It is March 7, 2026, we are at war with Iran, and I am thinking about the Declaration of Independence. Not about its most famous lines about equality and unalienable rights, but a phrase at the end of the opening sentence: “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them…”
In June of 1776, Richard Henry Lee had introduced a resolution for independence to the Continental Congress. The delegates knew, however, that something more was needed than just a decision to go to war. If you were going to disrupt the world order—if people were going to die—you owed the world an argument. The causes had to be declared. The decision had to be prudent and well considered, with alternatives examined and objections aired. As Jefferson wrote, “let Facts be submitted to a candid world.” The Declaration then proceeded to do exactly that, laying out a long catalogue of grievances meant to demonstrate why war was necessary.
When the founders later wrote into the Constitution that only Congress could declare war, they were expecting that this kind of debate—the kind that had taken place in the Continental Congress in 1776—would be replicated whenever the nation considered going to war in the future. War required deliberation.
Such a decision would not be made lightly or impulsively, but as the result of a prudent, rational, and morally compelling choice. Underlying that expectation was a simple but profound recognition: when a nation sends its people to die and takes the lives of the people of another nation, it bears an obligation to reason its way there in public.
Character Mattered 