WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - National Security Matters: To Declare War

Episode Date: February 9, 2026

Malia Thibado works through the historical legal process of how the U.S. declares war, how that process has changed over America’s 250 years, and what that change means for the balance of executive and congressional power. 

Hello and welcome to National Security Matters, the show where we discuss anything and everything related to U.S. international relations and defense policy. I'm your host, Malia Tibido. The United States has not made a formal declaration of war since 1942, yet we've directly engaged in the Korean, Vietnam, and Gulf Wars, as well as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention the countless prolonged military interventions that didn't lead to full-scale. conventional war. How did we get here? Well, Congress derives its power to declare war from Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11 of the Constitution. This article gives Congress this explicit responsibility. In early post-independence military engagements, Congress always had to prove

any military interaction, even just a formalization of defenses like against French naval harassment. For large-scale conventional wars, the president, for example, James Polk with Mexico, directly requested a declaration from Congress before declaring war against their adversaries. This status quo continues until after World War II and the U.S.'s first combat commitment to the Cold War, which is the Korean War, where President Harry Truman used the United Nations Security Council Resolutions 82 and 83 to justify the deployment of American troops into a three-year-long conflict. This is, by general consensus, the weakest legal justification because domestic law trumps international law in terms of domestic military commitments. From the Vietnam War and onward, the U.S. has gone to war through congressional resolutions.

The Gulf of Tonkin resolution authorized direct U.S. military intervention against the Viet Cong. The authorization to use military force against Iraq resolution was used to justify the Gulf War in 1991. Now, the phrase authorization to use military force is known as an AUMF. This has become the primary mechanism for the U.S. to conduct conventional warfare. Most prominently, the joint resolution to authorize the use of United States armed forces against those responsible for the recent attacks launched against the United States was signed September 18, 2001, with the recent tax being 9-11. This AUMF in particular has been used to justify,

continual interventions in the Middle East against different countries, but most prominently terrorists. Remember, I said I'd go back to the president being the commander-in-chief but unable to declare war. Well, with an AUMF, like aforementioned, with no expiration date, the president just needs to connect U.S. intervention to 9-11 somehow. And that can be post-intervention. He can act unilaterally. And that's not the only loophole that the president can use. The commander-intervention, Chief, using the commander in Chief Powers as enumerated in Article 2, can also act without congressional approval in case of sudden attacks to deploy troops into hostile areas as peacekeepers and, of course, under authority of UN resolution. Now, the saying, give an inch and

someone will take a mile, applies here too. Multiple presidents have stretched this legal loophole on both sides of the aisle to include action in low-level hostilities. For example, we have President Barack Obama and the U.S. airstrikes in Libya, which helped depose Muammar Gaddafi, and President Trump supporting Israel to debilitate the Iranian nuclear program. Both Obama and now Trump after him have faced congressional pushback in the form of the war powers resolution, which attempts to make presidents accountable to Congress within 60 days of an operation. But the war powers resolution separately is also legally dubious to its conflict with the commander-in-chief power. to directly oversee military action.

Regardless, Trump first got around this resolution with Venezuela by claiming that operation as counterterrorism and not military hostility. Senators Kane and Paul, Democrat and Republican respectively, have again reintroduced the war powers resolution to attempt to prevent Trump's intervention in Iran. Trump will likely fight this using the president of Obama affecting regime change in Wilmaia in 2011 and with the justification that Iran is enforced by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, a designated foreign terrorist organization. As always, Legalees has far too much nuance and history to pack into five minutes, but I think we'll see Trump fighting the war powers resolution in the coming weeks, and hopefully a ruling that more explicitly enumerates the scope of presidential power to initiate and conduct war. This has been National Security Matters with Malia Tibido on WRFH, Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM.