The United States Has Always Been At War With Eastasi-- I Mean, Iran

The chair of the House Foreign Relations Committee goes full Orwell

Photo by Abdul Ahad Sheikh on Unsplash

My last post on the uncertain future of liberalism sounded a touch more pessimistic than I intended. The truth is, at the Liberalism Conference I attended last week, there was a strong consensus — along with a healthy dollop of fury — that congressional Republicans have been particularly derelict in exercising their constitutional prerogatives of constraining unilateral presidential power.

As president Trump has ripped up the Iran “cease-fire” and decided on less jaw-jaw and more war-war, this has put these same Republicans in a tough spot. See, the war is super-unpopular — indeed, it is America’s least popular war in the history of modern polling. Oh and president Trump is also super-unpopular, and continues to trend in an unfavorable direction.¹

This has put congressional Republicans in a rather awkward position, as the New York Times’ Robert Jimison reports:

The collapse of the cease-fire and resumption of hostilities has inflamed a debate on Capitol Hill over war powers just as the administration is seeking tens of billions of dollars to pay for the conflict.

That has presented Republicans with a political worst-case scenario months before midterm elections in which their majorities are at stake: They are being asked to vote to fund an unpopular war over which they have had no meaningful oversight, and which they have never voted to approve.

“The greatest fighting force on the planet, the last great superpower must be fully equipped, and that’s the job of Congress to make sure it’s done,” Speaker Mike Johnson told CNN’s Manu Raju last week at the Capitol. The administration last month requested $87.6 billion in supplemental funding that would include $67.1 billion in extra military spending this year.

Asked whether it wasn’t also the job of Congress to authorize the war, Mr. Johnson replied: “We’re going to supply the needs for America’s national security.”

The position amounts to the latest instance of Republicans ceding power to the executive branch, as they sidestep a debate over the conduct of the war and try to rally support within their ranks for a filibuster-proof, party-line bill to pay for it with no strings attached.

It is all the more remarkable coming weeks after bipartisan majorities in both the House and Senate voted to reassert Congress’s constitutional role over matters of war, a slap on Mr. Trump’s wrist four months into a conflict that he had said would last a matter of weeks.

This does raise the discomfiting question of how the Trump administration is going to get funding approval when majorities in both houses of Congress basically voted against the war last month. As previously noted, the war has gotten even less popular since June. More American troops have been killed, and the administration is keeping the full human and material cost of the war off the record, on the QT, and very hush-hush.

House Republicans appear to be hoping that an administration briefing can rally the congressional troops. Good luck with that! But as the NYT’s Jimison reports, at least one House Republican has devised a more, shall we say, Orwellian strategy:

Republicans, by contrast, have largely sidestepped the renewed war powers debate, many of them echoing Mr. Trump’s justification for resuming the fight.

“The fact of the matter is, President Trump is the first president dealing with what has been the status quo for decades — which is Iran attacking everybody’s ships, everybody’s navy, everybody’s anything going through the Strait of Hormuz,” Representative Brian Mast, the Florida Republican who chairs the Foreign Relations Committee, said on Friday during an interview on Fox News. “After this escalation from them, we are now the United States of America that says this is not going to be the status quo. It’s going to change.”

How to put this gently…. the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee is either a blithering idiot or attempting to convince Americans that we have always been at war with Eastasia Iran. Or, to quote Orwell directly from 1984, Mast is hoping that, “the past was alterable.”

To be blunt about it: Mast is engaging in some serious bullshitting. Iran has not been attacking everybody’s ships, everybody’s navy, and everybody’s anything going through the Strait of Hormuz for decades. Full stop.

To be pedantic about it: there was a period in the 1980s when the Iran-Iraq War meant that tanker traffic in the Persian Gulf was imperiled, and the Reagan administration did provide some escorting of tankers during that time. And the Houthis — one of Iran’s violent non-state allies — have imperiled shipping through the Red Sea on an intermittent basis since October 2023 — including right now. However, at no time in the 35 years prior to February 2026 — a time period that includes multiple skirmishes between Iran and Israel — has Iran ever attacked everyone’s ships and everyone’s navy anywhere near the Strait of Hormuz.

It. Did. Not. Happen.

No, the status quo that Mast wants reversed has only been the status quo for months, and it was the Trump administration that triggered the change, a change everyone could see coming if the U.S. launched a large-scale attack.

As the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Mast would be well-positioned to ask the Trump administration how this new status quo could be reversed. Unfortunately, he’s too busy leaning into doublethink to engage in that kind of oversight.

At the end of last year, the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World noted that the MAGA movement was following the plot of Orwell’s Animal Farm in that Trump had ousted the neoconservatives from the GOP, only to embrace an even dumber brand of neoconservatism. With Mast’s quote, it looks like MAGA is now — wittingly or unwittingly — embracing Orwell’s other great novel as well.

1. To be fair, other poll aggregators do show a dead cat bounce in Trump’s favor.