The Atlantic Should Not Find Out About a War Before Congress Does
The White House accidentally leaked military plans in Yemen to a journalist—and demonstrated how unconstitutional U.S. war making has become.
Everyone has been there. You were added to a group chat that you're not supposed to be a part of, and you can't seem to stop the messages. Or, more embarrassingly, you've added someone else to a group chat they were not supposed to see. But most people have not done so with Top Secret military plans and the editor of a major magazine.
Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic, reported on Monday that he had been added by National Security Adviser Mike Waltz to an encrypted Signal group chat with the White House's principals committee to discuss U.S. war plans in Yemen. Goldberg received the first message at 11:44 a.m. on Saturday, March 15, and around two hours later, the White House announced a new air campaign against Houthi forces. The National Security Council confirmed the group chat was real and claimed Goldberg was added by accident.
The leak became an opportunity for Democrats to clutch their pearls about the sanctity of classified information. "You have got to be kidding me," groaned former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, whose own presidential bid was derailed by her mishandling of classified data. Goldberg himself accused the Trump administration of violating the Espionage Act and federal record-keeping laws, warning that some of the messages "could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel."
And among Republicans, the leak intensified the Trump administration's internal struggle over foreign policy. The hawkish Wall Street Journal editorial board used the messages to paint Vice President J.D. Vance as "a voice for U.S. retreat." Politico, on the other hand, reported that Trump administration insiders saw "an opening for longtime Waltz detractors suspicious of his neoconservative ties to push for his removal." After all, he had Goldberg, a personal enemy of Trump, in his phone contacts. Trump told NBC that Waltz has "learned a lesson" and blamed a junior staffer.
There's a much bigger scandal than Waltz's alleged carelessness, however. The U.S. has been involved in Yemen against the will of Congress for years, and President Donald Trump reopened a dormant war without any kind of public deliberation. The messages that Goldberg chose to publish reveal that the timing was driven by hawks' desire to sell the war—and go over Congress' head—rather than any urgent threat to American lives.
"There was no emergency. The executive branch unlawfully sidestepped Congress, taking military action that top officials admit was elective. The discussion establishes unequivocally that the strikes in Yemen are unconstitutional," former Michigan Libertarian Rep. Justin Amash wrote on X.
In other words, the scandal of the group chat was not that too many people knew about the war plans before they were carried out. It was that not enough people knew, because the administration deliberately tried to prevent a public debate from breaking out, as other officials revealed when Vance called for one.
"There is a real risk that the public doesn't understand this or why it's necessary," Vance wrote to the group chat, according to The Atlantic, arguing that fighting to protect other countries' trade routes would be "inconsistent" with Trump's agenda. "I am willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself. But there is a strong argument for delaying this a month, doing the messaging work on why this matters, seeing where the economy is, etc," Vance added.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth replied that "messaging is going to be tough no matter what – nobody knows who the Houthis are – which is why we would need to stay focused on: 1) [former President Joe] Biden failed & 2) Iran funded." He conceded that "a few weeks or a month does not fundamentally change the calculus," but predicted two "immediate risks on waiting: 1) this leaks, and we look indecisive; 2) Israel takes an action first – or Gaza cease fire falls apart – and we don't get to start this on our own terms." Hegseth added that "we can easily pause" the war later on.
Neither of them considered that war might need a vote from Congress, as the Constitution requires. At least Vance wanted some semblance of popular buy-in before going to war. And Hegseth was shockingly blunt about why that couldn't happen: It would "look indecisive," especially given that "nobody knows who the Houthis are." To open up public discussion about the case for war risked muddying the waters.
Hegseth's comment about Israeli action revealed another assumption underlying U.S. policy: If a war breaks out, the U.S. has to be involved. Waltz also commented in the group chat that "whether it's now or several weeks from now, it will have to be the United States that reopens these shipping lanes." (It's worth mentioning that the shipping lanes were open at the time, as the Houthi movement had suspended its attacks on American ships as long as the ceasefire in Gaza held.)
The same assumption has been driving two decades of U.S. policy toward Iran. Since the Bush administration, Israel has wanted to bomb Iranian nuclear sites, and the U.S. has scrambled to respond. As successive administrations tried to threaten or buy off Iran, the working assumption was that the U.S. would automatically be dragged into any hot war, so Washington had to be prepared "to start this on our own terms." Last year, when Israel and Iran were trading missile fire, the Biden administration sent troops directly into the fray with no pretense of public debate.
The constitutional and policy merits of war are two separate questions, but they're impossible to fully disentangle. The point of asking Congress for a declaration of war is to allow the people's representatives to weigh the pros and cons in a deliberate, transparent way. War is the most serious decision a government can make. Citizens of a republic should not have to perform Kremlinology—or wait for an official to fat-finger his contact list—to figure out what their leaders are planning.