https://x.com/shanaka86/status/2038883616030384604
Three men launched the most expensive American military operation since Iraq. None of them asked Congress for permission.
Donald Trump approved the strikes after a February 23 phone call in which Benjamin Netanyahu argued for joint action against Khamenei. Marco Rubio, whom Netanyahu has repeatedly called “my dear friend” across multiple Jerusalem visits and who speaks with the Israeli prime minister multiple times per 48-hour window, publicly admitted that Israel “was going to attack anyway,” effectively confirming that a foreign prime minister’s war plans set the timeline for American military action. Congress was notified under the War Powers Act. Congress was not asked to authorise. Congress has not declared war. Congress has not passed an AUMF. The only votes Congress has taken were votes to NOT stop the war, and even those passed by the thinnest margins: 219 to 212 in the House, 53 to 47 in the Senate, with a single Republican defector in each chamber.
The United States has now fired 2,400 Patriot interceptors, consumed 40 percent of its global THAAD inventory, lost an irreplaceable E-3 Sentry AWACS, deployed 3,500 Marines, surged 120 aircraft, bypassed Congress for $662 million in emergency munitions sales, drawn down pre-positioned war reserves worth $3.4 billion, and is preparing a $50 billion supplemental request to replenish what has been expended. Total US military aid to Israel since October 2023 exceeds $21.7 billion. Cumulative lifetime aid exceeds $174 billion. All of it flows through a constitutional architecture in which the legislature’s role has been reduced to declining to exercise the powers the Constitution explicitly grants it.
And the political cost is already arriving. Trump’s net approval has collapsed to minus 17, the worst for any second-term president at this stage. Working-class approval has cratered to minus 24. Independent economic approval sits at minus 48. CNN’s Harry Enten calls it “historic.” Forecasters project Democrats gaining 11 to 19 House seats in November. The war that Trump launched to project strength is producing the political conditions for the loss of his congressional majority.
Netanyahu’s position is no better. Seventy-four percent of Jewish Israelis trust him to manage the war, but that trust has not translated into a single additional Knesset seat. Coalition support remains frozen at 40 percent. War support has already declined from 93 to 78 percent. Opposition among Jewish Israelis has more than doubled. Netanyahu is pushing through a budget specifically to avoid the snap election he would lose if forced to call one. The rally-around-the-flag effect is fading before the flag has been lowered.
The third member of the triumvirate is the only one whose trajectory is ascending. Trump is privately polling “JD or Marco?” with advisers, and Rubio is drawing more positive feedback than Vance. He surged to 35 percent at CPAC behind Vance’s 53. The war that is destroying Trump’s approval is building Rubio’s profile as the man who coordinated it. The Secretary of State is being elevated by the same operation that is sinking the President who appointed him.
Three men. No authorisation. Two thousand four hundred interceptors. A $50 billion tab. An approval rating in free fall. A coalition frozen. And a succession race accelerating inside the wreckage. The triumvirate that started the war is being consumed by it, and the only exit, the grand bargain with China that trades rare earth access for Hormuz stability, requires the cooperation of the country that supplied the missiles on both sides.
The war has no constitutional foundation, no exit strategy, and no replacement parts. What it has is arithmetic. And the arithmetic is unforgiving.
open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans
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