Washington, DC – A new war in the Middle East and the knock-on effect of rising petrol prices have roiled the United States public, according to a slate of polls, but a month into the US-Israeli war on Iran, lawmakers have shown little appetite to rein in the conflict.
That was evidenced earlier this week when the US Senate again failed to pass a so-called War Powers resolution to curtail US President Donald Trump’s ability to unilaterally prosecute the war, which began with US and Israeli strikes on February 28.
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list of 3 itemsend of listThe vote failed in the Republican-controlled chamber, 53-47, the same as on March 4, with senators voting along party lines, save for one Republican, Rand Paul, voting in favour, and one Democrat, Jon Fetterman, voting against. Democrats in the chamber have promised to hold a weekly vote to force the issue.
Meanwhile, despite evidence that Democrats in the US House of Representatives, which is also slimly controlled by Republicans, have the votes to pass their own War Powers resolution, the party’s leadership has reportedly backed away from holding a vote.
That shows potential wariness about compelling party members to stake a position beyond “token opposition” as the Trump administration continues to prosecute the controversial war, according to Jamal Abdi, the president of the National Iranian American Council.
“There are [members of Congress] who are stuck between their support from the pro-Israel lobby and other political factors and the fact of this war being so unpopular,” Abdi told Al Jazeera.
“I also think that there’s this view that Trump is suffering. He’s bleeding out politically, and they don’t want to stem the bleeding.”
Approaching the one-month mark, the Trump administration has not articulated a unifying endgame for the conflict, instead hailing the degradation of Iran’s military capabilities and the assassination of top officials.
Observers have warned that the war appears to have entered a phase of attrition that strategically favours Iran, in which, as the US director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has said, “the regime remains intact but largely degraded”.
Polls continue to show widespread disapproval of the war, with a Reuters/Ipsos poll on Wednesday showing 61 percent disapproval compared with 35 percent approval. Trump’s overall approval rating slumped to 36 percent this week, the lowest since he took office.
An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research also released on Wednesday found 59 percent of Americans felt US military action in Iran had been excessive.
Over the last week, Trump continued to send conflicting messages on the war, claiming ongoing – if disputed talks – with Iranian officials and releasing a ceasefire plan that Tehran has since rejected.
That came as the Pentagon deployed yet more US troops to the region, further raising the prospect of a ground invasion.
Republican unity?
For their part, Republican lawmakers have so far broadly fallen behind Trump, with many of the party’s top members cheering the US military effort and embracing Trump’s claims that the conflict will be a weeks-long affair.
“Republicans writ large, but for [US Representative] Thomas Massie and maybe Rand Paul, are going to support anything Donald Trump does,” Eli Bremer, a Republican strategist and former Colorado US Senate candidate, told Al Jazeera. “Everybody is very, very entrenched in their positions – but things could change.”
Given the fickle nature of public opinion in the US, he argued, Republicans appear to be assessing that the short-term pain will not necessarily result in major political fallout in the midterm elections in November if Trump can claim some degree of victory in the weeks ahead.
The main test will be if Trump is able to secure the Strait of Hormuz, even if it requires a boots-on-the-ground deployment, and in turn stabilise global oil markets to create the perception that the US has “brought Iran to its knees”, he said.
“On the flip side, if it goes on for another eight weeks or three months or some undetermined period of time, and gas prices in the US keep going up and up and up, then Democrats will use that to say Trump said he was was going to avoid ‘unending wars’, and look what he’s gotten us into,” Bremer said.
Polls have generally shown higher support for the war among Republicans, with the AP-NORC poll released on Wednesday finding that about half say the US military action has been “about right”. A quarter said the war had “gone too far”.
Funding friction and MAGA dissent?
One nascent point of inter-party friction has been US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s recent appeal for $200bn to fund the war, which some Republicans have seen as antithetical to Trump’s “America First” pledge.
“The answer on most of this is: I don’t know,” centrist Republican Lisa Murkowski recently told reporters in reference to the funding request. She called for an open hearing in the case.
Representative Lauren Boebert, who was once seen as a rising star in Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, told reporters she was “tired of the Industrial War Complex getting our hard-earned tax dollars”. Eric Burlison, another US Representative who has hewed closely to MAGA, called for the Pentagon to pass an audit before he would support more funding for the war.
Nancy Mace, meanwhile, said following a House Armed Services briefing on Iran on Wednesday: “Let me repeat: I will not support troops on the ground in Iran, even more so after this briefing.”
For his part, Senator Lindsey Graham, a longtime Iran hawk, pledged to push ahead with a so-called “reconciliation bill” to provide the funding. The controversial legislative mechanism would allow the Senate to pass the funding bill with a simple majority of 51 Republicans, rather than the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster.
Just how meaningfully the war has divided Trump’s base remains unclear.
Top dissenters include influential figures such as Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, who have been vocal critics of the war, the apparent influence of Israel over US military action in the Middle East, and the contradictions to Trump’s campaign promises regarding so-called forever wars.
White House officials have repeatedly pointed to a collection of polls that show sky-high support for the war among self-identifying MAGA republicans: That included a recent NBC poll showing 90 percent of so-called MAGA voters supported the war.
Some politics watchers have said the results are potentially misleading: Those who break from the decisions on the war may no longer identify with a movement seen by many as inseparable from Trump’s personality.
“When people in this demographic disagree strongly enough, eventually they just stop calling themselves MAGA,” Jim Geraghty, a political correspondent for the conservative National Review, wrote recently in an op-ed in The Washington Post.
Michael Ahn Paarlberg, an associate professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University, said the influence of figures like Carlson and their ability to transform right-wing politics should not be underestimated.
“These are people that have large followings. I think this is going to be a longer-term change, a generational divide,” he said. “The narrative that the US followed Israel into this war is, at this point, I think, pretty indisputable and broadly accepted by much of the public.”
“We’re seeing a general scepticism of the US alliance with Israel from a nationalist perspective, asking: How does this serve American national interests?” he said.
How long can it last?
The length and nature of the war will likely ultimately decide its political fallout.
Paarlberg argued that, while critics often compare the war to US military quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan as part of the so-called “global war on terror”, the nature of the conflict puts it into its own category.
The administration has, so far, relied exclusively on air power for more than a month of conflict. Any possible troop deployments appear aimed at more acute objectives than full-scale occupation.
That has kept US casualties in the war relatively low, while simultaneously keeping the Trump administration’s wider aims for the conflict out of reach. In combination, that could be a recipe for a grinding conflict to normalise in the background of US public life.
To date, at least 13 members of the US military have been killed in the war, alongside
“I think that as long as US casualties do not rise precipitously, Republican lawmakers, at least ones who are loyal to Trump, won’t see as much war weariness on the part of the US public due to casualties,” he said.
“However, they will still see war weariness on the part of consumers when it comes to prices at the pump,” he said.
If the knock-on effects of the war continue.
“We may be far enough from the midterms that there has not been this sobering effect for Republicans, and they think they can still kind of cling to Trump without harming their prospects,” NIAC’s Abdi told Al Jazeera.
“They have to calculate when they’re sort of going to jump ship on this,” he said.
