Trump Goes to War

◼ The United States, alongside Israel, launched decapitation strikes against Iran. Justification has been abundant since the Iranian Revolution: the hostage crisis that birthed our enmity, the Iran-sponsored Hezbollah bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in 1983 and the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks the same year, the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, the roadside improvised explosive devices used to kill our troops during the Iraq War, the plots to assassinate President Donald Trump and other American citizens. The regime has been in a de facto state of war against the U.S. since its beginning. The world had mostly treated the Iranian regime as a perpetual threat to be intermittently mitigated rather than solved. Trump has decided that it is a threat he is no longer willing to live with. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s fanatical ruler for 37 years, was killed in a missile strike. The next ayatollah is expected to be his son, Mojtaba Khamenei. For a regime supposedly guided by the hand of Allah, it sure looks like just another self-serving authoritarian state. We do not know how this conflict will end; the painful lessons from the Iraq War remain fresh in many Americans’ memories. But no rational voice can disagree that the Iranian regime was one of the world’s most brutal and hostile.

◼ “In times of war, the law falls silent.” There is practical wisdom in Cicero’s maxim: No American president has ever been stopped from going to war by the law or the courts. Once war begins, its legality becomes practically moot. But that does not mean that the question should not be asked—and in advance. Under our Constitution, only Congress can declare war. But many conflicts, particularly in recent years, have had no congressional authorization—even when they have, like the current fight in Iran, gone well beyond quick strikes against imminent threats that fit within the president’s Article II authority to act unilaterally. The better practice, as well as the wiser course politically, would be to seek such authorization. By failing to go that route, Trump further undermined Congress and denied the American people the debate they deserved on our war aims and justifications. The 2002 Authorization for the Use of Military Force, enacted after the September 11 attacks, can arguably be stretched to cover the current assault on Iran, but the absurdity of using a 25-year-old blank check should be self-evident. Congress should have voted on this.

◼ The very first question the media posed to General Dan Caine and Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth during their first briefing on the war in Iran was about our “exit strategy.” The war had barely begun, yet the only thing on reporters’ minds was how soon it would end. In response, Hegseth affirmed that the U.S. and Israel will withdraw when their objectives are achieved. Those objectives are still ambiguous, and perhaps for good strategic reasons, but we can hazard a guess that the administration intends to end Iran’s nuclear ambitions and its support for terrorism. The regime has hastened its destruction by lashing out in all directions, lobbing missiles at friends and foes alike in a desperate effort to spread the pain of this war. This administration hates the phrase “nation-building,” but it might find it necessary to buttress Iran’s enervated civil society. What comes next will likely involve not just the United States but all of the region’s stakeholders.

◼ The day after the war began, a jihadist opened fire on a bar in Austin, Texas. His shooting spree left two dead and 14 wounded. The gunman, who died in a shoot-out with responding police officers, wore an Iranian-flag T-shirt and a sweatshirt emblazoned with “Property of Allah.” He has been identified as 53-year-old Ndiaga Diagne, a native of Senegal. Diagne came to the United States in 2000 on a tourist visa but probably never left. He is said to have married an American citizen and, on that basis, was permitted to adjust his status to lawful permanent resident alien in 2006. Seven years later, he was naturalized. The Austin investigation is in its early phase. Our experience of jihadist violence, however, is decades old. Trump administration law enforcement and security officials must resist the word games by which the government denies that a patent terrorist attack is a terrorist attack. Incorporating a focus on sharia supremacist ideology in law enforcement and intelligence investigations, and in immigration policy, is long overdue.

◼ Kristi Noem is out as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, with the president saying she will be replaced at the end of March by Senator Markwayne Mullin (R., Okla.). Noem’s departure was overdetermined. Her eagerness to court the cameras was matched only by her ineptitude, dishonesty, and ham-handedness, such as when she rushed to brand a woman killed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents as a “domestic terrorist.” Congressional hearings were a debacle, with Noem not denying a widely rumored affair with top aide Corey Lewandowski. What angered Trump more, according to reporting from our Audrey Fahlberg, was Noem’s claim that the president had approved a $220 million DHS ad campaign that prominently featured her and was subcontracted to one of her allies. Firing her—sorry, reassigning her to be special envoy to a new security organization for Latin America—was the right call, but doing so now has discarded a bargaining chip that Democrats had demanded in exchange for resolving the impasse over DHS funding. A sustainable deportation policy will, in any case, require more than personnel changes.

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◼ The feud between artificial intelligence company Anthropic and the Department of Defense continues. The Pentagon asked Anthropic to agree to contract language that would allow its technology to be used for “all lawful purposes,” which could include applications such as mass domestic surveillance that the company has sought to restrict. The company’s CEO, Dario Amodei, refused. Instead of just canceling the contract and working with another AI company, Trump responded by ordering federal agencies to halt the use of Anthropic’s technology, though reports indicate that the DOD continued its use during recent U.S. strikes against Iran. Meanwhile, Secretary Hegseth designated Anthropic a “supply chain risk.” The technology at the center of the dispute is Anthropic’s Claude, a large language model. Despite the criticism from Trump and Hegseth, various defense technologies and internal processes are already dependent on or optimized for the company’s AI models. Separating Anthropic’s systems from Pentagon operations has proved more difficult than expected.

◼ Senator Bernie Sanders, rehashing a bad idea from his 2020 presidential bid, has proposed an annual 5 percent tax on billionaires’ wealth. Sanders claims that his wealth tax would raise $4.4 trillion over ten years, or around half of U.S. billionaires’ total wealth. That’s unlikely. Rather than wait for the government to seize their money, wealthy individuals would likely move elsewhere or purchase hard-to-value assets. High avoidance and administrative costs explain why only three of the twelve European countries that imposed a comprehensive wealth tax in the 1990s still maintain it. Sanders wants to spend all the revenue squeezed from billionaires on a long list of handouts, including stimulus checks for the middle class, a Medicare expansion, and subsidized housing and childcare. Never mind that the nation cannot afford the entitlement state it already has. Besides, as an unconstitutional direct tax, Sanders’s proposal would be struck down by the courts and raise zero revenue. It represents naked redistribution and class warfare at its laziest.

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◼ Abdul Jalloh, an illegal immigrant from Sierra Leone, was charged with second-degree murder in the brutal attack of a woman at a bus stop in Fairfax County, Va. Governor Abigail Spanberger (D.) has drawn a line in the sand: The State of Virginia will not cooperate with immigration enforcement unless agents obtain a judicial warrant. Spanberger also recently rescinded an executive order from her predecessor that had allowed state agencies to enter into agreements with ICE. Jalloh entered the United States in 2012 and has been charged more than 40 times, including for such crimes as rape, malicious wounding, and assault. Prior to the most recent incident, Jalloh had received a final order of removal from an immigration judge. While Spanberger’s office conceded that dangerous criminal illegals should ultimately be deported, the governor insists that the state will not transfer Jalloh to federal custody without a signed judicial warrant. Her position puts procedural hurdles—and political posturing—ahead of the safety of her constituents.

◼ In Mirabelli v. Bonta, the Supreme Court ruled that parents were likely to prevail in their claim to have a right to know if schoolteachers are propagandizing gender ideology to their children. The case concerned a California law that led schools to adopt a gag rule against informing parents if their children were “gender transitioning.” Two sets of parents who found out what was happening to their children sued. In one case, parents discovered the school’s subterfuge only after their daughter attempted suicide and was hospitalized. As the Court observed, California “argues that its policies advance a compelling interest in student safety and privacy.” Yet “those policies cut out the primary protectors of children’s best interests: their parents.” The ugly reality is that state authorities were grooming children into a particular view of gender and sexuality. Parents have every right to know about and put a stop to it.

◼ Britain’s Labour government is now so unpopular that its loss of a by-election in its stronghold in Gorton and Denton was no great surprise. But there was something about the result that suggests that British politics may be taking a dangerous turn. Hannah Spencer, a member of the hard-left Green Party, won the seat. The Greens’ loud criticism of the “genocide” in Gaza, amplified by a campaign with strongly sectarian elements, played well in a constituency that is about 30 percent Muslim. Spencer’s victory is the latest evidence that Muslim voters are increasingly willing to switch their traditional support for Labour in favor of more explicitly sectarian alternatives. If those now include the Greens, a British equivalent of the French Islamo-left could be on the rise. As Keir Starmer’s shilly-shallying over Iran reminds us, this would pose a severe danger to Labour—and perhaps not just Labour.