As much as he loves to amass and wield power, President Donald Trump doesn’t always get to use it the way that he wants. After facing losses in the courts, he withdrew National Guard troops from multiple cities. Well-organized activists chased his federal immigration agents out of Minneapolis. The Supreme Court stopped him from using the law he’d been using to impose most of his beloved tariffs.
But in the sphere of foreign policy, Trump has enjoyed a dizzying amount of freedom. Trump has reshaped the fate of Gaza, likely for generations, with a ceasefire plan that enshrines Israeli domination of the territory. He seized Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and forced his successor, essentially at gunpoint, to ship oil to the U.S. And last week, without a coherent explanation of his motives or goals, he launched a war on Iran. The war is rapidly escalating into a regional conflagration and could devolve into a civil war and a U.S. quagmire. Nobody has gotten in Trump’s way as he’s taken a bat to the international order, and there is currently no workable plan to stop him.
Trump is exploiting norms American presidents have been using for decades to use military force without Congress.
Because Congress hasn’t put any checks on his power in foreign affairs and because he’s empowered by the most powerful military in the world, Trump is romping across the globe, dominating, extorting and targeting whomever he believes he can. And he is still scanning the horizon: the president has hinted at a “friendly takeover” of Cuba — and insinuated he could seize Greenland from Denmark, a NATO ally, by force or strike Mexico.
Trump’s aggressive actions and rhetoric in the international arena reflect a structural weaknesses in our government and political class. Presidents have been granted far too much power to conduct war unilaterally. And a longtime bipartisan consensus holds that the United States deserves to use its power without regard for international law.
Trump’s authoritarian ambitions at home have sometimes been foiled or limited by America’s democratic features. Even with a governing trifecta, Trump struggles to pass legislation, and executive orders leave him a narrower path for action. When he tests the limits of the law — or transgresses them — he’s hit with lawsuits, a good number of which have forced him to reverse course. Activists dog his Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents everywhere they go, and Trump’s attempts to repress them often backfire. While Trump’s power over his party is immense, it is not total, and GOP lawmakers maintain an ability to pressure him over issues that include the Epstein files and federals agent killing Alex Pretti. And some states that object to Trump’s immigration agenda have found ways to make his immigration enforcement plans more difficult.
But when it comes to foreign policy Trump is able to exploit norms that allow him to use military force without Congress. The Constitution assigns the power to declare war and the power to raise and support the military to Congress, not the president. But across American history, presidents have found work-arounds to use the military for combat without formally declaring war. As the historian Garry Wills has observed, since the mid-20th century in particular, coinciding with the development of the atomic bomb, the presidency has maintained a de facto monopoly on war-making powers:
The whole history of America since World War II caused an inertial transfer of power toward the executive branch. The monopoly on use of nuclear weaponry, the cult of the commander in chief, the worldwide network of military bases to maintain nuclear alert and supremacy, the secret intelligence agencies, the entire national security state, the classification and clearance systems, the expansion of state secrets, the withholding of evidence and information, the permanent emergency that has melded World War II with the cold war and the cold war with the ‘war on terror’—all these make a vast and intricate structure that may not yield to effort at dismantling it.
Trump has inherited this architecture and is using it energetically. Incidentally, Trump’s temperament is precisely the kind of thing that some of the Founding Fathers were attempting to guard against when they gave the legislative branch the power to declare war.
In addition to a robust institutional precedent for acting unilaterally, Trump also benefits from an ideological shield: a long-running bipartisan consensus that America is free to reshape the world as it wishes to, without regard for international law or even basic principles of respecting countries’ sovereignty. To be fair, Democrats in Congress have not been entirely idle — they have tried to rally behind war powers resolutions limiting Trump’s ability to use the military in Venezuela and Iran. (Those resolutions have failed so far, and the prospect of a veto-proof majority backing them with Republicans controlling both chambers is near zero for the time being.)
But the Democrats have been far from fiery in their objections to Trump’s foreign adventurism. And that’s because, even if they’re against Trump attacking Iran without consulting Congress, they’re not necessarily against the idea of using force to pursue the infinitely broad pretext of “American interests.”
After years of backing Israeli genocide, establishment Democrats have had little to say about the marginalization of Palestinians in Gaza through Trump’s ceasefire deal. On Venezuela, Democratic leaders objected to Trump’s actions on procedural grounds but lent credibility to his operation on substantive grounds by describing Maduro as an illegitimate president. They did not object to Trump’s swaggering imperialism; they just wanted him to clarify what he was doing. On Iran, a similar pattern is taking place, with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries voicing discontent with Trump’s refusal to consult Congress, but also affirming the ostensible premise of Trump’s operation by saying Iran is a bad actor which “must be confronted aggressively” and should never get nuclear weapons (even though Iran did not pose a nuclear threat to the U.S.). And again, they’re not demanding unequivocally that Trump end the war or condemning him on the grounds of international law or ethics, but seeking clarity on what he wants to do and criticizing it as strategically sloppy. Implicitly, the message throughout is if Trump is communicative and clear and promises a targeted operation, then Democrats might go along with it. But some Democrats don’t even need that little bit: Several have signaled they are already open to allocating funds for Trump’s bombardment of Iran. With Trump facing few obstacles to his actions on an institutional and legal level, there are two things that can foreseeably force him to change course. One is that the war goes so poorly — and in such an obvious way — that he is forced to retreat. The other comes down to American civil society: the formation of an antiwar movement with real leverage over both parties and an ability to exact political costs on supporters of endless war. That is, admittedly, a heavy lift in this era. It is hard enough for the anti-Trump movement to keep track of an ever-growing list of domestic policy challenges. And based in the heart of the global hegemon, Americans are too used to waking up and hearing that the government is bombing yet another country or ousting another foreign leader; the domination of other faraway nations remains abstract. But any truly democratic movement that claims self-determination and freedom from tyranny as its cause must make opposition to America’s imperialism a pillar of its platform. If Trump doesn’t face some kind of reckoning for his exploits in Venezuela and Iran, then it’s likely that his appetite for foreign intervention will only increase. A robust antiwar movement must emerge to counter it before he causes more destruction.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He primarily writes about politics and foreign policy. 
