There was little that was surprising about U.S. President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address on Tuesday. It contained the usual mix of racism, weird solipsistic digressions, needy self-glorification, and outright lies that Americans have unfortunately become accustomed to. But one thing that was striking in the nearly two-hour speech was the scant amount of time given to the possibility of war with Iran.
Over the past weeks, the United States has deployed the largest military force in the Middle East in decades. Yet the president offered only a few sentences about how Iran is building missiles that could strike the United States (there’s no evidence that this is true); criticizing the Iranian government’s killing of protesters (he doesn’t care); and insisting that, to avoid war, the Iranian government must say the “magic words” that it will never build a nuclear weapon (the Iranians have said this for years, and reiterated it just hours before the speech).
There was little that was surprising about U.S. President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address on Tuesday. It contained the usual mix of racism, weird solipsistic digressions, needy self-glorification, and outright lies that Americans have unfortunately become accustomed to. But one thing that was striking in the nearly two-hour speech was the scant amount of time given to the possibility of war with Iran.
Over the past weeks, the United States has deployed the largest military force in the Middle East in decades. Yet the president offered only a few sentences about how Iran is building missiles that could strike the United States (there’s no evidence that this is true); criticizing the Iranian government’s killing of protesters (he doesn’t care); and insisting that, to avoid war, the Iranian government must say the “magic words” that it will never build a nuclear weapon (the Iranians have said this for years, and reiterated it just hours before the speech).
But Trump is not the only one paying such scant attention to what could be another era-defining U.S. foreign-policy catastrophe. His desultory treatment reflects the broader state of the Washington, D.C., debate—or lack of it—around this issue. Pundits and policy wonks have spent the past month speculating over whether and when Trump might decide to attack Iran. But no one has yet bothered to provide a remotely plausible legal or strategic justification for it. And the country’s mainstream media and foreign-policy establishment seem far less troubled by these questions than they should be.
Some Democrats have overlooked the legal side of the question to focus on strategic issues, while others have highlighted legal concerns but ignored what a terrible idea attacking Iran is. Right now, the entire party should be pushing both of these points as hard as possible.
A Jan. 29 piece from CNN, entitled “Trump weighs major new strike on Iran as nuclear discussions show no progress,” had seven bylines on it. Yet not one of these seven reporters apparently bothered to ask, “Hey, is any of this actually legal?”
In an NPR interview a week later, former National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan discussed the possibility of conflict. But neither Sullivan nor interviewer thought the legal question was worth a comment. Meanwhile on CBS’s Face the Nation, Democratic Sen. Mark Warner focused solely on pragmatic concerns. Asked about reports that Iran is rebuilding the nuclear facilities bombed in June 2025, the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee responded, “What I fear is that we don’t have the ability to bring the full power of pressure against Iran.”
Avoiding debates about legality is unfortunately typical of a -policy community that operates based on a built-in assumption that the United States has a special privilege to do violence wherever and whenever it feels compelled to. If you want to understand the collapse of the so-called “rules-based order,” look here. We’ve heard much lamenting from foreign-policy experts about the breakdown of this order. But such lamentations rings hollow when the very same people are enabling Trump to keep breaking the rules.
“There’s no indication that there’s any sort of circumstance that would give the President the unilateral authority to order military action,” legal expert David Janovsky of the Project on Government Oversight recently told Time magazine. “It’s true that presidents have some inherent authority to deploy the military as Commander in Chief, but that’s really limited to true emergency circumstances where there is an attack underway that needs to be repelled, or maybe an extremely clear imminent attack. But there’s no suggestion that that’s the case today—that would make the strikes illegal.”
Brian Finucane, a former State Department attorney and now a senior advisor at the International Crisis Group, told me the same. “There’s no plausible legal basis for the Trump administration to attack Iran. Obviously, Congress has not authorized any such use of force. And there’s no credible argument that somehow U.S. military action would be in self-defense.”
But even arguments about legality, while important, shouldn’t be allowed to substitute for substantive opposition. The recent warnings from Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Dan Caine about the significant risks of a conflict with Iran, which echo Gen. Eric Shinseki’s prescient but overlooked warning before the Iraq War, should invigorate that opposition.
While a few Democratic voices have had the courage to step up, the party’s congressional leadership has again failed to act with the necessary urgency. So far, the only pushback we’ve heard from Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is that Trump is “amassing an armada off the coast of Iran with no articulated strategy to the American public or Congress.” Trump’s lack of strategy is surely a valid concern, but that hardly goes far enough, particularly after Shaheen declared herself “pleased” with Trump’s attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities in June.
Sen. Chris Coons, who is likely in line to replace Shaheen as the Senate’s top foreign-policy Democrat, released a very similar statement, warning that Trump “needs to make clear to the nation that he has a real plan, and he must seek the consent of Congress and the American people.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s statement sounded the name notes, making it sound like real problem isn’t Trump’s plan to launch another illegal war, just that he hasn’t explained it well enough.
It was only Thursday that Schumer and House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries finally endorsed a bipartisan effort to force a vote on a war powers resolution, which if passed would make clear that the president does not have the constitutionally required congressional authorization to use military force against Iran. This process would both facilitate the debate in Congress that has been thus far lacking and require members of the legislature to go on record with a vote for or against a war that will have enormous consequences for U.S. and global security.
In other words, these resolutions (introduced by Republican Thomas Massie and Democrat Ro Khanna in the House and Democrat Tim Kaine and Republican Rand Paul in the Senate) are simply trying to get Congress to do one of its most important jobs: weigh in on matters of war.
This shouldn’t be a tough call. We’re not in the post-9/11 period, when skittish Democrats could at least hide behind public opinion polls as the nation rushed to war in Iraq. Today, majorities of both Democrats and independent voters oppose an attack on Iran. Criticizing Trump for not seeking congressional authorization is important, but the problem goes much deeper. Speaking to reporters recently, Kaine got it right: “A war with Iran would be a grand disaster. Completely unnecessary.”
In short, an unpopular and reckless president is threatening to lead the country into an unpopular and reckless war. The Democratic leadership should be out front fighting this and whipping votes against it, not politely requesting a briefing. This is a crisis moment, and any Democratic leader who won’t step up should be asking why they’re in the role. The rest of us should be asking why we let them stay there.
