Like many other military actions ordered by U.S. presidents since the end of the Second World War in 1945, Trump initiated this foreign intervention without a congressional declaration of war. It has been executed under presumed executive authority and without another country having actually attacked the territory of the United States.

For eight decades, presidents have claimed that matters of "national security" or the "global interests" of the United States call for and even require the chief executive to take military action almost everywhere and in various forms around the world. However, one of the differences between Trump's public statements and rationales for his war against Iran from those of other presidents in defending their own foreign interventions is that these previous ones were usually couched in soothing or altruistic rhetoric that made it seem that the necessity and the justification were more than the wishes of one man living in the White House.

Trump's language is far more "first person singular": I have the authority; I have the power; I want; I demand; I will decide; I will punish; I will reward; I will order; I said this yesterday, and I say this today, and I may say something different tomorrow, but none of it is contradictory, inconsistent, or hypocritical because I know more than anyone, so any day-by-day changes in my words or deeds are all the right actions in the latest circumstances based on my superior insight. And anyone who disagrees with me shows his anti-Americanism, his disloyalty, his hatred for all things Trump, a loser enemy of making America great again. Me, Me, Me.

Part of the debate and argument over the current conflict in the Middle East, therefore, not surprisingly, has been reduced to the personal: do you or do you not like or trust or support Donald Trump? But his actions in intervening in Venezuela or, now, Iran, are really no different in terms of presidential authority presumed and applied by his predecessors in the White House.

The more general questions that should be asked are: Does the president of the United States have the authority to intervene, when he deems it necessary, into the affairs of other nations and in other parts of the world even when the United States has not been directly attacked and without a congressional declaration of war? Anyone who follows various social-media outlets knows that this has divided many classical liberals, libertarians, Objectivists, and conservatives. And their rhetoric towards each other has often been heated and, dare I say, sometimes "impolite."