Two wars are being fought in the name of the United States that Congress has never authorised. The first began on 3 January, when about 150 American aircraft struck Caracas and Nicolas Maduro was flown to a detention centre in Brooklyn. The second opened on 28 February over Iran, and is now in its seventh month. Neither was put to a vote before it started, and one of them has killed 18 American service members and wounded more than 750.
Congress has since tried twice to end the second war and failed both times, not for want of votes but for want of compliance. The House passed a war powers resolution 215 to 208 on 3 June; the Senate followed 50 to 48 on 24 June, with Bill Cassidy, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Rand Paul crossing the floor. No withdrawal followed. A second resolution passed the House 214 to 208 on 23 July and died in the Senate 47 to 49.
That is not a procedural quibble. The war powers machinery was built to be slow and reluctant, and it still produced majorities in both chambers of a Republican Congress. What it could not produce was an executive that treated the result as binding. Seventy per cent of Americans told Marist in January that the United States should obtain congressional approval before using military force; among independents the figure was 78.
The question is not whether America can still take a capital in two hours. It plainly can. The question is what it now costs to be the country that does.
Concede the competence, because the argument is weaker without it. The Caracas operation was over in roughly two hours, no American was killed, and Maduro presided over a government few will mourn. It was a display of capability almost no other state could have managed. But capability was never the scarce American resource. Consent was: the willingness of other governments to treat a request from Washington as reasonable rather than as a demand with a carrier behind it.
The bill for that consent is already arriving and it is measurable. Pew found in March that 53 per cent of Americans say their own country does not much consider other nations' interests, against 27 per cent in 2023, and that the share who say the United States contributes to global peace and stability has fallen from 69 per cent to 57. Across 36 countries surveyed to May, a median of 23 per cent expressed confidence in the American president.
The alliance ledger reads worse than the polling. The share of Canadians calling the United States a reliable partner has fallen from 83 per cent in 2022 to 35. Denmark, a founding member of NATO, spent the winter being informed by senior American officials that Washington had a right to its territory; seven European heads of government signed a joint statement against the claim. None of that was imposed on Washington. All of it was chosen.
There is a version of American power that needs none of this, and it is not a sentimental one. It spent eighty years persuading rich democracies to host American bases, buy American weapons and hold American debt, because every alternative looked worse to them. That version is being traded for a faster one, and the trade has not been put to anybody. Congress has now voted twice to say so. Representative Pramila Jayapal put the case in four words: “This war must end.”
