President Trump is waging or threatening to wage several presidential wars, ostensibly violating the Constitution, which specifies that only Congress, not the president, has the power to declare war, but the president controls the armed forces.
The president is waging war or threatening to wage war “without the authority of a Congressional war declaration,” says Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky). “This is an act of war,” Rand recently said in discussing the US invasion of Venezuela. The same arguments are now made as the US wars on Iran.
While Paul and Iranian war critics seem to have the Constitution on their side, Trump has history on his. Imperial presidents—both Republican and Democrat—have sidestepped Congress’s war powers for over a century. Since World War II (and often before in many cases), presidents make war without a war declaration, often ignoring Congress.
President Truman—the author of the Truman Doctrine that pledged US military aid for any country battling communism—plunged the United States into the Korean War without a declaration of war. A few months into the Korean War—in a speech to the Senate on June 28th, 1950, Senator Robert Taft (R-Ohio)—complained “that it should be noted that there has been no pretense of consulting the Congress. No resolution has ever been introduced asking for the approval of Congress for use of American forces in Korea.”
How Do Presidents Do It?
One part of the imperial presidency is presidents wage war and ignore or give little attention to Congress, which can always stop an imperial president by cutting off funding. But that’s something Congress will rarely do. As Commander-in-Chief, a president has various ways to force wars upon Americans, whether they approve or not.
President Wilson—who declared United States neutrality when World War I began in 1914—was reelected in 1916 partly on the idea that “he kept us out of war.” Yet, behind the scenes—through his de facto Secretary of State, advisor Edward House—Wilson negotiated with the British on how the US would intervene, which it did in 1917. Wilson also insisted, German warnings to the contrary, that supposedly neutral US ships had the right to go into war zones.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt—assistant secretary of the navy under Wilson—followed a similar policy in the runup to US participation in World War II. Before the declaration of war with Germany, FDR sent US ships deep into the North Atlantic war zone, escorting supplies to the Allies. FDR—mindful of “stay out of the war” public opinion polls—said the US was neutral. FDR lied; the US was working with British warships to track German ships.
However, Germany was not looking for war with the United States in the first two years of the war. Yes, Hitler envisioned Germany eventually conquering America. Germany’s Z Plan was based on the idea that a defeated or a neutral Britain would ally with Germany. They would conquer the United States, according to Holger H. Herwig’s The Politics of Frustration: The United States in German Naval Planning, 1889-1941. As long as Britain survived, the moment Germany attacked the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, the United States was not in danger, argues Bruce M. Russett in No Clear and Present Danger.
President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who admired FDR, campaigned in 1964 on the idea that his opponent, Senator Barry Goldwater, was a warmonger. But LBJ misled Americans according to the Pentagon Papers. He famously said of the Vietnam War that American boys shouldn’t be expected to do what “Asian boys should do for themselves.” Once elected, he did the opposite. LBJ pushed the nation deeper into Vietnam. Novelist Philip Roth called him “Lying Baines Johnson.”
However, Johnson’s predecessor, President John Kennedy, had sent some 16,000 troops to Vietnam without congressional approval. Senator Taft—on his deathbed in 1954—had his son read a speech begging President Eisenhower not to send US troops to save the French Indochina Empire. Ike concurred. (Curiously, Lyndon Johnson—then Senate Majority Leader—agreed with Taft).
President George H.W. Bush waged the first Iraq War without a declaration of war, but he did get use of force approval from Congress. But Bush—in an illustration of how Congress often has become irrelevant—said before the vote that he was going to war no matter the vote.
Congress is part of the problem. It has often avoided messy foreign crises or rallied around the flag once the shooting started, although its path to prevent presidential war is clear. Congress—which over a decade tacitly approved the Vietnam War—finally, after some 50,000 American deaths, stopped US participation in 1975. It cut off funding, something it could have done in 1965. The power has been there since the founding of the republic. Alexander Hamilton, writing in Federalist 24 wrote that “the whole power of raising armies was lodged in the legislature, not the executive.”
Nevertheless, John Lehman—a former Navy Secretary under Ronald Reagan—has noted in his book, Making War, that, most of the time, Congress backed down. Almost all executive military actions “were finally either approved by some legislative act or acquiesced in by inaction.” One thinks of Bismarck’s illegal action in the Prussian constitutional crisis of 1862. He ignored parliament and spent money without authorization. Two years later—after a successful war against Denmark—the Prussian parliament reversed itself and applauded the “Iron Chancellor.”
Regardless of one’s view of President Trump, he is doing nothing unusual, just more blatant. Reversing the imperial presidency—assuming one thinks that the president has too much power in matters of war—requires an apolitical view of presidents. It also requires an institutional reassertion of Congress’s powers to declare, prevent, or stop war.
