Notes on the political constraints on presidential warmaking
My view, as discussed last week, is that presidential warmaking is an almost wholly political issue, rather than a legal one. No court is going to stop a war.
That said, I think may people hear "wholly political" and just assume that the president has a free hand to do whatever he/she wants. I completely disagree. In fact, presidents are incredibly constrained by politics when it comes to war.
Take Trump and Iran. What are some of the major political constraints:
- Military capacity
- Cooperation of allies
- Reaction of foreign adversaries
- Reaction of markets
- Congressional opinion
- American public opinion
- Partisan/base opinion
The first two---military capacity and ally cooperation---are straightforward; they are essentially supply-side constraints. Presidents can only go to war with the military Congress provides. Ditto with allies; absent the ability to use airspace and foreign bases, some operations become impossible. And it's always better to have a coalition of nations fighting the war than going it alone.
The third and fourth items on the list---foreign and market reactions---are constraints because they create immediate negative feedback, political and economic. Trump can't just nuke Tehran because that could easily trigger an escalation to global war, and WW3 with China is a bad outcome. Similarly, now that Iran has closed the strait and oil prices are spiking, the economic costs of the war may soon exceed the benefits, encouraging the president to seek a diplomatic off-ramp.
The final three items---opinions in Congress, the public, and the president's party---are the most purely political. These matter because the president has goals other than the objectives of the war, and negative opinions about the war will inevitably spill over to future political goals, whether they are policy, electoral, or egoist.
Don't overthink this. If your 10 friends all Venmo $50 so you can buy stuff to host a party Friday night, there are no functional legal constraints on what you spend the money on. But you sure as hell better buy reasonable party supplies, or you are never going to have any decision-making authority in your friend group ever again. You are deeply constrained. And if the party sucks, you are also going to have future problems when you proposed to put something fun together for the group. And they are all going to think less of you.
In the extreme, Congress can of course remove the president from office. People will tell you that would never happen but that's mostly because the president won't cross the red-lines which would make it less-than-unthinkable. If Trump started carpet-bombing civilian areas of Tehran and announced that a 1,000,000-man invasion backed with tactical nukes was next, I think he's probably out of office. Just like you aren't planning any future parties if you spend all $500 your friends gave you on Snickers bars.
Those extreme constraints aside, unpopular war decisions are going to make your political allies less likely to support your future goals, and your political enemies more likely to challenge you. Unpopular presidents don't get the support of their co-partisan in Congress or in the public, and they draw all sorts of fire from their enemies. Unpopular wars---whatever their cause---make for unpopular presidents. And so presidents resist creating unpopular wars. They hurt your other policy goals, they hurt your party's electoral goals, they hurt your legacy, and they hurt your future influence in politics.
The median Republican in the House---and the median Republican in the country---right now is giving Trump the benefit of the date, but it seems very conditional. Any sign of the war going poorly, or the president increasing the US commitment to a longer war, or (knock on wood) US service men and women dying, could quickly make Members or supporters reassess the cost of the war against the value of it. This is one reason most presidents spend a lot of time justifying wars preemptively; if a war at least begins as popular, you'll have some room to maneuver so long as it is going reasonably well. If it starts off unpopular, you are constrained right out of the gate.
This is what makes Trump's moves in Iran seem so poorly considered. He spent almost no time trying to build public support for it. That meant it had to be a limited operation, in scope and duration. He's done almost nothing to articulate the goals of the war, and for most people that defaults to "I don't understand what we are trying to achieve." It's already unpopular among the public and Democrats, and the Republican support is tenuous and conditional. Market forces are working against a prolonged conflict.
None of this is damning to the president or the war effort. Excellent outcomes could still be achieved. But it certainly seems like Trump is badly constrained in what he can do at this point, especially on the escalation side. Even if that's the proper military/geopolitical strategy, it probably is foreclosed at this point by domestic opinion, such that the political cost of escalation likely outweighs the benefits. That, in turn, may box him in diplomatically.