David Schultz, Professor of Political Science at Hamline University, USA, Visiting Lecturer at Mykolas Romeris University (MRU), and a member of the MRU LAB Justice Research Laboratory.
Two weeks into the United States' war against Iran, the American president is showing signs of hesitation. He launched military strikes without a declaration of war from Congress, without meaningful public debate, and in apparent violation of the constitutional order he swore to uphold. Yet the force now pushing back against him is not the legislature, the courts, or an outraged electorate. It is the bond market.
For Lithuanians, this carries weight far beyond American domestic politics. A United States consumed by a Middle Eastern war of choice is one with less capacity, and perhaps less political will, to sustain its commitments in Eastern Europe. And the conflict carries a dangerous symbolic logic: when a great power wages war unilaterally, in defiance of international law and its own constitution, it hands adversaries a ready-made justification for doing the same. Russia has taken note.
A War Without Democratic Consent
The legal basis for this war is, by any serious constitutional reading, deeply flawed. The United States Constitution vests the power to declare war in Congress, not the executive. President Trump acted without that authorization, and constitutional scholars across the political spectrum have noted the breach. Yet Congress has not moved. Courts have not intervened. The machinery designed to prevent exactly this kind of unilateral action has remained largely inert.
Public opinion has not been silent, but it has been ignored. Polling consistently shows that approximately 60 percent of Americans oppose the war. That majority has not translated into political pressure sufficient to alter the administration's course. A government pursuing a war that most of its citizens oppose, without legislative authorization, has crossed a threshold that warrants serious attention.
The Discipline of Global Capitalism
What democratic institutions have failed to achieve, global markets are attempting in their own impersonal way. Oil prices are rising sharply. Stock markets are retreating. Gasoline prices are climbing at a pace Americans notice immediately, and economists are beginning to use words like stagflation and recession. The political scientist Charles Lindblom described capitalism as a structural force that disciplines governments: a decentralized authority that punishes policies threatening economic stability. When governments stray too far from market expectations, capital moves, prices shift, and pain follows.
There is a pointed irony in this. The Trump administration has consistently deployed American economic dominance as a geopolitical weapon, using tariffs, sanctions, and financial pressure to coerce other states. Now that same global system is turning its disciplinary logic inward. Earlier in Trump's presidency, when sweeping tariffs triggered sharp market declines, policy was quietly walked back. Whether that pattern can repeat itself in a live military conflict, with far greater stakes and momentum, remains uncertain. Wars are considerably harder to de-escalate than trade policies.
Why Lithuania Should Be Watching Closely
For Lithuania and its Baltic neighbors, the strategic consequences of this war are direct. American security commitments to NATO's eastern flank are not infinitely elastic. A foreign policy establishment consumed by the Persian Gulf is one with diminished bandwidth for Eastern Europe. The rotational forces, logistical planning, and political capital required to sustain credible deterrence against Russia all compete with the demands of a shooting war elsewhere.
The precedent is equally troubling. The United States launched a military attack on a sovereign state without UN Security Council authorization, without congressional consent, and without a coherent definition of victory. It is a war of choice conducted outside the rules-based international order. When Lithuania and its partners seek to hold Russia accountable for Ukraine, the core argument rests on international law: the UN Charter prohibits wars of aggression. That argument becomes structurally weaker when the world's leading democracy is simultaneously conducting its own legally dubious military adventure. Moscow's propagandists have not missed this, and they will not hesitate to exploit it.
The two situations are not morally equivalent. But in the arena of international legitimacy, perceptions and precedents carry real weight. A world in which great powers act unilaterally and without legal justification is structurally more dangerous for small states on contested borders.
A Warning Worth Heeding
If market pressure does ultimately constrain the Iran war, that outcome should not be celebrated without reservation. It would represent a failure of democratic governance. Markets can signal distress and punish instability, but they cannot reverse the deaths of soldiers committed without a clear strategy, nor rebuild the norms of international conduct that unilateralism erodes. There is also no guarantee that economic pain will arrive quickly enough to prevent further escalation. Conflicts develop their own momentum.
What the Iran crisis reveals, above all, is the fragility of the institutional architecture designed to prevent exactly this kind of unilateral action. Both the American constitutional framework and the post-1945 international order are under strain, not only in Washington, but in Moscow and elsewhere. For Lithuania, the lesson is not to abandon faith in the transatlantic alliance, but to redouble commitment to European defense capacity and to insist, consistently and without exception, on the principle that wars require legal justification. That principle is not abstract. For countries on NATO's eastern flank, it is a matter of national survival.