Schrödinger's War
They can’t agree on whether it’s a war, a mission, regime change, or self-defense. They don’t need to. They just need Congress to stay out.
By the time House Speaker Mike Johnson stood in front of cameras on March 5 and announced that “We are not at war” and that the U.S. has “no intention of being at war,” here’s where things stood: Trump had announced “major combat operations” via Truth Social at 2:30 in the morning on February 28. Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was dead. The U.S. and Israel had jointly struck targets across Iran in what the Pentagon was calling Operation Epic Fury. Dozens of Iranian naval vessels had been destroyed. Multiple American service members had been killed. The Iranian Red Crescent had reported hundreds of Iranian civilians killed in the strikes, including more than 160 people when a missile hit a girls’ school. And the House had just voted 212-219 to reject a War Powers resolution that would have directed the removal of U.S. forces from hostilities against Iran. Johnson voted against that resolution, too.
Not at war, though. Definitely not that.
That same week, from the other end of the Capitol, Sen. Lindsey Graham reached a different conclusion: “We’re at war with Iran. We’ve been at war for a long... they’ve been at war with us. We’re finally at war with them. It’s an undeclared state of war.” Graham also voted against the War Powers resolution.
I went through the public statements of six Republican senators from the same week. All six described the situation in Iran differently. Sen. Markwayne Mullin told CNN “this isn’t a war”; Sen. Tommy Tuberville called it “a conflict that should be very short and sweet.” Sen. Tom Cotton was arguing that “Iran has been an imminent threat to the United States for 47 years” (a phrase that bends the word “imminent” past its breaking point). Sen. Cynthia Lummis posted that “the United States has been in a forever war with Iran since the late 1970s.” Graham went all in on “undeclared state of war.” And Sen. Ron Johnson wouldn’t even bother with a label. Six people, six completely different characterizations.
All six voted the same way on the War Powers resolution.
Sen. Johnson was maybe the most honest about it. Asked about the competing characterizations, he told The Hill: “Who cares what you call it? I don’t. Bombs are dropping. Bad people are dying.”
They’re not confused. The administration and its allies are running multiple arguments at the same time, and the arguments don’t need to be consistent with each other. They just need to do the same job: keeping Congress out of the decision-making process and letting Trump do whatever the hell he wants.
Argument 1: It’s not a war, it’s a limited mission
The War Powers Resolution of 1973 requires the president to notify Congress within 48 hours of deploying troops into hostilities and to withdraw those troops within 60 days unless Congress authorizes the action. The law doesn’t hinge on whether anyone calls something a “war.” It hinges on whether it constitutes hostilities. So when Johnson called the operation “limited” and said “the mission is nearly accomplished,” those were words aimed at a specific legal target: if this is a short, limited mission rather than an ongoing deployment into hostilities, the 60-day clock either hasn’t started or won’t matter by the time it runs out.
Trump notified the Gang of Eight shortly before the strikes began. That satisfies the 48-hour notification requirement in the narrowest technical sense. What he didn’t do was ask Congress for anything. He told them. There’s a difference.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune was asked whether Trump would need congressional authorization once the 60-day window ran out. He said “No,” then added that “the president has the authority that he needs” and moved on. No elaboration. Just: no.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered something a little more creative. “No presidential administration has ever accepted the War Powers Act as constitutional,” he told reporters. “Not Republican presidents, not Democratic presidents. All that said, we complied with the law 100%, and we’re going to continue to comply with it.” So the law is unconstitutional, but they followed it. Got it.
And all of this is coming from the Department of War. That’s what they call it now (it’s still legally the Department of Defense). Trump signed an executive order in September 2025 rebranding the Department of Defense, and the White House fact sheet said the new name “conveys a stronger message of readiness and resolve.” Pete Hegseth goes by Secretary of War. The website says war.gov. But they’re not at war. They’re running a mission.
Argument 2: It’s a war, and it’s been going on for 47 years… or 50… or a thousand
The second argument runs in the opposite direction. If the first one says this isn’t really a war, this one says it absolutely is, but that Iran started it decades ago, and there’s nothing new to authorize.
U.N. Ambassador Mike Waltz laid it out on Meet the Press on March 8. “The Iranian regime started this war in 1979, under Jimmy Carter,” he said. When pressed on whether the U.S. is currently at war with Iran, he landed on: “I describe it as Iran has been at war with us.” Then, when the question turned to the War Powers Act, Waltz said he’d “leave it to the lawyers.” On GB News the same day, he was more direct: “This war has been dragging on for 47 years.”
Hegseth made the same argument at his March 2 Pentagon briefing. “For 47 long years, the expansionist and Islamist regime in Tehran has waged a savage, one-sided war against America,” he said. Foreign Policy noted that this was false: “the first shots in the current conflict were fired by the United States and Israel.” And in briefings that same week, administration officials told congressional staffers that U.S. intelligence did not suggest Iran was preparing to strike U.S. forces. The “imminent threat” Trump cited in his announcement didn’t exist in the intelligence.
Trump made the case more casually. “Something had to be done, and it’s been 47 years,” he told German Chancellor Friedrich Merz on March 3. “They’ve been killing people all over the world.”
The number 47 comes from 1979, the year of the Iranian Revolution and the hostage crisis. But the number keeps moving. Rep. Darrell Issa went on Bloomberg on March 1 and called the conflict “50 years in the making.” Graham called the strikes “the catalyst for the most historic change in the Middle East in a thousand years.” 47, 50, a thousand. The timeline inflates because the timeline was never really the point. The history is being assembled after the fact to fit the constitutional argument: if Iran declared war in 1979, then this isn’t a new conflict, and no new authorization is needed.
And that’s just the war question
The “is it a war” question is where the contradictions are most obvious. But they’re not limited to it. The administration can’t stay on message about regime change either.
Hegseth, at that same March 2 briefing: “This is not a so-called regime change war, but the regime sure did change, and the world is better off for it.” That’s a real sentence a person said out loud at a Pentagon podium. Meanwhile, Trump’s video announcement of the strikes told the Iranian people that “the hour of your freedom is at hand” and urged them to “take over your government.” By March 6, he was posting on Truth Social that there would be “no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER,” followed by the selection of “GREAT & ACCEPTABLE Leader(s)” and “MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN (MIGA!).” He told Axios he wants to be “personally involved in selecting Iran’s next supreme leader.” Not regime change, though.
And then there’s Vice President J.D. Vance. In January 2023, still a senator, he wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed endorsing Trump under the headline “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars.” The sub-headline: “He has my support in 2024 because I know he won’t recklessly send Americans to fight overseas.” Three years later, on Fox News, Vance insisted that “there’s just no way that Donald Trump is going to allow this country to get into a multi-year conflict with no clear end in sight.” Then, in the same interview, he conceded: “We could go for a little bit longer. We could go a lot longer.”
War or not a war. Regime change or not regime change. Four weeks or “a lot longer.” None of these positions agree with each other. But they all point in the same direction: whatever this is, Congress doesn’t get a say.
How the talking point gets mainstreamed
The “47-year war” argument doesn’t stay in congressional hallways. It gets picked up, repeated, and sent out through every layer of right-wing media within days. Media Matters documented the full roster, but even a partial list tells you everything you need to know about how this works.
Jesse Watters on The Five, March 3: “We’ve been at war with these people since 1979.” Julian Epstein on Fox News Live, February 28: “Iran has been declaring open war against the United States since 1979,” followed by the claim that Trump “could qualify him once again for a Nobel Peace Prize.” Sean Hannity, March 4: the war would bring “a peace that hopefully is lasting in the Middle East” and the world “is a safer place.” And Newsmax’s Rob Finnerty, who managed to contradict himself inside a single thought: “Iran is not a forever war. In fact, right now Iran has been a war to end forever wars. Right now, I’m not even sure it is a war. Not yet.”
That’s the cable tier. Then the argument moves up. On March 3, the Washington Post ran an op-ed by Marc Thiessen under the headline “The Trump Doctrine is here. It ends forever wars.” Thiessen argued that “for 47 years, the Iranian regime has been waging war against the United States” and that Trump was therefore ending a conflict, not starting one. Thiessen is a former George W. Bush speechwriter and an American Enterprise Institute fellow. (I’ve written about him before, in the context of his “siding with Iran” rhetoric, which functions the same way: build an intellectual scaffold around a political decision that’s already been made.) Trump reshared Thiessen’s piece.
The Free Press, Bari Weiss’s outlet (whose installation at CBS News I’ve also written about), ran a piece on March 1 titled “Our 50-Year War with Iran,” which opened by telling readers not to “pretend” this was the start of the conflict. It used 50 years, not 47. Nobody at this stage in the chain was checking the math, because the math was never the product. The permission structure was the product.
Within days of the strikes, the same argument traveled from Hegseth’s Pentagon podium through Fox, Newsmax, and talk radio, then landed with a byline in the Washington Post and a first-person essay in The Free Press. Each stop dressed it a little differently. Hegseth said “savage, one-sided war.” Thiessen wrote it as geopolitical analysis. Savodnik wrapped it in a childhood memory. Same argument. Different costumes.
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Pick one
These two arguments cancel each other out. If Iran declared war on the United States in 1979 and the conflict has been ongoing ever since, then what’s happening right now is unambiguously a war, and Johnson’s “limited mission” framing collapses. If it’s a limited mission with a short timeline, then the 47-year war is retroactive fiction assembled for the occasion. Pick one.
You don’t need both to be true. You just need both to be available. When Tim Kaine stood on the Senate floor and said “Members of the Senate, this is war!” the response was the 47-year argument: it’s not a new war, it’s an old one. When someone raised the constitutional question about starting a new conflict without authorization, the response was the limited mission argument: it’s not big enough to count. When one framing gets challenged, you reach for the other. The floor is always moving.
Ron Johnson said it himself: “Who cares what you call it?” He’s right, from their perspective. The label only matters because of the legal constraints it carries. Switch labels fast enough and the constraints never attach.
The House War Powers resolution failed 212-219. The Senate version failed 47-53. John Fetterman was the only Democrat to vote no. Rand Paul was the only Republican to vote yes. Even if both resolutions had passed, they’d have needed a two-thirds majority to override a veto, and that probably wasn’t going to happen. The strategy didn’t need to be coherent, just to hold together long enough for the votes to happen. It did.
The next argument
The 60-day clock under the War Powers Resolution is now running. In theory, that means the administration has to either get congressional authorization or begin withdrawing forces. In practice, what will happen is a new argument. Maybe the war will be over by then. Trump has said four to five weeks. Hegseth has said maybe eight. If it is over, the clock won’t matter. If it isn’t, there will be a third framing, and it won’t need to be consistent with the first two.
The Department of War is not at war. The Department of War is running a limited mission. The Department of War has been at war for decades. Who cares what you call it.
"This is not a so-called regime change war, but the regime sure did change," It used to be Ayatollah Khamenei, now it's Ayatollah Khamenei!
"We've always been at war with [middle] East Asia."