As D.C. edges toward war with Iran in 2026, Americans must decide whether real defense requires prudence and constitutional restraint, or another ruinous Middle East disaster.
This editorial ran in the Tuesday 21 April 2026 edition of the Moscow-Pullman Daily News.
America should be the hardest nation in the world to bully and the slowest nation in the world to drag into war.
That used to be common sense. Today, too many in Washington reach for one of two bad instincts. One camp treats every Middle East crisis as a fresh excuse for intervention, as if the United States were appointed manager of the globe. The other suddenly rediscovers restraint only when Donald Trump is involved. Neither side is serious. Neither has learned much.
Let me be plain. I am anti-war. I believe in non-aggression. I do not believe the United States is called to be the policeman of the world. But that is not the same thing as categorical pacifism, and it is not the same thing as pretending the Iranian regime is harmless. Iran is not Switzerland with bad manners. For decades it has funded terror through Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, and Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria—while destabilizing its neighbors, menacing Israel, attacking American interests, and chasing nuclear capability. That is not a regime to trust, and a nuclear-armed jihadist state is unacceptable.
Still, a threat does not automatically justify a stupid response. We have been lied into enough wars by men who always sound confident on television and always disappear when the body bags and invoices arrive. Iraq was sold as necessity. Libya was sold as humanitarian realism. Afghanistan was sold as mission accomplished half a dozen times. Names change. Slogans change. Outcome rarely does.
Even libertarians do not all agree here. Mises-style defensive libertarians allow for limited force against real threats, while Rothbardian anti-war libertarians reject nearly all state warfare as inherently coercive. That is the real divide, whether Washington wants to admit it or not.
That is why the first question is constitutional, not emotional. If America is going to war, Congress should say so. War is too grave to be treated like an executive project or an improvisation by whichever president happens to be in office. The Constitution does not give us an elected king. Yet presidents of both parties have chipped away at that limit for years, and Congress has been all too happy to surrender its responsibilities.
The Left’s sudden concern about war powers would be easier to take seriously if it existed when its own party was dropping bombs. Where were these constitutional purists when Obama bombed Libya without authorization and turned it into a larger wreck? Where were they during years of drone strikes, proxy meddling, and executive freelancing under Democratic administrations? A principle that wakes up only when Trump acts is not a principle. It is a partisan reflex.
The Right, meanwhile, has its own temptation. Many conservatives spent twenty years condemning forever wars, intelligence failures, and the arrogance of nation-building. Good. They were right. But now some talk as if bombing Iran is a chance to replay the old fantasy of remaking the Middle East by force. Have they learned nothing? A few successful strikes are not a blueprint for a new Persia. Air power can punish. It can disrupt. It can buy time. It cannot manufacture a healthy political order for 93 million people on the far side of the world.
That is the distinction Washington always tries to blur. Limited defensive force is one thing. Another Iraq is something else entirely. If Iran presents a real and growing danger through terror sponsorship, missile expansion, or nuclear breakout capacity, narrowly tailored strikes may be arguable. Ground invasion, regime export, occupation, and endless reconstruction are not. Those are not acts of defense. They are acts of conceit.
The proper American posture is harder than either party wants to admit. It means rejecting appeasement without embracing crusading. It means protecting American lives, defending real national interests, and keeping sea lanes open, while refusing to own every tribal, sectarian, and civilizational conflict in that region. It means intelligence, deterrence, sanctions, naval strength, and only the most limited use of force when clearly justified.
America should be strong enough to hit back and wise enough to stop there.
We do not need the neocon Right dragging us into another desert quagmire. We do not need the selective anti-war Left performing outrage on cue. We need a foreign policy that begins with this simple idea: do not start wars lightly, do not fight them vaguely, and do not keep them going because the people who caused them refuse to admit they were wrong.
Non-aggression is not pacifism. Prudence is not weakness. And America is safest when it remembers both.