Trump is about to get us into war in Iran

The Hill

4 hours ago

By the time this column is published, the U.S. could be entangled in yet another ruinous war in the Middle East.
I wish that statement felt more like hyperbole.
President Trump supercharged the latest round of global instability on Monday when he abruptly left the G7 conference currently underway in Canada to address 'serious matters' back in Washington. Before convening the National Security Council in the White House Situation Room, Trump ominously warned Iranians to 'immediately evacuate' Tehran. Israel's expanding military operation there had suddenly become America's top priority.
Trump's rhetoric escalated on Tuesday, when he issued a call for Iran's 'unconditional surrender' and boasted that 'we now have complete and total control' of Iranian airspace, even though the U.S. isn't a party to the conflict. Trump may not have signed the official order, but he is clearly loving the opportunity to rattle the saber against his favorite foreign foe.
Trump has made no secret of his admiration for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He is also well aware of Netanyahu's success using the war in Gaza to vastly expand his executive power and crack down on public criticism. Facing his own political struggles at home, Trump may find Netanyahu's example too tempting to ignore. If the U.S. soon finds itself aiding an Israeli war with Iran, it won't be national security reasons that lead Trump to pull the trigger.
It wouldn't be the first time Trump has let domestic political issues dictate his foreign policy. Back in April, the he responded to consumer anxiety about how his tariffs on China would affect cell phone prices by carving out huge exemptions for popular products. Just days after the Pew Research Center published a poll that showed most Americans felt he was too pro-Russia, Trump came out with a string of 'blistering' threats aimed squarely at Russian President Vladimir Putin.
That is to say, under the Trump doctrine, all values are negotiable if the polls get bad enough.
Trump also has his own cynical reasons to consider involving the country in a situation even he has acknowledged is a costly military quagmire in the making. This week's Harvard-Harris poll showed Trump underwater with voters on nearly every part of his domestic policy agenda. It is no surprise that he is now considering a hard pivot into foreign policy, an area where voters are more likely to give him the benefit of the doubt.
More immediately, a few cruise missiles would distract the media from the bubbling discontent on Capitol Hill, where his 'One Big Beautiful Bill' has received a frosty reception in the Senate.
But there's a simpler calculus at play among Trump's advisors. A country at war means expanded powers for the president. Those powers could derail some of Trump's thorniest federal legal battles, while enhancing the chances that he can legally invoke the Alien Enemies Act under these new conditions.
He could even go old-school and make war on Iran in exchange for even greater powers. But that would also lead to a bruising battle with House Republican isolationists such as Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who on Monday described the Israel-Iran conflict as 'not our war.'
Although he is unlikely to go that far, Trump doesn't actually need a formal declaration of war to expand his reach. As the federal courts made clear during the War on Terror, even undeclared wars allow a president to bend and even break the rule of law. In Trump's transactional math, that's a whole lot of power over domestic politics in exchange for a few hundred cruise missiles and one or two tough-talking Oval Office speeches. Easy deal.
Republicans will argue that Trump would never approve a strike on Tehran because of his history as an Iran dove. But that ignores Trump's evolution into a president with a taste for both military parades and military deployments, even if that means deploying Marines against American citizens on the streets of a major city. In Los Angeles, Trump is openly testing the limits of his constitutional power.
We would be foolish to think his new militarism stops at our shores, especially when Trump himself tells us it doesn't. When his fellow G7 leaders asked Trump to join a statement calling for de-escalation and diplomacy between Israel and Iran, he pointedly refused before eventually bowing to pressure from world leaders.
Trump's decision to ultimately sign the letter felt empty and unconvincing — by design. After all, why would he want to de-escalate the situation? In Trump's own words, expanding the Israel-Iran conflict makes Tehran more likely to sign an American nuclear deal. Trump now sounds more like Dick Cheney than his first-term isolationist self. What an irony.
Trump's hawkish Iran advisors yearn for the lack of accountability that comes from being involved in an undeclared yet very real conflict. Trump was right to remark during the 2016 Republican debates that President George W. Bush never paid any price for his catastrophic mismanagement of the war in Iraq or his wartime abuses against civil liberties. Now that Trump is engaged in his own civil liberties crackdown, the neoconservative path he once condemned looks more like a political escape hatch.
As the world stumbles headlong into another security crisis, America's allies wait anxiously to see which Trump they're going to get. The answer will determine whether our nation is a stabilizing force in the Middle East — or a profoundly destructive one.
Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.