David J. Butler
The campaign against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure may come to be remembered as one of the most consequential strategic operations in decades. In coordination with Israel, the United States helped deliver a stunning blow to a regime that spent years racing toward nuclear capability while threatening Israel’s destruction and destabilizing the Middle East.
For Israel, the stakes were never abstract. Iran’s nuclear drive was widely understood as an existential threat — the kind that keeps families scanning headlines, listening for sirens and living with a strategic clock ticking. Rolling back that danger, even if not permanently erasing it, is not just strategy. It is relief.
There was also a serious strategic case for American participation. Some of Iran’s nuclear facilities were built to survive attack — buried deep underground, hardened against conventional strikes or widely dispersed. Israel’s military is formidable, but certain targets may have required capabilities only the United States possesses. If the objective was to cripple the program rather than merely damage it, American involvement may well have made the difference.
The conflict, however, has not been confined to those initial strikes. Iranian retaliation and U.S. counter-operations around the Strait of Hormuz — the narrow passage through which much of the world’s oil moves — have raised the possibility of a broader confrontation. President Donald Trump has warned that attempts to disrupt shipping there could trigger extensive American action.
Those factors only make the constitutional debate surrounding the initial operation more significant. War powers resolutions seeking to halt U.S. participation failed in both the Senate and the House, largely along party lines. The outcome was widely expected. Once military operations begin, lawmakers are understandably reluctant to order an abrupt withdrawal while American forces remain in harm’s way.
But the votes still mattered. They forced Congress — and the country — to confront a question that cannot simply be waved away by battlefield success: Who decides when the United States goes to war?
The Constitution divides that responsibility deliberately. Congress declares war and controls funding; the president commands the armed forces. The goal was not to prevent military action in emergencies but to ensure that sustained conflicts reflect collective national judgment rather than the decision of a single leader.
Yet over the past 75 years, that balance has gradually shifted.
The turning point came in 1950, when President Harry Truman sent American forces into the Korean War without seeking a declaration of war from Congress. The conflict was described as a “police action,” but the precedent was unmistakable: The president had committed the country to a major war without congressional authorization.
Subsequent presidents pushed the boundary outward. Ronald Reagan ordered airstrikes against Libya in 1986 without congressional approval. Bill Clinton launched the NATO bombing campaign in Kosovo in 1999 after Congress declined to authorize it. Barack Obama initiated the 2011 intervention in Libya under the argument that the operation did not constitute “hostilities” under the War Powers Resolution. In 2020, President Trump ordered the strike that killed Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani without seeking advance approval from Congress.
And now the Iran campaign joins the list.
None of this means the recent operation was unjustified. It may ultimately be judged strategically necessary. But constitutional design was never meant to depend on whether a particular president happens to make the right decision. It was meant to shape how such decisions are made.
Presidential war power has expanded through a kind of ratchet effect: Once a precedent is established, it rarely moves backward. Each president inherits the authority asserted by predecessors — and often extends it further.
Modern warfare has accelerated that trend. Military operations now unfold at speeds unimaginable to the framers of the Constitution. Cyberattacks, missile launches and drone strikes can begin and end before Congress has time to convene and vote. Presidents argue that such threats require immediate action. Often, they are right.
Yet the pace of modern conflict has blurred the definition of war. Actions once clearly understood as acts of war now appear as discrete “operations,” “missions” or “strikes.”
Which raises the difficult question: What exactly counts as war?
Is it a single strike? A short air campaign? A naval confrontation over a strategic chokepoint like the Strait of Hormuz? One action may not qualify. But when operations accumulate — across targets, regions or successive campaigns — the distinction becomes harder to sustain.
Meanwhile, Congress has often shown little appetite for reclaiming its role. Voting to authorize war carries obvious political risk. If the conflict goes badly, those who supported it own the consequences. It is far safer to allow the president to act first and decide afterward whether to praise or condemn the result.
The result is a modern system in which the president effectively decides when military force begins while Congress debates whether it should continue. Sometimes that arrangement may produce outcomes many Americans welcome. The operation against Iran may be one of them.
But the Constitution was never designed to rely on presidential judgment alone. The framers believed that the gravest national decisions — those that could cost lives, reshape alliances and commit the country to prolonged conflict — should carry the nation’s visible consent. That principle has not disappeared. Congress still holds the authority the Constitution gave it.
The real question raised by the Iran debate is whether Congress will choose to exercise that authority — or whether the presidency’s expanding power to initiate war will simply continue to grow.
David J. Butler is an attorney. He is president of Dvash Consulting, LLC and a member of the ownership group of Mid-Atlantic Media, which owns and publishes Washington Jewish Week.
