For the second time in under a year, U.S. President Donald Trump has launched strikes against Iran without presenting the pluses and minuses of another war in the Middle East to the American people. The joint U.S.-Israeli attacks, which killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei along with several other senior Iranian officials, come in the wake of not just a U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign against Iran in June 2025 but also a series of U.S. strikes on boats said to be trafficking drugs in the Caribbean and the U.S. operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro—none of which received congressional approval.

It is hardly surprising that an American president who has taken the assertion of executive power to new and dangerous places in domestic politics feels emboldened to act unilaterally in the realm of national security and foreign affairs. But Trump’s actions, unparalleled in their brazen transgression of legal norms, do not represent a complete break from tradition. Trump has been enabled by decades of bipartisan practice that has insulated presidential decision-making on the most lethal and consequential actions the United States can take from scrutiny or accountability.

In word and deed, senior members of Trump’s cabinet have expressed outright contempt for the legal guardrails against the use of force. Trump’s powerful deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, dismissed international law as “niceties” in a world governed by “strength . . . force . . . and power.” Vice President JD Vance labeled the 1973 War Powers Resolution, Congress’s Vietnam War–era effort to reclaim its constitutional war-making prerogatives, as “fundamentally a fake and unconstitutional law.” Yet those guardrails had been weakened before Trump returned to office. Some of the very national security lawyers who find so much to (legitimately) criticize in Trump’s current actions are responsible for chipping away at the laws and norms that constrain presidential power, and thereby for setting the stage for Trump’s unilateral rampage.

The full article can be read on the Foreign Affairs website.