The U.S. Should Cut Its Losses in the Iran War

The United States currently spends almost a whopping trillion dollars a year on the U.S. military (a level higher than the next nine highest-spending countries combined). Donald Trump wants to increase it to almost a staggering $1.5 trillion per year. Plus, there will be supplemental war spending for a conflict of choice, which the Trump administration estimated at $25 billion but has now increased to $29 billion, a figure that did not pass the straight-face test. One independent cost estimator put the total at $72 billion in direct costs and in the trillions when indirect costs are included, including higher consumer prices caused by higher oil prices, which either go into or are used to transport most other products. In addition, the United States is already carrying a huge debt burden of $39 trillion, with mind-blowing interest payments accruing to U.S. taxpayers.

War hawks have been telling us since World War II that this heavy martial burden for U.S. citizens is needed because the United States has “responsibilities of a superpower.” And the monetary costs pale in comparison to the costs of American military lives and the larger body counts of local people being wracked up in places such as Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and other countries in the continuing and failed War on Terror, and now Iran. 

And even more important than all this is the rarely mentioned toll on the American republic at home. War is the greatest cause of overweening government in American history and human history. During the long Cold War and seemingly endless War on Terror, a national security state was created in America, with the first large peacetime standing U.S. military in American history retained and huge military budgets to fund it. With this expanded military, many U.S. overseas bases were retained after World War II, and the United States became the most interventionist state on earth (surpassing even the Soviet Union during the Cold War and with the martial intrusions accelerating further during the War on Terror after this major adversary fell).

In the 1970s, historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., realized that large military forces in being and a concomitant intelligence community had shifted power among the branches of government, leading to the rise of an “imperial presidency” that was no longer constrained by Congress as much. Schlesinger correctly saw that such augmented presidential power could be turned inward on Americans. 

Although Schlesinger focused his analysis on Richard Nixon and the domestic dirty tricks exposed during the Watergate scandal, the first imperial president had likely been Harry Truman—with command of a newly consolidated Department of Defense and his own new intelligence agency, the CIA, to feed him information and conduct dirty tricks overseas—he thumbed his nose at the constitutional requirement for congressional approval of U.S. wars and unilaterally took the nation to war in Korea in 1950. Since then, presidents no longer ask Congress to declare war before committing the country to hostilities. Since Truman, as the Cold War continued and then the War on Terror replaced it, executive power continued to grow and congressional power continued to diminish. 

Thus, Donald Trump did not invent the imperial presidency, but is now taking full advantage of the deterioration of the American constitutional system of checks and balances by employing regular military forces and nationalized National Guard forces at home against civilians against the wishes of state and local officials; using militarized law enforcement forces (ICE, the Border Patrol, and other agencies) to ostentatiously target illegal immigrants brutally but also ensnaring legal ones and U.S. citizens; and directing the FBI and Justice Department to try to investigate and prosecute his political enemies.

Presidential power is now running rogue. Congress needs to push back at its roots and use the War Powers Resolution of the 1970s to end both the Iran War and the continuing War on Terror. The president’s own party is paralyzed by congressional members’ fear that an adverse tweet from Trump will end their political careers, even though there should be strength in numbers to do the right thing. However, many should be even more frightened that the American people will fire them in November if they don’t act to end this pointless war of choice now.