The November 2024 presidential election has set the United States on a new course for national security and foreign policy. Vice President Kamala Harris, like President Joseph Biden before her, said she would have left untouched the United States’s role as the world’s policeman. Former President Donald Trump, more conscious of the high cost in lives and treasure of carrying this burden, seeks to align means and ends, and reduce America’s global commitments.
But Trump’s victory does not necessarily portend more, rather than less, American involvement in foreign wars. Under the Biden administration, the United States poured billions of dollars and military equipment to support the defense of Ukraine against Russian invasion. While it meddled in Israel’s tactics, Biden still supported the Netanyahu government’s war against Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and their Iranian supporters. President Trump experienced relative peace during his four years in office, but he still used force against Syria for using chemical weapons, Russian mercenaries in the Middle East, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps by killing its leader, General Soleimani. While Trump has called for an end to the war in Ukraine, he has also supported an acceleration of the war between Israel and its enemies in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran.
Fearful of the prospect of more “endless wars,” members of the new Congress may attempt to rein in presidential warmaking. A bipartisan coalition, for example, has attempted to repeal the 2001 and 2002 Authorizations to Use Military Force, which supported President George W. Bush’s response to the 9/11 attacks and his invasion of Iraq (both of which I helped draft—more on that below). “Three Presidents, both Republicans and Democrats, have used this permission to drag out conflicts that will get us into new ones,” Rep. Nancy Mace (R.-S.C.) said during a failed 2021 try. These critics of foreign wars argue that the president cannot launch offensive military operations without the approval of Congress, thanks to the Constitution’s vesting in the legislative branch “the Power … to Declare War.”
The view that Congress must authorize foreign wars may be widespread, but it is dangerously mistaken. Congressional support, of course, can signal political unity in war to both friends and enemies. But it is neither constitutionally necessary nor functionally wise—if Congress wishes to control warmaking, it has the power of purse and an ample set of tools available. Neither presidents nor Congresses have acted under the belief that the Constitution requires a declaration of war before the U.S. can conduct military hostilities abroad. The United States has used force abroad more than 100 times, but it has declared war in only five cases: the War of 1812, the Mexican-American and Spanish-American Wars, and World Wars I and II.
Presidents alone have sent the U.S. Armed Forces into combat from the nation’s earliest days. They ordered troops to battle Indians in the West, Barbary pirates (who were really princes within the Ottoman Empire) in the Mediterranean, and revolutionaries in Russia. Without any declaration of war, Presidents Truman and Eisenhower sent troops into conflict with communists in Korea, while Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon oversaw an undeclared war in Vietnam. American troops have fought abroad to engineer regime changes in South and Central America and to prevent human rights disasters in Somalia and the Balkans. Other conflicts, such as the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, and the 2003 Iraq War, received legislative “authorization” but not declarations of war. The practice of presidential initiative, followed by congressional acquiescence, has spanned both Democratic and Republican administrations and reaches back from President Biden to Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington.
Common sense does not support replacing the way our Constitution has worked in wartime with a radically different system that mimics the peacetime balance of powers between president and Congress. If the issue were energy use or entitlement reform, Congress would enact policy first and the president would faithfully implement it second. But the Constitution reverses the polarity of our system in foreign affairs and war. Our Framers decided that the president would take the initiative in matters of national security while Congress would check the executive with its power of the purse.
Critics of the presidency, however, believe that the Founding’s anti-monarchical spirit dictates reading the Constitution to limit executive war powers. If the Framers rebelled against King George III’s repressions, surely they would........