs fell on Iranian targets and American bases came under retaliatory fire. Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin argued that oversight would be harmful because “you don’t want to show that kind of division to your enemy.” Let that reasoning sink in: the solution to wartime disagreement, in this view, is not to resolve it through democratic deliberation but to silence it entirely.

Representative Brian Mast, the Florida Republican who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, dismissed Democratic demands for public hearings with top administration officials as “total BS,” adding that the case for war had already been “very clearly made by the administration in public comments.” Senator John Thune, the majority leader, went further, suggesting that news conferences were a sufficient substitute for sworn testimony: “You guys are covering them and putting out all the relevant information.” This is not oversight. This is abdication.

What makes Congress’s surrender all the more alarming is the administration’s inability—or unwillingness—to offer a consistent rationale for the conflict. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told lawmakers the war could last eight weeks, twice as long as the president’s initial estimate. The administration first said it was about destroying Iran’s ballistic missiles, then about its nuclear program, then about regime change.

And then, in an interview with Axios published March 5, President Trump offered an explanation that should chill every American who believes in selfgovernance. Asked about Iran’s leadership succession following the killing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Trump declared: “I have to be involved in the appointment, like with Delcy in Venezuela.” Let me repeat that. The President of the United States said he *has to be involved* in choosing the next leader of Iran.

He dismissed Khamenei’s son as a “lightweight” and declared him “unacceptable to me”—as though Iran were a subsidiary to be managed and the American president its CEO. Speaking to Reuters, he doubled down: “We want to be involved in the process of choosing the person who is going to lead Iran into the future.” This is the language of empire, not democracy. It is the language of a monarch who believes his writ runs everywhere and his judgment supersedes all other considerations—including, evidently, the will of the American people, let alone the people of Iran.

The price of a king’s war is already being paid, and it will be paid not by the president but by ordinary Americans and people around the world. Gasoline prices have surged as oil topped $100 a barrel. European natural gas prices have doubled. Fertilizer costs—a critical input for global food production—are spiking as the Gulf’s petrochemical plants face supply disruptions, threatening to drive up food prices ahead of the northern hemisphere’s spring planting season. The world’s largest chemical firms are raising prices. Airlines are canceling flights. The worst travel disruption since the pandemic is unfolding as the conflict widens.

Economists are invoking a word that should terrify any American who remembers the 1970s: stagflation. The combination of rising prices and stagnant growth that defined that grim decade is now a distinct possibility, with some analysts warning that a prolonged war could push oil to $170 a barrel and trigger a global recession. The parallels to 1973, 1979, and 1990—all years when Middle East conflicts produced western economic crises—are impossible to ignore. Six American service members have already been killed. Thousands of Americans have been evacuated from the region on charter flights. And for what? For a war the administration cannot clearly explain, for objectives that shift with the news cycle, for a vision of American power that sees Congress as an inconvenience and the Constitution as a suggestion.

Perhaps the cruelest irony is that this war represents the complete abandonment of the “America First” rhetoric that powered Trump’s return to office. He was elected primarily on a promise to lower prices. Instead, his tariffs, his immigration crackdown, and now his war are driving inflation higher. The war alone is costing over $1 billion per day, even as the administration asks Congress for $200 billion to continue the operation—and this from a Congress that just cut $1 trillion from Medicaid to pay for tax cuts. The global consequences are already reverberating. European nations are rushing warships to the region. China’s exporters are losing access to Middle Eastern markets. Ukraine’s defenders may face a shortage of interceptor missiles as American supplies are diverted to the Gulf. And in a dark historical echo, experts warn that a cratered Iranian economy could send new waves of refugees toward Europe, reigniting the migration crisis that tore the continent apart a decade ago.

On March 28, the “No Kings” movement will hold its third nationwide protest. The second, on October 18, 2025, drew an estimated 7 million Americans—about 2 percent of the population—into the streets. According to Erica Chenoweth at Harvard Kennedy School, it takes roughly 3.5 percent of a population actively protesting to effect significant political change. The movement is approaching that threshold.

This is not a partisan movement, whatever the president’s supporters may claim. It is a constitutional movement. It is a movement of Americans who understand that the power to send their children to war belongs to the people’s representatives, not to one man in MaraLago. It is a movement of veterans who have seen the cost of “wars of choice” and refuse to watch another generation sacrificed on the altar of executive ego.

When Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland rose to argue for the war powers resolution, he put it simply: “The Framers weren’t fooling around.” They had fought a war to free themselves from a king. They knew that the most dangerous power any government can possess is the power to make war—and they placed that power in the legislature, where debate would be public, where votes would be recorded, where the people’s voice would have to be heard before the nation’s blood and treasure were committed.

That constitutional order is being dismantled before our eyes. A Congress that refuses to hold hearings, that votes against even debating whether the president can continue a war he started without authorization, is a Congress that has forgotten its purpose. Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska put it plainly: “As a sitting United States senator, I think I deserve to have honest answers. So when I see the secretary of defense and the president of the United States, who are not giving clear answers publicly, that makes it hard for me to go back and tell my constituents, ‘OK, here’s what we think we should expect going forward.’”

She should not have to ask. And we should not have to protest. But here we are.

Neither the United States nor the world needs kings. We fought a revolution to escape one. We wrote a Constitution to ensure we would never have another. And now, in a moment of constitutional crisis that rivals any in our history, we are being asked to accept that one man can launch a war without Congress, can demand the right to choose foreign leaders, can dismiss oversight as a luxury we cannot afford.

We can afford oversight. We cannot afford monarchy.

Join the protests on March 28. Find your local event at nokings.org. Demand that Congress reclaim its constitutional authority. Demand public hearings. Demand a debate on the war before more Americans die, before more families lose loved ones, before the global economy tips into a crisis from which it will take years to recover.

The Framers gave us the tools to prevent tyranny. But those tools work only if we use them. The question before us is whether we still have the courage to do so.

© Eurasia Review