National Interest

by Christian Dobson Santiago

    An unbounded executive hollows out America’s capacity for coherent long-term deliberation and execution of its foreign policy.

    Congress, the first branch of government, has abdicated its duties. This judgment is difficult to contest yet equally difficult to dismiss. But the conventional criticism, that Congress is simply broken, understates both the problem and its consequences. Congressional abdication has left a structural vacancy at the center of American statecraft, one that is quietly degrading the coherence of American grand strategy at precisely the moment when the international system can least afford it.

    Congress’ impairment predates the current majority and the current president. Decades of polarization have made consensus costly, procedural gridlock has made action difficult and a political environment in which every vote cast is a campaign liability has made courage rare. In any case, the result is the same: the branch constitutionally charged with appropriating funds, regulating commerce and authorizing war has ceded each of these functions to an executive operating with fewer and fewer constraints.

    For realists, this should be alarming. The international system is anarchic. States survive by balancing power, maintaining credible commitments and exercising strategic discipline. Each of these depends on a domestic political order capable of coherent action. A great power whose trade policy is improvised by executive decree, whose military commitments rest on quarter-century-old authorizations and whose legislature cannot summon the will to vote on a live conflict is a great power operating without a strategy.

• The Supreme Court Cannot Check the President Alone

    Unlike Congress, the federal judiciary has largely held its own. The Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump this past February was a genuine check on executive overreach. The court held that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) never authorized the president to impose tariffs in the first place.

    Within hours, President Donald Trump invoked Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, a statute never before used to impose tariffs, to set a 10 percent levy on all imports for 150 days. US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer simultaneously announced new Section 301 investigations and an expanded Section 232 program to replace the struck-down tariffs once that window closed.

    While the court functioned exactly as the Constitution intended by drawing a boundary around executive power, it said nothing about what belongs on the other side. That question belongs to Congress. And so far, Congress has declined to answer and the executive branch seems to have expected nothing less.

    Courts can check what the executive does. The Constitution gives the judiciary no recourse when Congress fails to act. A dysfunctional Congress and an absent Congress are not the same thing. Appropriating funds, writing trade law and authorizing war are legislative functions that no court can perform or compel. A ruling is not a statute. Someone still has to govern.

    The consequences of congressional abdication are nowhere more visible than in trade policy. In this arena, the United States once led the construction of the liberal economic order that served its interests for seven decades.

    The current tariff regime amounts to a series of executive improvisations, each resting on statutory authorities that Congress never intended to delegate at this scale. Section 122 was designed for short-term balance-of-payments emergencies, not as a permanent instrument of commercial policy. Section 232, intended to address narrow national security threats to specific industries, has been expanded into a general-purpose tariff authority. The result is a trade posture that changes with each news cycle, untethered from any legislative framework or strategic design.

    For a nation engaged in great-power competition, this matters enormously. Allies cannot plan around commitments that the next executive order may reverse. Adversaries face no stable deterrent structure in the economic domain. And the United States itself forfeits the capacity to leverage trade as a coordinated instrument of statecraft: to bind partners, isolate rivals and shape the rules of the system it built. Instead, trade policy has become a unilateral executive function, responsive to domestic political incentives rather than the structural demands of the international environment.

    Congress could reclaim this authority tomorrow. It has chosen not to do so because doing so would require members to take positions, cast votes and accept responsibility for outcomes. That is the precise function a legislature exists to perform.

• The Iran War’s Lack of Congressional Authorization

    On war, Congress has been absent longer still. The 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), passed three days after September 11 to authorize military force against Al Qaeda and those who aided the attacks, has since been stretched across 25 years to justify combat operations in at least 22 countries and against other organizations that bore no connection to that fateful September morning.

    The strategic consequences are at least as severe as the constitutional ones. The realist tradition has long warned that great powers decline through the gradual overextension of commitments that no longer serve the national interest. A war authorization with no geographic boundary, no temporal limit and no named adversary is the statutory basis for precisely that kind of overextension. It provides legal cover for military action without requiring the political system to weigh costs against interests, the judgment on which sound strategy depends.

    The present is hardly better. Congress repealed the 1991 and 2002 war authorizations last December, the first such rollback since 1971. The 2001 AUMF, still the operative legal basis for American counterterrorism operations worldwide, remains untouched.

    The undeclared conflict with Iran has since produced five Senate votes, yet no answer. Five times, the upper house has declined to either authorize the conflict or end it. Under the War Powers Resolution, Congress had 60 days to decide. That deadline arrived on May 1.

    A legislature that cannot decide whether the nation is at war is a legislature that has forfeited its most consequential power, the one the Framers placed in legislative hands precisely because they understood that the decision to commit blood and treasure must be one of the highest deliberation.

It’s Getting Harder and Harder for Congress to Kick Bad Habits

    The defense of Congress through all of this has remained the same: it is simply too broken to be held to account. That indictment has instead become a shield for the members who perpetuate it, for Congress has learned that confessing dysfunction is cheaper than correcting it.

    The more that the judiciary steps in, the more Congress is relieved of the obligation to do so itself; every ruling hailed as proof that democracy endures is an instrument of evasion for members of Congress. This dynamic compounds over time. A legislature that cultivates the habit of deferral will not discover the habit of action when the stakes are highest. The institutional capacity to govern under pressure must be exercised and maintained, or it atrophies. And in a competitive international system, one in which the margin for strategic error narrows as power diffuses, institutional atrophy becomes a national security vulnerability.

    The next genuine crisis will arrive with the full weight of its urgency and find whatever legislature happens to exist. If that legislature has spent a generation deferring its most consequential decisions to the executive and the judiciary, it will be structurally incapable of the rapid, coherent deliberation that the moment demands.

    That atrophy is reversible. Reform, in this case, is a matter of mechanism. Congress should sunset emergency trade authorities, Section 122, Section 232 and Section 301, so that any tariff imposed under executive emergency powers expires unless Congress affirmatively reauthorizes it within a fixed window. It should replace the War Powers Resolution’s toothless clock with a binding framework in which any sustained military engagement not authorized by Congress within 60 days triggers an automatic funding cutoff. And it should require that every AUMF carry a named adversary, a defined geographical theater and an expiration date, so that no future authorization can stretch across a quarter-century of undeclared hostilities. Together, they would begin to close the structural vacancy at the center of American statecraft.

    The case for congressional reform is as much strategic as constitutional. The United States cannot sustain a coherent foreign policy, cannot balance against rising powers, maintain alliance commitments, or exercise disciplined restraint, through executive action alone. Grand strategy requires a domestic political foundation capable of deliberation, authorization and sustained commitment. That foundation is a functioning legislature.

    A legislature that has forgotten how to govern has not yet been forced to remember. That moment will come. The only outstanding question is whether it will be too late.