More than two-thirds of Americans support a ceasefire in Israel’s war on Gaza, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll whose results were released on Wednesday.
The poll, which gathered responses from just over 1,000 respondents earlier this week, also shows that U.S. support for Israel has declined in the month since Hamas’s incursion into Israel on October 7. The percentage of respondents who said that "the U.S. should support Israel" when asked what role Washington should play in the war dropped from 41% in mid-October to 32% percent this week.
Meanwhile, respondents who said that the U.S. should support Palestine increased from 2% to 4%, those who said it should play no role decreased from 21% to 15%, and those who urged Washington to be a “neutral mediator” jumped from 27% to 39%.
The ceasefire question was not included in the poll taken in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s attacks, but it has become a hot-button political issue amid Israel’s ongoing, brutal retaliatory war. As of Monday, an estimated 11,000 people have been killed in Gaza since October 7. According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, 40% of those have been children.
“The Gaza crisis has sparked an international outcry that has focused in recent days on the collapsing medical infrastructure in the crowded coastal enclave,” reads the Reuters report that announced the polling results. “Palestinians trapped inside Gaza's biggest hospital were digging a mass grave on Tuesday to bury patients who died under Israeli encirclement.”
The 68% of respondents who agreed with the statement, “Israel should call a ceasefire and try to negotiate," were divided by political party, with approximately 75% of Democrats and about half of Republicans concurring.
The overwhelming support from Democratic respondents puts them squarely at odds with the party’s political leadership in Washington. President Joe Biden said last week that there was “no possibility” of a ceasefire in Gaza, and only 27 congressional Democrats (about 10% of the conference) have publicly supported one. The split between the public and elected officials is also notable in the GOP, where no elected officials on Capitol Hill have called for a ceasefire.
“Support for Israel's war in Gaza is fast eroding among Americans,” wrote Trita Parsi, executive vice President of the Quincy Institute, on the social media platform X. “Biden & Congress are once again out of step with the American public.”
The poll also showed that 31% of respondents support sending weapons to Israel, compared to 43% who were opposed, in what Reuters called “a potentially worrisome sign for Israel.” Providing military support to Israel has long had strong bipartisan support in Washington, and Biden has recently called for an additional $14.3 billion in aid for Tel Aviv, as part of a larger supplemental package that has yet to make its way through Congress.
Blaise Malley is a freelance writer and a former Responsible Statecraft reporter. He is currently a MA candidate at New York University. His writing has appeared in The New Republic, The American Prospect, The American Conservative, and elsewhere.
Smoke rises after Israeli airstrikes on Gaza City, the Gaza Strip, Palestine, Wednesday, May 12, 2021. (Nick_ Raille_07 / Shutterstock.com).
Smoke rises after Israeli airstrikes on Gaza City, the Gaza Strip, Palestine, Wednesday, May 12, 2021. (Nick_ Raille_07 / Shutterstock.com).
As a fragile ceasefire takes hold between Israel, Iran, and the United States, many questions remain.
With Iran’s nuclear program unquestionably damaged but likely not fully destroyed, will the Iranian government now race towards a bomb? Having repeatedly broken recent ceasefires in Lebanon and Gaza, will Prime Minister Netanyahu honor this one? And after having twice taken direct military action against Iran, will President Trump pursue the peace he claims to seek or once again choose war?
Meanwhile, Congress is currently debating whether and how to rein in Trump's war making power, with votes possible by the end of this week. There are two competing House bills, one bipartisan War Powers Resolution (WPR) sponsored by Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Tom Massie (R-Ky.), and another by Reps. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.), Adam Smith (D-Wash.) and Jim Himes (D-Conn.). Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) introduced a Senate version and that one is likely to get a vote by Friday.
Time will tell whether these measures will pass or have any effect on current events, but on one point, there is absolute certainty. President Trump’s war on Iran was illegal and unconstitutional.
When it comes to who has the legal authority to declare war, the Constitution is unequivocal. The power to declare war rests solely with Congress. Once authorized, the president is the commander-in-chief, but the title does not confer on him the authority to decide where, when, or against whom the country goes to war, simply to oversee the prosecution of wars once they have been authorized.
For the Constitution’s framers, these weren’t hypothetical arguments, and we don’t have to guess at their reasoning or intention. They lived in an age when wars were fought at the whims of monarchs, sometimes for lofty imperial goals but sometimes for petty personal grievances. Indeed their own revolution had been based, in part, over frustration with the massive taxation required to pay down King George’s war debts. Instead, they sought to create a system in which the people who would pay the war’s costs in blood and treasure would decide whether or not their nation goes to war.
To accomplish this, they put this awesome power in the branch of government most accountable to the people, Congress. They did so with the hope and intention that this would make going to war difficult. If one person alone decides when the nation goes to war, wars will inevitably be about one person’s grievances, politics, and personal interests. By requiring Congress to publicly come together and navigate their myriad differences, the hope was that consensus would be difficult to obtain and wars would thus only be launched when there was a clear, overwhelming, and genuine national interest in doing so.
And of course, if members of Congress failed to exercise their authority responsibly, they’d regularly face elections where they could be replaced.
It was and remains an inspiring decision to impose a massive check on the most awesome power of the state. Unfortunately, as Donald Trump’s decision to wage war on Iran reminds us, this system of war powers is deeply broken and prone to abuse.
For starters, Iran posed no imminent threat to the United States that required military action in self-defense. To the extent any such claims are being made, they are based on a hypothetical future threat that must be prevented, namely an Iranian nuclear weapon. Such claims, of course, are a disturbing echo of the Iraq War, and even then they amount to arguments for preventative wars, not genuine preemption of an imminent threat. While this may seem like a small distinction, it is in fact a massive one.
In a letter to Congress justifying his war-making, President Trump makes no claim that the Iranian government was preparing an attack against the United States that he needed to preempt. Instead, he argues he was simply acting to “protect United States citizens at home and abroad” as well as stating repeatedly he is acting to “advance vital United States national interests.” Nowhere in this justification or his public remarks does the president make any claim that he is acting to defend against an imminent attack. Rather, he is simply claiming the unilateral right to both decide what is in the national interest and then to use military force in pursuit of that interest. Even if one agrees with his definition of interests and belief that military force will achieve them (something of which this author and others are deeply skeptical), it does not negate the need for constitutionally required authorization before resorting to war.
Similarly, the president’s claim in the letter that he was acting “in collective self-defense of our ally, Israel” is not an invocation of any actual legal authority to wage war. What Trump is attempting here is a sleight of hand in which the president’s right to use military force in self-defense of the United States is, without any legal authority, bestowed upon another country. Sadly, Trump may have learned this trick from Joe Biden who absurdly also made this claim to justify his use of military force in Somalia. To be clear, international law does allow for using military force in collective self-defense, but international law is not a replacement for the Constitution’s requirements of congressional authority to go to war. For the U.S. president to send the U.S. military into war, they ultimately need authority under U.S. law, and U.S. law simply does not provide existing authority for using military force in defense of Israel.
Of course, Trump isn’t the first president to try to unilaterally expand his authority to wage war. After the disastrous U.S. experience in Vietnam in which the mission grew from a small advisory effort in support of the French and then South Vietnamese forces to hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops fighting a deadly and ultimately unsuccessful major war, Congress attempted to get ahead of this growing problem and place limits on presidents in the 1973 War Powers Act. While perhaps no law in history has been more misunderstood or misinterpreted, WPR reaffirmed Congress’s sole constitutional right to declare war and created a framework to force presidents to remove the military from situations in which they may become engaged in wars Congress had not authorized.
The goal was simple: if it seemed like the U.S. might end up in war, the WPR required the president to remove forces to prevent that from happening. It also gave Congress fast-track procedures to consider legislation to force the president to comply. Indeed, in the coming days Congress may consider this with the variousversions offered in both the House and Senate. This is exactly what happened in 2020 following Trump’s assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassam Soleimani, when Congress passed a resolution blocking further military action against Iran.
The fate of that resolution, however, also revealed the fundamental flaws in the current system. Trump ultimately vetoed that 2020 WPR legislation, and no doubt will do so again if Congress passes such legislation in the coming days. Thus, without a two-thirds supermajority, the system creates the conditions for presidential impunity when violating the Constitution’s separation of powers. This is, of course, exactly the opposite of what the framers intended. Their goal was that a majority of both houses of Congress would be required to go to war, not that a super majority of Congress would be required to prevent a president from going to war. The current system is thus an absurd perversion of the plain text and obvious intention of the Constitution.
Thankfully, some in Congress are trying to repair this dangerous situation. Bipartisan groups in both the House and Senate have recently introduced legislation to return the balance of power to Congress, and by extension to the American public, preventing the kind of unilateral war-making President Trump has repeatedly engaged in. This legislation likely faces long odds, but such reforms are deeply necessary in the long run. Without a change, we will only continue to see presidents launch more and larger wars whenever and wherever they want and for whatever reason they choose.
While the worst-case scenarios of a spiraling, escalating war may (or may not) have been avoided in this case, there is no guarantee that future presidential war-making will be so limited. Thankfully, the Constitution was drafted to prevent just such disasters. The only question left is if we’ll continue to allow presidents to violate it and act like kings.
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Top photo credit: Reza Pahlavi, Crown Prince of Iran speaking at an event hosted by the Center for Political Thought & Leadership at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)
The Middle East is a region where history rarely repeats itself exactly, but often rhymes in ways that are both tragic and absurd.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the current Israeli campaign against Iran. A campaign that, beneath its stated aims of dismantling Iran's nuclear and defense capabilities, harbors a deeper, more outlandish ambition: the hope that toppling the regime could install a friendly government under Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran's last Shah. Perhaps even paving the way for a monarchical restoration.
This is not a policy officially declared in Jerusalem or Washington, but it lingers in the background of Israel’s actions and its overt calls for Iranians to “stand up” to the Islamic Republic. In April 2023, Pahlavi was hosted in Israel by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Isaac Herzog.
During the carefully choreographed visit, he prayed at the Western Wall, while avoiding the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount just above and made no effort to meet with Palestinian leaders. An analysis from the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs described the trip as a message that Israel recognizes Pahlavi as "the main leader of the Iranian opposition."
Figures like Gila Gamliel, a former minister of intelligence in the Israeli government, have openly called for regime change, declaring last year that a "window of opportunity has opened to overthrow the regime."
What might have been dismissed as a diplomatic gambit has, in the context of the current air war, been elevated into a strategic bet that military pressure can create the conditions for a political outcome of Israel's choosing.
The irony is hard to overstate. It was foreign intervention that set the stage for the current enmity. In 1953, a CIA/MI6 coup overthrew Mohammad Mossadegh, Iran’s last democratically elected leader. While the plot was triggered by his nationalization of the British-controlled Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the United States joined out of Cold War paranoia, fearing the crisis would allow Iran's powerful communist party to seize power and align the country with the Soviet Union.
The coup reinstalled the Shah, whose autocratic rule and dependence on the West bred a potent mix of anti-imperialist sentiment and religious fervor.
The 1979 Islamic Revolution, in its own way, was a delayed reaction to 1953, a radical assertion of national sovereignty over foreign interests. Now, Israel and the U.S. seem to believe that a new foreign-backed intervention could be the solution to a problem the last one helped create.
Since June 12, Israel’s military campaign has gone beyond targeting nuclear facilities. Strikes have hit state institutions and state television headquarters. In its most symbolic attack yet, Israel also struck Evin Prison, the primary site for jailing political opponents.
President Trump on Monday announced that an agreement had been brokered between Iran and Israel to stop the fighting, a ceasefire that as of this writing, was still largely unconfirmed. It came hours after Iran had launched a limited attack on the U.S. base in Qatar,. The missiles were intercepted and no injuries were reported.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has openly framed the conflict as a pathway to liberation for Iranians. Operation Rising Lion, the name given to the air assault, is itself a nod to Iran’s pre-revolutionary flag, a symbolic gesture toward the monarchy’s legacy.
“As we achieve our objective,” Netanyahu said in a video address to the Iranian people, “we are also clearing the path for you to achieve your freedom.”
For all the talk of regime change, however, there is little clarity about what, or who, should come next. Publicly, Israeli officials insist the Iranian people will choose their own leaders. Yet their public embrace of Iran's exiled crown prince tells a different story.
Reza Pahlavi has spent decades cultivating an image as a democratic statesman-in-waiting. In interviews, he speaks of a future decided by a popular referendum, backed by detailed proposals like a 100-day transition plan. To Israel's delight, his alignment extends beyond symbolism to the core of Israeli strategic thinking.
During his 2023 visit to Tel Aviv, he articulated the very logic driving Israel’s current attacks against Iran, dismissing nuclear negotiations as a “waste of time” and insisting that the “quickest way to eliminate all threats” was to invest in an alternative to the regime itself.
Moreover, he envisions a future rooted in what he calls the “Cyrus Accords,” a revival of the ‘ancient friendship’ between the Persian and Jewish peoples, a vision reinforced by powerful personal gestures, such as his daughter’s recent marriage to a Jewish-American businessman.
But this vision, compelling as it may be in D.C and Jerusalem, is almost entirely detached from Iranian realities. For many critics, even within the fragmented opposition, this democratic messaging is a calculated strategy to rehabilitate the monarchy’s image and position Pahlavi as the only viable successor.
His high-profile meetings with foreign leaders—most notably in Israel—and his calls for Western support are seen not as statecraft for a future democracy, but as efforts to secure foreign backing for his own return to power.
The Pahlavi name remains tainted for many by memories of SAVAK torture chambers, lavish corruption, and dependence on foreign powers for viability. While dissent against the Islamic Republic is widespread, slogans from the 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests — sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini in custody over the mandatory hijab — reveal a deep-seated rejection of both autocracies with chants like, “Death to the oppressor, be it the Shah or the Leader.”
The monarchy Israel hints at reviving was not merely overthrown in 1979, it was actively rejected by a powerful coalition of Islamists, leftists, and nationalists united against the Shah’s repression. This legacy of popular rejection severely curbs Reza Pahlavi’s appeal today.
While opinion pieces in Israeli mediaframe the choice for Iran as one between chaos and a restored monarchy, Pahlavi commands little tangible support inside a country where many see his movement as “opportunistic” and “disconnected from the Iranian people.”
For Israel to imagine a different outcome in Iran is to ignore the region’s bitterest truths. From the sectarian carnage of post-Saddam Iraq to the militia-ruled wastelands that now scar Libya, Yemen, the last two decades have taught the brutal lesson that foreign-imposed regime change does not produce compliant allies, but rather vacuums filled by extremists, proxy wars, and humanitarian catastrophes.
It is this painfully learned lesson that drove the Arab Gulf states pivot to diplomacy with former rivals like Iran.
The Israeli hope that airstrikes and assassinations are “creating the conditions” for the Iranian people to “rise up,” as Netanyahu stated, is not only ahistorical—it is dangerous.
Even among Iran’s opposition, there is deep skepticism about foreign intervention. As exiled activists have told Western media, Iranians want to topple their leaders themselves, they do not want a “made-up state” or a new regime imposed by outsiders.
In addition, the fantasy that a successor regime in Tehran would be inherently friendly to Israel ignores deep-seated suspicion embedded through decades of conflict, propaganda, and animosity now being cemented by overt foreign intervention. Even Reza Pahlavi, if somehow installed, would likely face immense pressure to distance himself from any perception of being ‘Israel’s man in Iran.’
Israel’s campaign may weaken the Islamic Republic, but it cannot conjure a new, friendly Iran from the ashes, least of all by championing a successor from a fallen dynasty that Iranians have long since rejected.
In the end, the future of Iran should be decided not in Jerusalem or Washington, but by Iranians themselves — on their own terms, in their own time.
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Top image credit: TIRANA, ALBANIA - MAY 16: France's President Emmanuel Macron, Britain's Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Germany's Chancellor Friedrich Merz speak during a Ukraine security meeting at the 6th European Political Community summit on May 16, 2025 at Skanderbeg Square in Tirana, Albania. Leon Neal/Pool via REUTERS
The European Union’s response to the U.S. strikes on Iran Saturday has exposed more than just hypocrisy — it has revealed a vassalization so profound that the European capitals now willingly undermine both international law and their own strategic interests.
The statement by the E3, signed by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and French President Emmanuel Macron, following similar statements by the president of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen, and its high representative for foreign affairs Kaja Kallas, perfectly encapsulates this surrender.
The European trio affirmed their support for the security of Israel — and only Israel, as if other nations in the Middle East weren’t entitled to security. They repeated the rhetoric that Iran “can never have a nuclear weapon” and endorsed the U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities despite the numerous conclusions of both the IAEA and the U.S. intelligence community (IC) that Iran is presently, or at least before Saturday’s attack, not working on weaponizing its nuclear program.
In truly Orwellian fashion, the E3 called on Tehran to “engage in negotiations leading to an agreement that addresses all concerns associated with its nuclear program” — despite the fact that Iran was literally engaged in those very negotiations with the E3’s foreign ministers on Friday, the day before the U.S. strike — as it was preparing to continue negotiations with the U.S. in Oman before Israel launched the war a week before. In fact, Israel’s brazen decision to sabotage U.S.–Iranian diplomacy is precisely the evidence that, contrary to what the E3 now imply, Iran has engaged in talks seriously enough to make the prospect of concluding a new deal realistic.
The timing of the U.S. strikes — coming after diplomatic efforts by E3 and Iran — makes a mockery of the E3’s assertions that the onus is now on Tehran for renewing the talks. It prompted Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi to ask: “how can Iran return to something it never left, let alone blew up”?
Even more damning is the EU’s refusal to acknowledge what former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt forthrightly stated: the U.S. attack was a clear-cut violation of international law. The U.N. Charter prohibits the use of force except in self-defense against an imminent attack or with Security Council authorization — neither of which applied in this case. Yet the current EU leadership, so vocal in condemning Russia’s breaches of Ukraine’s sovereignty, remains conspicuously mute when Washington or Jerusalem does the same.
This hypocrisy does more than expose EU moral posturing — it actively erodes the foundations of international law and the much-vaunted “rules-based international order.” By legitimizing the "right of the mighty" to wage preventive wars, the EU fatally undermines Ukraine’s cause and sets a precedent that its adversaries are certain to exploit. If preventive strikes are permissible for the U.S. and Israel, why not for Russia, China, or any other power claiming a "threat"? Why should nations of the Global South rally behind Kyiv’s appeals to the U.N. Charter when Europe itself excuses blatant breaches by Western powers?
Worse, this vassalization of Europe is proving strategically useless. No evidence that the Trump administration even bothered to warn its European "allies" in advance of its attack on Iran has yet come to light, a damning indication, if borne out, of the contempt the Trump administration holds for its main European NATO allies which then rush willy-nilly to defend Washington’s flagrant violations of international law.
The timing couldn’t be more conspicuous. Days before a critical NATO summit, this episode confirms what sober observers already knew: Europe’s servility earns neither respect nor reciprocity from Washington. The Trump administration’s apparent failure to consult the E3 — despite their ongoing diplomatic engagement with Iran — proves that U.S. policymakers view Europe not as partners, but as lackeys to be ignored at will. This dynamic poisons the atmosphere ahead of NATO’s meeting, where European leaders will once again appeal for “transatlantic unity” while accepting their role as Washington’s junior subordinates.
But the deeper tragedy is that Europe’s leaders have internalized their own subordination. They betray international law not for tangible gains, but out of reflexive obedience — a habit that weakens Europe’s global standing while emboldening Washington’s and Jerusalem’s worst impulses. This is one of the big differences with the run-up to the last big U.S. war of choice. Back then, leaders of France and Germany had the backbone and foresight to oppose George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. Fast forward to 2025, and Germany’s neoconservative chancellor Merz enthusiastically endorses Israel’s illegal attacks on Iran as the necessary “dirty work” performed on behalf of the “West.”
The expanding war in the Middle East should be a wake-up call: given Europe’s geographical proximity to the Middle East, the spillover effects in terms of possible new migration flows, terrorist threats, and energy shocks that would be massively destabilizing for Europe. Given the stakes, if Europe won’t assert its interests now, when will it? When Washington and Jerusalem unilaterally drag it into another endless Middle Eastern war? When the next illegal strike hits a third country? Vassalage doesn’t pay — it only degrades.
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