In the final year of President George W. Bush’s second term, his administration asked Congress for $190 billion to continue funding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that had long since turned into quagmires. On Wednesday, the Pentagon asked the White House for $200 billion to fund the war on Iran, which is not even three weeks old.
That amount doesn’t go as far as it did two decades ago, of course, but it nonetheless says a lot about what the Trump administration is planning in Iran. The Pentagon thinks it needs roughly as much money as it cost to fight a year of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars—indeed, adjusted for inflation, $200 billion is more or less what President Obama proposed for those wars in 2009.
Why does the Pentagon need that much money? Just last week, Trump said the war was “very complete” and that we had “won,” albeit with a sizable asterisk: We still had to “finish the job,” he said. So what does finishing the job in Iran entail? It’s a rhetorical question—because it’s clear that the administration doesn’t know. The more interesting question at this moment is whether the Republican-controlled Congress, which is about to be put on the spot over the war, will force the administration to provide a concrete answer.
Trump and his “secretary of war,” Pete Hegseth, have said plenty about the war, but their statements have been vague, geopolitically illiterate, unhinged, sociopathic, and increasingly desperate—sometimes all at once. But one can glean a handful of potential objectives: the demise of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard; the elevation of a political leader deemed “acceptable” by the U.S., Israel, and the Gulf States; the permanent end of an Iranian nuclear program that the administration claimed to have obliterated last June; and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, the vital shipping canal that transports roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil supply, which has been functionally closed this month.
That’s a pretty big job—and it’s one that does not appear to be going very well right now. The U.S. has killed dozens of Iranian military and political leaders, including its Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but Iran seems no closer to capitulating. Indeed, it has subsequently issued its own set of objectives, which are much clearer than those the U.S. is fighting over, and which include a new security arrangement with its neighbors—a considerable escalation. The IRGC is still firmly in power, Khamenei was replaced by his hard-liner son, and gas and oil prices are spiking worldwide thanks to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and, on Thursday, an Iranian strike on a Qatari facility that produces 3 percent of the world’s liquid natural gas—a strike estimated to set back production for three to five years.
The spike in energy prices has already led the U.S. to lift sanctions on Russian oil. Indeed, one could argue that Vladimir Putin is the big winner thus far of the war, which has further damaged the credibility of the U.S. and the transatlantic alliance, as well as distracted from diplomatic efforts to end Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. And now, the United States is mulling lifting sanctions on Iranian oil—not exactly the kind of move you’d expect from a country allegedly on the brink of a military victory.
“Two countries that we’ve spent years sanctioning are now the direct beneficiaries of a conflict the United States chose to start,” Brett Erickson, managing principal at Obsidian Risk Advisors, told The Washington Post. “The United States has spent years building sanctions architecture specifically designed to constrict Russia and Iran. Within three weeks of this conflict starting, we’re tearing it to shreds. That is not a short-term adjustment, it’s a complete strategic collapse.” That more or less sums it up.
Trump insists that the war will end whenever he says it does—when he “feels it in his bones”—but that it will probably be quite soon. His administration talks of the fight in terms of weeks, not months—and certainly not years. But you can’t fund a war with late-night social media screeds or unhinged press conferences. Wars cost money, and the $200 billion figure tells us that the war is not going well. It also tells us that the administration is lying.
Right now, the war is being waged via massive airstrikes and assassinations. Whether the Pentagon is gearing up for something analogous to Iraq—boots on the ground, a conflict that drags on for years, or both—is not clear, though the size of its budget request certainly suggests a conflict that is far from “very complete.” And Reuters reported late Thursday that the administration “is considering deploying thousands of U.S. troops to reinforce its operation in the Middle East”—and to secure the Strait of Hormuz, which, two U.S. officials acknowledged to the outlet, “could also mean deploying U.S. troops to Iran’s shoreline.”
This war was started without any meaningful attempt to persuade the public of its necessity. It was also started, unconstitutionally, without congressional approval—but that only seems to bother the Democrats. GOP Senator Rand Paul led an effort in the Senate on Thursday to require such approval to continue the war; it failed by a 47–53 vote, with Paul the only Republican voting in favor. But this isn’t the last they’ll be asked to weigh in on the war, if indeed the administration goes to Congress with its $200 billion request. GOP Senator Susan Collins said the figure was “considerably higher than I would have guessed,” while her Republican colleague Lisa Murkowski said, “You just can’t come up here with an invoice and say, you know, ‘Pay this,’ and expect to have great cooperation going forward.”
It’s possible that in this critical election year, many Republicans do not want to “approve” the war because doing so would mean taking responsibility for it. For now, this is Trump’s war, not theirs. But approving $200 billion, or even a smaller figure, would be congressional authorization by another name, at least in the eyes of the public. An appropriations fight will be a test of the seriousness of Democratic opposition and Republican support; it will also be a test of congressional seriousness itself. This war is unpopular, aimless, and illegal—and the Trump administration is preparing to ask for enough money to fund it for many months to come. If Congress can’t hold the line here, with a new forever war in the offing, then when will it ever?
