A week during which Donald Trump exercised his foreign policy.
An initial question about Trump authorizing the United States to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities on June 26,2025 is why Trump could be driven ro do so, given his reluctance to make war, he being a bellicose rather than a stalwart warrior, while John McCain never found a war he didn’t like. Trump talked big about North Korea but did nothing, which was just as weak. On domestic matters, he is a wet noodle, running for covert rather than standing for his announced principle, asin te case of tariffs, which he withdrew when the Stock Market showed it didn’t like the idea of that “beautiful” word. Trump was labelled by opposition wags as “TACO”: Trump Always Chickens Out”. Why decisive enough to stick with the bombing from conception to execution? It was refreshing and surprising to see and hear, even with vulgarity, him attending to matters of state rather than just milking the Presidency with his cryptocurrency scheme and the reported million dollar a plate dinner.
One reason might be foreign influence. Remember that Trump in his first term preferred what Putin said about intelligence over what his own intelligence agencies said. This time, he might have disregarded Telsi Gabbard’s assessment of the level of atomic developments to those offered by Bibi Netenyahu who has long been eager to mix it up with the Iranians. Netanyahu thinks of himself as Churchill. He will end the hundred year war with Israel’s enemies so that Israel can become a normal rather than a ceaselessly embattled nation. David Brooks, in his Friday, June 27th column, says he detests Trump and Netanyahu, but the two of them accomplished that. A second possibility is that General Dan Caine, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, convinced Trump that the present moment was a narrow window of opportunity for bombing Iran’s nuclear bomb capacity given that the Israelis had destroyed Iran’s air defenses and that situation wouldn’t last for long before Uran reconstituted its air defenses. But even high ranking generals are reluctant to get into policy. This might be an exception because the President is so rudderless.
At any event, Trump went through with it. It is still too early to see how significant the damage was to Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Trump, ever the showman, probably exaggerates, without evidence, that the Iranian atomic assets were “obliterated”. Some say that Iranian developments were delayed only a few months. But what Trump did show was that Iran was a paper tiger. It had to accept a ceasefire rather than seriously respond because it didn’t have one or out of fear of American power. Trump in his first term had revealed the Arab world to be a paper tiger when it did nothing in response to Trump moving the American Embassy to Jerusalem, its official capital. Trump wins again on Iran because there is only a token military response and then a cease fire. There is no conflagration.
The alternative point of view was offered by Anthony Blinkin, Biden’s Secretary of State, in a NYTimes op ed piece a few days after the bombing. He said that destroying the Iran facilities would encourage the Iranians to develop a secret bomb and use it because they had nothing to lose and could engage in other methods of destruction such as terrorism or dirty bombs for the same reason that they themselves were facing an ultimate threat. But this posture of restraint by many Presidents who don’t attack Iran us to offer many reasons for why not to act rather than offer reasons to act even if the work accomplished was limited. Trump is the one who seems bold because he was in this instance.
A more serious objection to Trump’s action had to do with procedure, and these are serious indeed. The U. S. Constitution has limited and only categorical remedies in warfare. It can declare war, and that has always been approved of major wars. The Bay of Tonkin Resolution was a declaration of war against North Vietnam. That war was legal even if not wise. There was no need to have a declaration of war to put American Marines into Haiti in the 1920’s though it was questionable to treat the Korean War as a police action under the flag of the United Nations. The other power of Congress is to withhold funds from a war and the executive can only spend money that has been authorized by Congress, This is a severe and politically dangerous thing to do because it seems unpatriotic to withdraw support the troops while they are under fire, Such a thing did happen when Congress passed the Boland Amendment which said no money should be spent on fighting in Nicaragua. Reagan or his minions promptly traded arms for hostages, circumventing the prohibition and I think that was an impeachable offense because Congress having the sole power of the purse is vital toAmerican constitutional government, but nothing much happened when the constitutional provision was violated. And, anyway, this was a pretty minorwar and so left to the executive.
A more relevant set of procedures were installed by Jacob Javits’ War Powers Act of 1973 which tried to deal with the now established “Imperial Presidency” whereby the President had been given so much power because during the Cold War Presidents had to respond quickly to Soviet ICBMs coming across the North Pole to attack America. Javits jerry rigged a set of procedures that would allow some congressional input. The law said that the Gang of Eight, which includes the Speaker of the House ans its opposition leader, the Senate majority and minority leaders and the same duos of the House and Senate majority and minority leaders had to be consulted and advised aboutPresidential war activities. Just consulted and advised, mind you. No approval necessary. All that means is that a relatively proforma consultation has to take place but even that did not take place before the attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Mike Johnson was given a briefing but Chuck Schumer was told only that an unspecified nation was about to be attacked. Hardly a minimum briefing, much less convening the Eight for a discussion that the President might find a compelling argument. The failure to consult shows just how bitter the feelings have become across the aisle. Not even national security makes leaders think they are all Americans and committed to the common interest. Democratic Progressives are calling for impeachment but cooler heads, like Nancy Pelosi, will prevail because impeachments of Trump go nowhere except to make him a martyr.
So this is the way things stand. Democrats would be wise to give Trump a victory and get back to other policy and constitutional issues such as cutting Medicaid and arresting illegal immigrants without due process. Those may affect the outcome of the midterms. That is what Chuck Schumer is aiming at: a change in power rather than a symbolic protest. There will be no need to castigate the Democrats’ failure of vision if they win in 2026.
Actually, Trump had a foreign policy that week he could crow about. The NATO members on Wednesday agreed that all of them would agree to raise the ir defense budgets to five percent of their GDP’s, something Trump had been bullying them about since his first term, making threats to sever from NATO and still insisting that the would not have the United States honor the key provision of the NATO Pact, which is that a war on one of them is a war on all of them. That the NATO nations were forced to take that decision was shown in how obsequious they were in announcing it. They had been intimidated into it and the NATO members were wealthy enough, long recovered from World War II to handle it. But Trump’s success was still overshadowed by the events in Iran, which is just as well because the NATO victory reveals once again his contradictory positions, such as when he says in the same statement that the Iran nuclear facility at Fordu was obliterated and that it is too soon to make an assessment. His view of NATO is also contradictory. He takes credit for putting it on a sound economic footing but also thinks, like some Conservatives, that NATO is an organization in want of a purpose ever since the end of the Cold War, when NATO was needed to face off against the Soviet Union. Let it disappear rather than flourish. For my part, NATO having U. S. troops on the Rhine guaranteed that Germany would not again descend into Fascism. Now that that danger is past, NATO remains as the military arm of a United Europe, Canada, the U. S. and G. B. providing some ballast, should Orban of Hungary become sufficiently difficult and troops are needed to restore a democratic continent..
Trump steps on his own victory over Iran by showing himself, as usual, as less than Presidential. He gets into a squabble by insisting that he has obliterated Iran’s nuclear assets while in the same sentence saying that it is too soon to say. What he discloses or doesn’t disclose about the strike has a more serious issue than Trump’s vanity. And boasting, qualities which his supporters just accept and which his opponents show him to be too immature to be president even when he actually accomplished something.
More significantly, Trump announced before the Thursday and Friday hearings that some information known about the attack on Iran would be withheld from the Congressional committees, which at the least breaches the bi-parftisan basis for foreign relations. That is not as bad as when the George W. Bush crowd ;ied about weapons of mass destruction in the lead up to the Iraq War, but still pretty bad. Anyway, the public focus, whether for praise or derision of the attack on Iran, is fast fading, moving on to Democratic Party infighting, Supreme Court decisions, and the fate of the “Big Beautiful Bill”, expected by July 4th, domestic politics usually in the forefront.