Without Congress, There Is No US Strategy
May 7, 2026
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment