The Constitution vests Congress with the power to declare war. August 15, VJ Day, marks the end of World War II, the last U.S. war declared by Congress. In all the military actions since then, have we respected the Constitution and its intent? Have the administrations that mounted undeclared wars honored America’s deepest sovereign interests?
Much of our armed action has had to do with the need, clarified soon after World War II, to contain Soviet expansion. The USSR’s strategic tools included proxy wars, propaganda and agitation abroad, guerilla insurgencies, and nuclear weapons. Declarations of war often would not square up against their moves, and when they might, the process of declaration would often have been too slow.
At the same time, the Cold War, a geostrategic conflict, put national security at the heart of U.S. foreign policy, effectively subsuming all U.S. interests. Aid, cultural exchange, economic liberalization all were justified, at least in part and often at heart, as enhancing security. The zero-sum, mutually escalating, domain-creeping nature of the contest with the Soviets set the logic to that priority. The doctrine became a fixed norm. To the US strategist, national security defines foreign policy, and a “DIME”, or “DIMEFIL” – diplomacy, intelligence, military, economic, and later finance, information and law enforcement – names the tools, means to the national end, all revolving around geostrategic security.
Foreign policy was effectively conflated with security as a matter of normal habit. Conventional wisdom in Washington said the National Security Council was the coordinating body for foreign policy. But with the fall of the USSR, the habit of setting all interests in the service of security now lost its reason for being, namely the Soviets. Military interventions in Korea, the Bay of Pigs, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, and Grenada responded to Soviet backed insurgencies, and so we grew accustomed to using our armed force to fight bad guys. But without the coherent rationale of stopping Soviet Communism, that basis for claims based on national security evaporated. It just felt natural to fight other bad guys, in Haiti, in Panama, in Kosovo, or Kuwait, the same way. In our proficiency with the geostrategic hammer, with all the other functions serving as means to use it, other international issues started to look like threats to be contained, in something of a habit.
Now, as Emma Ashford points out in Foreign Affairs, it has become “all too easy to start a war,” while Americans’ “insulation from the wars Washington wages, and the diffuse nature of those wars’ costs, serves to defuse political opposition.” Ashford points out a range of consequences, notably a kind of path-determination that inures us to increasingly disadvantageous and costly wars. She calls for mechanisms to break what is an addiction to armed intervention.
On top of Ashford’s compelling strategic case, the very ease of starting wars of choice, without exigent need or danger, risks putting America at moral peril, if we become cavalier about war. America was founded on the principle of people’s rights to live by their own lights, and of government to secure those rights, by consent of the governed. Employment of state lethal violence to pursue impulses will always raise questions:, whether government will confine its use of state force to the foreign arena; whether the people’s rights are served by starting war; and, in a test of our national nature, whether this free people is out to take things by force. If our answers do not validate our national self conception, we put our founding premises in doubt, which is, in fact, a primary threat to national security.
Today almost any debate over any armed action will be fraught with political animus. Morality, strategic purpose, risks and rewards will not be deliberated on, but, rather, disputed in terms conjured to fit partisan allegiances. We need ways to induce more serious consideration of questions of war. Fashioning them is a challenge, to say the least.
Speculative ideas that might not actually work could illustrate an approach. In that vein, what about proposing a Constitutional amendment, noting that Congress has the power to declare war but stipulating further that any war of choice, launched without Congressional declaration, will now constitute grounds to start impeachment proceedings of a President who launches one, alongside “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors?”
This idea aims at “wars of choice,” but deliberately leaves the term partially and indirectly defined. It would only exempt certain actions from the definition, to steer any deliberation to define its terms before the partisans can evoke some attempted definition in dogmatic belligerence. Exemptions would be limited and clear, including: armed action against attacks on the U.S., in process or effectively “on the launchpad;” measures triggered by defensive treaty obligations such as NATO’s Article 5; actions prescribed by well recognized global consensus, e.g. the UN Security resolution to repel the North Korean invasion of South Korea in 1950; “return fire” from defensively positioned U.S. forces, and perhaps a few other specified cases.
The idea explicitly would not dictate that the President determine a proposed action’s constitutionality in advance. If Presidents find that initiation of armed action is truly necessary, their hands are not tied: they can shoot first and face any accusers later. Alternatively, certain actions could even be pre-approved by Congress for certain circumstances. Either way, the proposed stipulation would at least call for a second check of the circumstances, a clarity in the public costs and benefits, and a certain courage in conviction of those who support an armed initiative. It would give military officers grounds to counsel the President against an action if they find that appropriate. It could give citizens – in their sovereign power as “we the people of the United States” – a path of recourse to their sovereign will, in suing the administration for wars they believe unnecessary.
Partial, deliberately incomplete definition would, in the intent of this idea, force public discussion whether an armed action, actual or proposed, is a war of choice. Generally accepted definitions of a “just war” specifies that it either responds to an attack or pre-empts an imminent attack, and this proposed constitutional requirement would exclude the latter from its purview. But where a given action might constitute a war of choice, it forces us to talk about the intention or national need for it, to assess any threat invoked to justify the action, or weigh costs and benefits. Deliberation could occur in Congressional debate, or post facto in court if anyone sues the President for breach of the Constitution. And a Congressional declaration of war takes the whole question off the table.
Would such an Amendment only set another arena for the same intransient partisan mudslinging that characterizes our discourse today? Quite possibly. But for undeclared wars, the suggested wording would channel the language toward certain questions – what is a war of choice and what is a justified response to a threat? Are the objectives of the armed action truly desired by the nation, or institutional reflex or political ploy? Interested voices will account for these points, whether in pre-action planning, in congressional debate, or in court proceedings, in the latter two cases on the record. If the nation is to engage in war, it should either be in defensive exigency, or after deliberate affirmation of its reasons. If the preparations for a war, or for opposition to it, answer the terms of this Amendment, then the war that follows will have a base of popular and political legitimacy, and pose less risk of divisiveness.
We the People are the U.S. sovereign, who, in our sovereign power, set the methods by which we choose our authorized agents, like legislators and Presidents. The growing ease of making war represents an expanding delegation of sovereign authority to the agents. But we can also retain sovereign power directly to ourselves, in a mechanism to act, through our long-established, chosen constitution. War is an appropriate activity for us to keep that power in our hands. Using it to ensure congruence between our agents’ actions and our sovereign intent, in particular on matters of war, is in our core sovereign interest.
Finally, proposal of such an amendment, in and of itself, could affect our overall political discourse. By its terms it would require interested parties to address some questions on their merits. Can we engage in wars that are not purely defensive? What stakes are so important that armed pursuit is essential, and what could we pursuit, even if less confidently, by other means? What else beyond national security should influence our choices? What are our true bedrock sovereign interests? An amendment would apply to any party when in office, so such deliberations might even avoid some of the formulaic partisan coloring. That possibility alone makes this proposal interesting.
Common Conviction 