Presidents at War

Book DescriptionPresidents at War: Trump in Comparative PerspectiveFrom Eisenhower to the Second Trump AdministrationDr Naim Tahir Baig Presidents at War is the most systematically comparative scholarly treatment of Donald Trump's war policy yet produced. Working across seven analytical dimensions - constitutional authority, military doctrine, alliance posture, use of force, coercion short of war, war termination, and decision-making process - Dr Naim Tahir Baig measures Trump's record as commander-in-chief against the full sweep of postwar American executive war-making, from Dwight D.
Eisenhower's armistice diplomacy in Korea to the turbulent second Trump administration and its unprecedented direct strikes on Iranian nuclear infrastructure in 2025 and 2026. The result is a work of rigorous comparative analysis that refuses the twin temptations of exceptionalism and of apologetics, and renders instead the granular, dimension-specific verdicts that careful scholarship demands. The book's central argument is that neither the "rupture" nor the "variation" framing fully captures Trump's significance for the study of the presidency.
On some dimensions - the assertion of unilateral Article II authority, the accumulation of executive precedents, the deployment of sanctions and coercive economic tools - Trump represents the intensification of structural trends that predate him by decades and will survive him. On others - the explicit transactionalism applied to alliance partners, the scale of the Greenland territorial challenge to the NATO compact, the direct strikes on the sovereign territory of a major regional power without congressional authorization - the evidence supports the stronger verdict of rupture rather than acceleration.
And on the crucial institutional question of whether Congress retains effective constitutional war powers - the War Powers Resolution's sixty-day clock, the Article I appropriations power, the power of investigation - the book documents a structural transformation whose consequences extend far beyond any single presidency: the partisan-deference dynamic that has made the imperial presidency genuinely self-perpetuating for the first time in its history.
Scope and StructureThe book is structured to move from framework to history to contemporary analysis to synthesis. Two framework chapters establish the seven-dimensional grid and situate it within the existing scholarly literature on imperial presidency theory, strategic-culture analysis, and the deliberative-constructivist account of constitutional authority developed by Mariah Zeisberg. Three historical chapters reconstruct the postwar baseline - the arc from Truman through Reagan, the post-Cold War consensus of Bush 41 through Obama, and the internal erosion of that consensus in the Iraq War's aftermath - providing the comparative foundation against which the Trump chapters assess novelty and continuity.
The empirical core of the book - two full chapters on Trump I (2017-2021) and Trump II (2025 onward) - deploys the seven-dimensional apparatus with the rigor that the framework establishes. The Trump I chapter provides the book's most extensive treatment of the Soleimani decision-making process, drawing on a multi-source triangulation of the memoir record against contemporaneous reporting that renders the most credible composite account yet assembled.
The Trump II chapter confronts directly the places where the evidence pushes toward rupture rather than intensification: Operation Midnight Hammer (June 2025), the partisan-vote defeat of congressional resolutions invoking the War Powers Resolution, and the Supreme Court's February 2026 ruling in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump partially checking the administration's IEEPA tariff authority.