IMHO that's a reasonable comprise to try to keep both promises that seem to run against each other. No nukes for Iran, and no boots on the ground war.
By the way, Iran started attacking our cargo ships going through the Suez Canal beginning in late 2023. That's the kind of thing reasonable Americans would go to war over since Biden's tit-for-tat responses didn't stop the attacks.
Obviously, in late 2023 Iran started the war, not Trump, who wasn't even in the WH. Is it safe to say that Biden's year's worth of on-again-off-again firing back at Iran's Houthi rebels in Yemen was Biden taking us into war? Or do we reserve that accusation for only Trump because the media told us to?
Ok, you’ve demonstrated that I didn’t make clear my point about the need to have Congress declare war in case of, well, war.
My point was, and is, that the President, the country, and pretty much everyone except for America’s enemies are better off if Congress declares war when appropriate.
Yes, it is about fidelity to the constitution ... and as a practical matter, a congressional declaration is about a lot more than that.
It’s also about getting a commitment from Congress members that they approve of the conflict. So that, if things need to escalate, the President / SOW / military CAN escalate without having to be limited to extremely limited actions in order to maintain plausible deniability that there’s a war occurring at all.
There’s a game theory issue here. It’s likely that the Iranians are willing to wait Trump out because they know that any major escalation by US forces will give Trump’s domestic enemies (even if those enemies would have supported military action before military action started) ammunition against him. That knowledge reduces their incentive to capitulate or even to bargain.
As I wrote upthread: we’ve been at war since at least 1979. Further, allowing an aggressively hostile group to develop nuclear weapons is existential madness.
Yes, existential. It’s believable that the permanent end of human civilization and of human life altogether may occur when aggressively hostile and hateful people get nuclear weapons. That’s a REALLY bad outcome, and must be opposed by any means necessary.
In the context of the world in which we live, using any means neccessary means getting Congress on board with declaring war, or at least with authorizing use of military force. Not just because the Constitution says so ... but because not getting Congressional authorization grossly hampers the war effort. As we see right now in Iran.
So I believe that the President, or his designates, needs to make the case to Congress that some sort of military authorization is a good idea. I don’t think anyone has seen the President strongly make that case. Frankly, I’ve been surprised that such a successful media star hasn’t forcefully made the case to the American people already. Especially since so many of the American people know that we’ve already been at war for decades. And since, unlike in other conflicts, there are PLENTY of Iranian expats in the US and all over the world who would love to help make the case that the mullahs must go. But ... the case to remove the mullahs has not really been vigorously argued by this president or anyone else high in the executive branch.
And so, we’re in the current predicament. Poked the hornet’s nest, and can’t destroy that nest while the hornets continue to sting us and our friends.
The most likely way out is for the president to get Congress on his side, perhaps by appealing to the people. This current path of blockading Iran while everyone believes that large scale use of military force will be blocked by Congress one way or another, doesn’t seem as likely to produce good results.