America’s Post-Deliberative Wars

Over the last eight weeks of war with Iran, America’s two deliberative institutions, Congress and the media, have largely abandoned their duty to sustain public debate on the most important question a republic can face—the choice between war and peace. Neither institution performed perfectly during the Global War on Terror. Yet on Capitol Hill there was debate before the initiation of hostilities, and the media made considerable efforts to manufacture consent. By today’s standard, these activities seem almost admirable. The Iran War may be the first genuinely “post-deliberative” war in American history.

To see the difference, we need to think back more than twenty years. While deeply flawed and perhaps rushed, there was nevertheless a debate on Capitol Hill about U.S. military action in Afghanistan and then the invasion of Iraq. The first was directly precipitated by a direct attack, 9/11. The second was preceded by roughly two months of Congressional hearings followed by a vote for an Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF). The AUMF authorizing the war in Iraq passed the Senate by a vote of 77–23 and 296–133 in the House. Those debates and votes have since been widely judged as mistakes—but they occurred.

There was no comparable congressional deliberation on the eve of the president’s unilateral launch of the Iran War. Despite the administration’s prior uses of force in Venezuela and against Iran in June 2025, Capitol Hill showed little appetite for a sustained debate before hostilities began. As American forces were built up in the Middle East, there were no serious efforts to compel a vote in Congress. The most Congress has managed is to act after the fact, through failed war powers resolutions—half-hearted attempts to get proverbial horses back into the barn. Capturing the almost uniform sentiment of congressional Republicans, Rep. Blake Moore said of the vote that it would be “irresponsible to tie the hands of the Commander-in-Chief and our military leaders.” In the upside-down world of Washington, shirking one’s constitutional duties is recast as responsibility.

On the other side of the aisle, while many Democrats fretted about President Trump’s use of force in Iran, those in leadership evaded the core issue, focusing more on process than principle. In the spring of 2026, for example, Sen. Mark Warner criticized Trump for using military force in Venezuela as it distracted from the possibility of regime change in Iran. Warner reiterated those critiques after the start of the Iran War, hitting Trump on the process of the war rather than its substance. Considering such equivocation, it is not unreasonable to argue that Democratic leadership acquiesced to the war powers vote because they knew it would fail, thereby allowing their party to strike a pose of opposition while, in fact, their disagreement was mostly rhetorical.

The corporate media’s role in the Iran War was largely reactive and failed to ask deeper questions about presidential authority or strategic prudence. Instead, mainstream media reporting boiled down to event narration, asking questions like “will he or won’t he,” rather than examining deeper issues about war and its meaning for American society. Coverage has also slow-walked troubling developments like the U.S. military’s destruction of an Iranian school and the killing of 165 Iranian civilians at the start of the war. More troubling have been networks such as Fox News and CBS News, which have been supportive of the war to the point of parody.

The point here is not to determine the merits of arguments for or against the war. It’s to point out that this argument is barely occurring. The mainstream media has taken to covering war as if it were the weather: a condition to be tracked rather than a decision to be debated. This is the antithesis of the self-government we’re promised by the Constitution.

These evasive tendencies aren’t new, of course. The latter half of the Global War on Terror was egregious from the standpoint of congressional and public discourse. Despite his campaign promises on foreign policy, President Obama, learning the same lesson about casualty aversion as his predecessors, revised rather than retrenched. Using expansive interpretations of existing Authorizations for the Use of Military Force, Obama extended America’s covert military footprint in the Middle East. Similarly, Obama launched Operation Odyssey Dawn, a no-fly zone turned regime-change operation without deliberation, much less a vote in Congress. The fallout of the intervention in Libya, as well as U.S. covert action in Syria and support for the Saudi-Emirati coalition in Yemen, led to disastrous outcomes abroad and solidified Congress and the media’s role as bystanders.

For those who hope for a foreign policy more closely aligned with constitutional norms and grounded in robust public debate, the outlook is mixed. While the mainstream press has often been derelict in its responsibilities, a “new media” ecosystem of podcasts, web-based outlets, and independent commentary has, to some extent, filled the gap. Such sources have shortcomings but their emergence is, on balance, a welcome corrective. What remains to be seen is whether such dissenting commentary can elicit and sustain a more robust public debate that spills into politics. While new media has mobilized listeners, translating that energy into political action is another matter. If dissenting media consumers do not become dissenting voters, today’s online commentary may prove as ineffectual as yesterday’s print opposition.

The outlook is bleaker on Capitol Hill. The Iran War has reinforced a decades-long trend of congressional abdication, as legislators defer to the president rather than assert their responsibility to debate questions of war and peace. Recent history offers little reassurance, as heightened polarization has sustained the growth of the imperial presidency. Yet there are glimmers of hope: a small number of resolute conservative voices have joined a growing body of more consistent liberal ones in calling for restraint and a return to constitutional norms. Adding to this chorus will require sustained voter engagement, particularly in primaries, which traditionally see low turnout. If Americans believe foreign policy is crowding out domestic priorities and want consistent congressional oversight of the executive, they must make clear to incumbents that there will be consequences at the ballot box. If, as the saying goes, “the government you elect is the government you deserve,” then American voters must make clear that they demand—and deserve—better.

Outside of electoral politics, polling suggests that opposition to the Iran War is not a fringe position, but the norm—one sustained by voices across the political spectrum. Realizing that sentiment and forcing into politics will require what Abraham Lincoln called “a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people,” coupled with the sustained effort to make it so.