Donald Trump suffered a significant setback last week. On Wednesday, the House of Representatives passed a measure under the 1973 War Powers Resolution. It directed the White House “to remove all US forces from hostilities against the Islamic Republic of Iran”. This occurred several weeks after the US Senate voted 50-47 to advance its own version of the bill. (A final vote has yet to be scheduled.) Unlike previous failed attempts, both votes won support from some Republican lawmakers.
Trump was predictably irate. “Yesterday, in a meaningless vote, the House voted, 4 bad Republicans and all of the Dumocrats, to limit my War Powers, right in the middle of my final negotiations to end the War with the Islamic Republic of Iran,” he wrote in a June 4 Truth Social post. “Who would do such an unpatriotic thing. [sic]”
This isn’t the first time Trump has excoriated rebels in his party on a foreign policy issue. When five Republican senators voted in January to proceed on a motion to limit Trump’s authority to order military strikes in Venezuela without congressional approval, he named the defectors publicly and declared that “they should never be elected to office again.” The pressure worked; two of them flipped, helping the administration to kill the effort.
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Trump’s intimidation tactics won’t work this time. The snatch-and-grab operation against the Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro lasted a few hours and no American troops were killed. By contrast, the war in Iran has been an own goal of epic proportions.
Though the military strikes against Iran did considerable damage, Trump failed to anticipate that Iran would fight on by attacking American bases and allies in the Gulf region and closing the strait of Hormuz, through which at least a fifth of global oil and natural gas supplies flow. Moreover, 13 American troops have been killed so far.
Not only has Iran survived the war, it is now emboldened and has an even more hardline leadership. Plus, the price of energy and many other critical commodities – including fertilizer, jet fuel, helium and diesel – have soared amid warnings, including from the IMF, of a global recession if the war drags on.
To add to Trump’s troubles, a majority of Americans have turned against what they see as a failed and economically ruinous war. According to a 4 June Economist/YouGov poll, 68% want a deal with Iran that ends the fighting quickly.
The House vote to restrain Trump shows that legislators have taken notice. They fear a backlash in the November midterm elections if they are seen as having failed to restrain Trump. But even lawmakers who support the war have publicly complained about the administration’s failure to provide basic information, while others worry that the war is depleting stocks of precision munitions and air defense systems, many of which will take years to replace.
Some presidents have sought congressional approval before taking military action – Ronald Reagan in 1983, George HW Bush in 1991 and George W Bush in 2001 and 2003 – so Trump’s fulminations about being subjected to unprecedented restrictions aren’t accurate. Yet others have sidestepped the War Powers Resolution: Bill Clinton in 1999 and Barack Obama in 2011.
The House vote will not, however, limit Trump’s freedom of action in Iran (only his growing recognition that the war cannot be won will force him to pull back) because it is a “concurrent resolution”, which, even if passed by the Senate, will not be sent to the president. It lacks the force of law and essentially expresses the sentiment of Congress.
But fixating on these legal limitations risks missing the vote’s broader political significance.
Even congressional Republicans are breaking with Trump over Iran. Four joined Democrats for the recent House vote, probably prompted by the war’s unpopularity and Trump’s plummeting poll numbers. If the legislation moves to the Senate, there will be Republican defections for the same reasons.
Though Trump claims that public disapproval of the war and the economic hardships it has created don’t bother him, he knows that his political power will be eroded substantially if the war lingers and the Republicans suffer big losses in the midterms. That prospect will force him to find a way out of the Iran quagmire; but because Tehran understands his predicament, it won’t be inclined to make big concessions.
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The change in Trump’s political fortunes at home and the extent to which that works to Tehran’s advantage are therefore more significant than the military consequences of the 3 June war powers resolution vote. Even if it passes in the Senate, Trump can ignore it. What he cannot ignore is the political implications of the vote, which highlights both his diminished standing at home and loss of leverage over Iran as he scrambles to exit a disastrous war.
The irony here is hard to miss. President Trump, who campaigned on bringing common sense to US foreign policy, avoiding “forever wars” and focusing on problems at home, now faces opposition across the country in Congress – precisely for blundering into the kind of Middle East quagmire he once railed against.
