The Iran War and the Limits of Presidential Power

Allen Weiner: If I were a senior government official in the Iranian Foreign Ministry, upon seeing the signature of the MOU that we’ve concluded, I would be high-fiving my colleagues in the ministry because it’s quite clear that the MOU itself is a big win for Iran.

Pam Karlan: This is Stanford Legal, where we look at the cases, questions, conflicts, and legal stories that affect us all every day. I’m Pam Karlan. Please subscribe or follow this feed on your favorite podcast app. That way you’ll have access to all our new episodes as soon as they’re available. Today we’re going to talk about one of the conflicts that affects us all every day, especially if you have to buy any gasoline.

The United States and Israel attacked Iran in February of this year, and we are still at war in Iran. I guess I want to start you off, Allen, by saying why did we attack Iran? What was the ostensible reason for the attack in the first place?

Allen Weiner: Pam, it’s good to be with you. This administration has not always been renowned for its laser focus and laser messaging, as different messages track whatever the president’s impulses are.

That said, the administration identified at least four objectives that it referred to consistently. The most important one was to ensure that Iran would never be able to acquire a nuclear weapon. There was also an effort to obliterate Iran’s missile capability, to annihilate its navy, and to sever its support for its terrorist proxies in the region—Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and, to a lesser extent, Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

There was also sometimes talk about regime change. This ran hot and cold.

Pam Karlan: Yes, it seems like it was kind of a moving target, if you will.

Allen Weiner: It was a moving target.

Pam Karlan: If we start off in February, there was this concern about Iran’s nuclear capacity, and I wonder if you could take us back a couple of years before that, because there had been an agreement.

Allen Weiner: Absolutely. It has been a long-term strategic concern of the United States and Israel, and not only Israel, but also Gulf States— Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and the Kuwaitis—about the risk that Iran would develop a nuclear weapon. This was seen as deeply destabilizing. The Obama administration worked on this and concluded in 2015 something called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

I’ll just say: the JCPOA—the Iran deal, the nuclear deal—which was a compromise in which Iran basically agreed to give up some highly enriched uranium that it had developed, which was actually delivered to the Russians, and also to agree to quite low levels of enrichment. The way that uranium works is you take U-238 uranium, and you run it through centrifuges, and some of it creates enriched uranium, U-235 uranium, and that’s the fuel that you use for a nuclear bomb.

Iran agreed that if they were enriching uranium, which is also something that you use in civilian nuclear energy, right? This has always been the problem that what we use for nuclear power and what we use for nuclear bombs is the same thing, except maybe at different degrees. Iran agreed that they would limit their enrichment to 3.67 percent, and they would accept international inspections from the International Atomic Energy Agency.

So a lot of people thought, “Yes, this is a decent deal.” The main problem with the agreement, the JCPOA, was that it was not permanent. Iran agreed to these restrictions on its enrichment levels for a certain period of time. Some provisions were 10 years, other provisions were 15 years, and critics of the agreement said, “Well, that’s great in 15 years, we’re going to be right back where we started.” Okay, so the first Trump administration declared the JCPOA to be the “worst deal ever,” and this is going to come around on the guitar again because…

Pam Karlan: Right, yes.

Allen Weiner: Actually, the JCPOA does not look so bad compared to the agreement that the Trump administration has just concluded with Iran, withdrew from the agreement, Iran began enriching uranium at higher levels, and re-escalated the crisis.

Pam Karlan: So our first thing when we attacked Iran, in addition to the mistaken bombing of the girls’ school…

Allen Weiner: Right.

Pam Karlan: We knocked out the then leadership of Iran.

Allen Weiner: Right. We have to remember that the 2026 war comes less than a year after the first time that we attacked Iran’s nuclear program. We did this in 2025.

Pam Karlan: Right.

Allen Weiner: This was a much shorter campaign, just a few days, and we really focused in 2025 on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Again, as we got into 2026, the Trump administration began to develop these more ambitious goals.

Pam Karlan: There was going to be regime change.

Allen Weiner: Well, again, it was always in the background.

The administration wasn’t going to do it. The thing that I love about this is Donald Trump at one point saying to the Iranian people, “Since the Iranian Revolution, there have been”—I don’t know what, whether it was “seven presidents or eight presidents, and none of them,” he said, “have been willing to do what I’m doing— to attack the regime. So, Iranian people, this is your chance.” Now, I think for President Trump…

Pam Karlan: There had been a kind of upsurge of popular resistance to the regime inside Iran.

Allen Weiner: This has been recurring, right? We had the “Women, Life, Freedom” uprising earlier in the ’20s. We’d also had uprisings more recently in Iran. We should say, for the record, for the avoidance of doubt, Pam, that the Iranian regime is a repressive regime that engages in horrible human rights violations. It’s not representative of the will of the people. It’s an authoritarian and oppressive regime.

There have been, through the last 20 years, different moments of public unrest, which have been met with quite emphatic repression by the regime. But I think it’s interesting what the president said—when he said that we’ve had seven or eight presidents who haven’t been willing to attack Iran—I think he thought that what that reflects is his boldness and decisiveness. What those of us who have been studying this issue for a long time probably thought was: There’s maybe a reason why seven or eight presidents who have the same military capacity that the U.S. has now decided it would not be a good bargain to try to use force to achieve our strategic objectives and maybe to bring about regime change in Iran. And we see that’s been the outcome.

Pam Karlan: So we attacked the regime, we bombed the headquarters, we killed the then-head of the government, and it seems like a bad trade if you’re trading an 80-year-old tyrant for a 40-year-old tyrant. That’s…

Allen Weiner: Well, and the bigger problem…

Pam Karlan: It’s not a great…

Allen Weiner: The bigger problem, as I see it, Pam, is that, in the United States, when I worked in the State Department, back before I came to the law school here, I worked on Iran issues, and we had a Manichean view of Iranian politics. There were reformers and hardliners. I didn’t know that much about Iranian politics, but I always had the impression, and I continue to have the impression, that Iranian politics are actually much more complicated than that.

There are lots of different factions and lots of different voices. And what has actually happened as a result of this attack, the previous supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, was a broker who would manage these different factions. And I think what’s emerged from these attacks is that it’s now quite clear that one of these factions—the military faction, the so-called Revolutionary Guard, the IRGC—is now dominant.

In fact, what we’ve seen is that, rather than regime change, we’ve seen retrenchment, and I think that some of the most repressive elements have, in fact, had their authority consolidated.

Pam Karlan: Yes, so we now have a regime after our initial attack that closed the Strait of Hormuz. That had a set of immediate effects on the global economy.

Allen Weiner: Absolutely. And you mentioned that this affects everybody who buys gas. There’s an old ad…

Pam Karlan: It’s everybody who uses any petroleum products, right?

Allen Weiner: …or any energy. Farmers have been devastated by this. It’s not only oil, but also fertilizer. There are other key goods that transit through that gulf. It’s been devastating for farmers in the United States. It’s been more devastating for farmers in the developing world who are impacted by this even more. Energy costs have gone up. If you’re here in California and you look at your local gas station and the regular—the medium level of gas—is six and a half bucks now, right?

And the Trump administration quickly began to feel this pressure. The Iranians ended up being very effective in deploying this tool that was at their disposal, which is the ability to strangle an important part of the global interdependent economy…

Pam Karlan: And it was completely foreseeable that they could do that, right?

Allen Weiner: Everybody who works on the Iranian portfolio in the U.S. government, if you war-game a conflict with Iran, everybody knows that on day one, the Iranians fire a bunch of missiles at Israel and Gulf states and U.S. facilities. And on day two, they choke the Strait of Hormuz. This is absolutely something that the professional experts know. It may be that the people who are running foreign policy for the administration did not know this or were not listening to the advice that they got. I think it’s important, Pam, to realize that the Trump administration had been emboldened by what it saw as its success with the Venezuela operation. And I think they went in, they did this operation to snatch, to remove, and to abduct Maduro from Venezuela. It was a kind of a technical tour de force. They lost no forces. They snatched him. And I think Donald Trump…

Pam Karlan: And then we made a bunch of deals with the people who were…

Allen Weiner: Yes. Stage two is not necessarily the one that is so deeply thought out.

Pam Karlan: Pam Karlan: Yes.

Allen Weiner: But I think when we see the image of Maduro, whether it’s AI-generated or not, in his orange jumpsuit and goggles being put on the plane and brought to the United States, I think Donald Trump thought, “Wow, this military option is awesome.” And I think he was emboldened to think that there would be a similarly simple and swift and effective military outcome. Again, the professionals—the foreign policy professionals in both the State Department and the Defense Department—would have been advising to the contrary, but I don’t think people were listening.

Pam Karlan: So we’ve got the U.S. in there, and then there’s the only other country that really joined us in this, which was Israel.

Allen Weiner: …in the actual bombing campaign. There was then pressure as the Iranians closed the Strait of Hormuz. The U.S. administration began calling on our NATO allies and said, “Hey, you should actually support us. We’re allies. You should support us with the de-mining operation. Please send your warships to the Gulf to try to help open the Strait of Hormuz.” And I think the NATO allies thought, “This is not our zoo. These are not our monkeys. We were not consulted on this. We had nothing to do with this.” The NATO allies did not come to our assistance, which has actually enhanced the tensions between the United States and NATO. There’s other collateral damage that follows from this conflict.

Pam Karlan: We then decide we’re going to negotiate some sort of truce, some sort of deal, with the Iranians, and what is that? What is that deal? It seems to be hard for me to wrap my mind…

Allen Weiner: Yes. I will say this. I was talking with my wife about these things, and she said, “How do you think the Iranians feel about this?” And I said, “Let me put it this way.” If I were a senior government official in the Iranian Foreign Ministry, upon seeing the signature of the MOU that we’ve concluded, I would be high-fiving my colleagues in the ministry because it’s quite clear that the MOU itself is a big win for Iran.

Now, the U.S. did achieve through its military operations, it did achieve some goals.

It did not eliminate or destroy Iran’s missile program, but it degraded it. There are estimates that a third, a half, of the missile program was destroyed. We said we wanted to annihilate Iran’s navy. All of its big ships have been sunk, right? Although it does still retain these small, fast boats which are able to go out in the Gulf and drop the mines…

Pam Karlan: I was going to say—what were the big ships in the Iranian Navy were not…

Allen Weiner: They were not the ones…

Pam Karlan: They were not the problem for us…

Allen Weiner: …posing a threat to commercial. They were not—we did not have a solution to the instruments that were being used to pose the threat that we face. But in the agreement itself, I was quite struck when I saw it. I thought, “This is actually quite a staggering achievement for Iran.” When we think about our objectives, is there anything in this agreement about support for the regional proxies? Silence. Other than that, actually, the Iranians have been successful in saying not that they have to stop supporting Hezbollah, but that ending the war in Lebanon—that is to say, having the U.S. impose constraints on Israel—is now one of the shared objectives that we have, right?

Pam Karlan: Yes, that’s really striking, right? We went into this war essentially saying to Israel, “You go and do what you want,” and now we’re in this position where, in order to get any kind of agreement with the Iranians, we have to put pressure on the Israelis.

Allen Weiner: We were together when we entered the war, but we’ve clearly jettisoned the Israelis on the way out of the war. There has not been close consultation with the Israelis on the terms of the MOU. I’m looking at the language. It is quite astonishing where we say that the U.S. and Iran and their allies in the current war declare the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon, but the Israelis didn’t sign this thing.

So we appear to have agreed that Israel, as our ally, is now precluded from conducting its military operations in Lebanon. So we see no restriction on Iran’s support for the regional proxies. There’s silence on the missile program, which Iran is already reconstructing. There’s silence on the Navy. The nuclear issue is the heart of the deal, and really there, what we ended up with essentially is not very much. Iran…

Pam Karlan: We ended up basically back where we were in 2015, didn’t we?

Allen Weiner: Maybe less.

Pam Karlan: But certainly not more.

Allen Weiner: Certainly not more. Iran reaffirmed that it would not procure or develop nuclear weapons. That’s actually been stated as official Iranian policy for decades. The previous supreme leader issued a religious decree, a fatwa, saying that Iran would not develop nuclear weapons. We have no details in this instrument. It’s reflective… If you look at the Board of Peace proposal for Gaza, there’s now been a separate trilateral MOU that’s been negotiated with Israel, Lebanon, and the United States.

This administration is attracted to these…We saw the negotiations with Russia and Ukraine. They’re attracted to these documents that have a list of points—15 points, 14 points, 20 points. They’re framed at a very high level of generality. If you pull up the JCPOA, you need to make sure that you’ve got toner in your printer because it’s a document of more than 100 pages long that really addresses detailed micro issues, and that’s not true for this.

Now, again, this is understood to be an interim arrangement, that a final agreement is supposed to be concluded within 60 days. I’m very hard-pressed to imagine that we’re going to see a final agreement concluded within 60 days. But again, Iran has agreed that it will not pursue a nuclear weapon. We were already there. The Trump administration in the past had said that Iran would not be allowed to have a nuclear fuel cycle at all. No enrichment, no civilian nuclear energy. Instead, we now see that there’s going to be a discussion about how Iran’s nuclear needs will be met that contemplates a pair…

Pam Karlan: What about the Strait of Hormuz? It used to be you just—your boat just traveled through the Strait of Hormuz for free.

Allen Weiner: Yes, and this is another issue. In the MOU, there’s been a commitment on the part of Iran that for 60 days the strait is open. We’re open for business again. Although Iran…

Pam Karlan: There’s some mines lying around.

Allen Weiner: There’s still some mines, and the Iranians are saying, “You have to coordinate with us,” which is why we saw a resurrection or a return to strikes in just the last few days, because the Iranians launched drone strikes against commercial shipping that it said had not coordinated with us.

So again, the details of what exactly “free transit” means. But the thing that’s even maybe more alarming is there’s a reference in the MOU to the possibility that Iran will be able to start charging vessels for transit through the Strait of Hormuz. There’s a commitment that there will be no charge, but that’s for 60 days only.

Pam Karlan: Right, that was…

Allen Weiner: 60 days only! This week only! Free transit through the Gulf, and now it appears that the Iranians and the Omanis, who also have control over the other side of the strait, are talking about a regime in which they’re going to start charging vessels for transit through the Gulf, which is incompatible with longstanding…

Pam Karlan: Right.

Allen Weiner: …traditions of freedom of movement, innocent transit through territorial waters that connect international waterways.

Pam Karlan: So far we’ve been talking about our relationship to Iran and our relationship to Israel, but there’s also this question: At some point, doesn’t the president have to get congressional approval to a) to continue this war, and b) on these agreements? Or is this all just going to be done through an executive agreement and this kind of weird starting and stopping of the clock, so we don’t have to go to Congress…

Allen Weiner: There are two separate questions there. Let me talk about the second one, the international law one. So the first question is: Is this instrument a treaty? Is it legally binding? If it’s a legally binding instrument, there might be a question about whether or not congressional approval is required. In fact, even if it is an executive agreement that falls within the scope of the president’s inherent constitutional powers—when the JCPOA was negotiated, there was so much hostility on the part of the right toward the agreement that legislation was enacted that said, “If you do an international agreement, it requires congressional approval.”

So the JCPOA was done to circumvent that because the Obama administration knew that they would not have been able to secure approval in the Senate, at least, for the deal, and did the JCPOA in the form of a non-binding arrangement. So lots of what is done in international law is not legally binding. So the JCPOA is what we call a political commitment or a non-binding arrangement.

I read the current MOU that’s been negotiated also as a political commitment. The co-author of my casebook, Duncan Hollis, who actually writes the treaty law chapter in our book, says he thinks it’s a treaty. So there’s ambiguity about that, and we don’t know what the subsequent, the final deal, what form that would take.

But because of that legislation that was enacted at the time of the Obama administration, provisions in which we would lift sanctions against Iran would require—if not congressional approval of the instrument, then congressional approval of the sanctions relief. So there’s going to be a role for Congress in dealing with the final deal. They capitalize “Deal” in the MOU, by the way, which kind of makes me crazy, but it’s a little pet peeve.

Pam Karlan: But it’s a Donald Trump production.

Allen Weiner: You said it, not me.

Pam Karlan: …and then capitalize it. He’s like…it’s translated from the original German. They’re just randomly capitalized.

Allen Weiner: Wir müssen Ordnung haben, ja.

So the separate question is the War Powers question—the domestic law question. We had commenced under the War Powers Resolution, adopted after the end of the Vietnam War when Congress realized we were not supervising the executive branch enough. The basic idea is that if the president introduces U.S. forces into situations, into combat situations or situations in which combat is likely, he has to obtain congressional approval within 60 days. If not, he’s legally obligated to withdraw U.S. forces. He gets a 30-day extension if he wants, right?

And it’s interesting that we were running up to the 60-day deadline with the operation that began at the end of February, and around the time in April, a ceasefire was announced. The Trump administration declared that because there’s a ceasefire, there’s been a permanent—they used the word “permanent”—there’s been a permanent cessation of hostilities, so the War Powers obligation’s not triggered.

Pam Karlan: This is starting to look like the last two minutes of a football game.

Allen Weiner: Yes, exactly.

Pam Karlan: We’re going to take a little time out for a commercial, and then we’ll stop the clock with throwing the ball out of bounds and…

Allen Weiner: The other thing that I find interesting is when we look at our international law justification for attacking Iran, there’s a quite different theory.

The State Department legal adviser has said, “Actually, we’ve been involved in a continuing armed conflict with Iran, maybe since 1979, back to the days of the hostage-taking.” So on the one hand, we don’t need a new justification for attacking Iran because we’re simply in the middle… It’s like December 20th, 1941. We don’t need a new justification for attacking Japan. We’re in the middle of the war.

So with the international law claim, the argument is there’s an ongoing war. With respect to the War Powers Resolution, the claim is like, no, the war is over permanently, even though, of course, since that ceasefire, there has been the resumption of shooting between the U.S. and Iran.

Now, Congress recently passed a concurrent resolution demanding that the president either get congressional—explicitly with respect to this operation—that either the president get congressional approval for his military operations in the Gulf, or that he withdraw U.S. forces. You’re the constitutional law expert, not me, in terms of understanding exactly what the effect of a concurrent resolution that does not contemplate presidential signature is.

Pam Karlan: Yes. This has always been the problem with the War Powers Act: it’s not clear how you enforce it.

If Congress isn’t willing to enforce it by either—and Congress’s ways of enforcing it are so draconian or so politically unpalatable, in some ways, that they’re really hard to use, right?

Allen Weiner: I don’t get that. Why don’t they just cut off funding? This is…

Pam Karlan: Because they could cut off the funding.

The problem being, it’s not clear exactly how they cut off the funding. But if they cut off the funding, the politics of saying, “What are we doing about our brave boys? We’re cutting off their funds,” is difficult.

Allen Weiner: No.

Pam Karlan: Impeachment is out of the question.

Allen Weiner: Right. We’ve done it at least twice.

Pam Karlan: I assume we’re going to see “mission accomplished” fairly soon on this. He’s going to declare victory and try to go home.

Allen Weiner: I’ll just say two things.

We have done the suspension of funding twice. We did it after Vietnam.

Pam Karlan: Right.

Allen Weiner: We also did it in Somalia after the Black Hawk Down operation. If you’re targeted enough—the boys get their money for all of the funding—it’s just not for this. I’ve often been…

Pam Karlan: Yes, no, I think it…

Allen Weiner: …surprised by Congress’s…

Pam Karlan: I think it can be done. It’s not that it can’t be done, but…

Allen Weiner: No…

Pam Karlan: Do you see anything other than a sort of unilateral announcement we got from the president saying, “I’ve triumphed here. Let’s turn back to the reflecting pool,” or?

Allen Weiner: Yes, I think there will be ongoing negotiation.

I think there is a possibility, it’s not going to happen within 60 days. I think there’s a possibility of an agreement on the nuclear program. My guess is it won’t be so different from what was in the JCPOA. The Iranians will agree to limits on enrichment. They might even agree—I’ve seen some press talking about what’s going on inside of Iran—there might be some willingness to say, “Hey, no enrichment at all for five years.” Right?

But limits on enrichment, either for a period of time or at the level of enrichment, they’ll open up their facilities to IAEA inspectors again, which they had done. The evidence before the U.S. withdrew from the JCPOA during the first Trump administration was that Iran was actually largely complying with its obligations under the JCPOA.

They did have this residual clandestine…We know that the Iranians have been trying to figure out, “If we want to develop a nuclear bomb, how do we do that?” There clearly has been a covert program, but they had stayed on the line of, “We’re just going to get up to the breakout point, but not cross that threshold.”

And they were complying with that. So I think the chance that we get a JCPOA-type of deal is plausible. And I think it’s already interesting that the president was among the most virulent critics of the time limits in the JCPOA that we talked about. And I’ve already seen him tweeting that, with respect to Iran’s undertaking that it won’t develop a nuclear weapon, as opposed to the interim steps that you would want to take to monitor or control that, the president has already said Iran’s agreed to this to infinity.

So I think you’re right. It may be that he will try to basically find a way of saying, “We have a great deal, and it’s better than the Obama deal.” I think he needs to find some way of describing it as better than the Obama deal, even if that might not be true.

Pam Karlan: That strikes me as a pretty great prediction of exactly where we’re going to be. And when he does that, Allen, I’m going to ask you to come back and tell us about what’s happened then. So I want to thank our guest today, my colleague Allen Weiner.

This is Stanford Legal. If you’re enjoying the show, please tell a friend and leave us a rating or review on your favorite podcast app. Your feedback improves the show, and it helps new listeners to discover us. I’m Pam Karlan. See you next time.