Date

9-17-2026

Department

College of Arts and Sciences

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy in History (PhD)

Chair

John Broom

Keywords

war powers, constitutional history, executive power, Congress, presidential war initiation, technology and war, War Powers Resolution, Cold War, covert operations

Disciplines

History

Abstract

This dissertation examines how changes in military technology and institutional design shifted practical control over war initiation from Congress to the presidency between the founding era and the end of the Cold War. The Constitution vests the power to declare war in Congress, and the framers rejected proposals to give that authority to the president alone. This study argues that advances in communication, transportation, weapons lethality, and government secrecy compressed the time available for congressional deliberation, concentrated war-relevant information inside executive institutions, and made presidential initiative the default rather than the exception. The study traces this pattern across six chapters, beginning with the Constitutional Convention debates and the early republic, moving through the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, and the overseas expansion of the 1890s, and continuing through both world wars and the Cold War confrontations in Korea, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf. Specific episodes receive extended treatment: Truman’s unilateral commitment to Korea in 1950, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and its use as a blank check for escalation in Vietnam, the secret bombing of Cambodia, the Iran-Contra affair, and the contested authorization process before the 1991 Gulf War. The dissertation also traces a second route around the war clause through covert operations. The CIA’s vague statutory mandate, combined with a culture of plausible deniability built into the national security state from 1947 onward, allowed presidents to commit the country to armed conflicts that Congress either did not know about or could not effectively oversee. Iran-Contra is the sharpest example, but the pattern runs from Guatemala and the Bay of Pigs through Angola and Nicaragua. The study also examines the War Powers Resolution of 1973, which Congress passed to restore its constitutional role but which failed in practice because presidents learned to report “consistent with” the statute without triggering its enforcement provisions. The dissertation engages the major scholarly positions on executive war power, including Schlesinger’s imperial presidency thesis, Fisher’s institutional account, Ely’s procedural critique, and the pro-executive arguments advanced by Yoo, Turner, and Ramsey. It departs from the existing literature by foregrounding technological tempo as a structural driver of constitutional change. The central finding is that the declare-war clause was never formally repealed or overruled. Instead, the national security state built after 1945 created an operating environment where the clause became progressively harder to use for the purpose the framers intended.

Download

Included in

History Commons

Share

COinS