A letter from the White House is enough to officially declare an ongoing war a closed chapter. That is exactly what happened today. The administration informs Congress that hostilities with Iran have ended. At the same time, American forces remain in the region. The military presence continues. The situation is anything but calm. The contradiction is not explained, not resolved, not even acknowledged. It is simply ignored, as if ignoring has become a form of politics.

A letter from the White House is enough to officially declare an ongoing war a closed chapter. That is exactly what happened today. The administration informs Congress that hostilities with Iran have ended. At the same time, American forces remain in the region. The military presence continues. The situation is anything but calm. The contradiction is not explained, not resolved, not even acknowledged. It is simply ignored, as if ignoring has become a form of politics.

The timing is no coincidence. On May 1, the legal deadline expires within which the president must obtain congressional approval for military operations. This deadline is now being bypassed, not through a vote, but through a new definition of reality. If there is officially no war anymore, then the obligation for authorization disappears as well. That is precisely what the letter aims at. A legal pirouette in two sentences, written by a president who treats the Constitution like a lease that can be terminated when it becomes inconvenient.

Donald Trump makes it clear enough himself. The operations were successful, he says, work toward a lasting peace is ongoing, but the threat from Iran remains significant. That is not reassurance. It is preparation. The war is supposedly over, while at the same time the door to the next phase is left slightly open. Peace that can become war again at any moment, depending on how the president woke up in the morning and how many likes appeared on Truth Social.

This undermines a basic principle of American democracy. The use of military force without congressional approval was controversial from the start. Two months after the conflict began, Congress should have decided whether the operation would continue. Instead, nothing happens. Republican lawmakers let the deadline pass and hand full control to the White House. In this moment, the letter is more than a notice. It is a retroactive justification for a silence that is politically louder than any statement.

The legal construction is thin as paper. Military presence does not end because it is described differently. Ships do not disappear because of a sentence in a document. Soldiers do not come home because someone in the White House typed the word peace into a line. Yet this is exactly the path being taken. The war is formally ended without any change to the actual conditions. Reality and explanation move in different directions, and the explanation wins because no one defends reality anymore.

At the center is an expansion of presidential power that is unusual even by the standards of previous conflicts. The president determines the start of a war. He determines its course. And now he determines its end, without intervention from Congress. That this approach works politically is not only due to the White House strategy. It is due to a Congress that has accepted the abandonment of its own role. An institution that no longer exercises oversight becomes decoration. A democracy in which the legislature only watches while a president wages and ends war is a democracy that exists in name only.

At the same time, the situation in the region remains unresolved. The tensions are not settled. The economic consequences continue. Energy prices have not stabilized. Military infrastructure remains in place, ready to be reactivated at any moment. The statement from Washington ends nothing. It only shifts responsibility. It creates a condition in which a war can be reactivated at any time without anyone having to be asked first. It is the ideal situation for a president who sees responsibility as a burden, and the ideal gift to an Iran that knows the next bombardment will not be restrained by a parliament.

What remains is a situation that has nothing to do with the normal functioning of a legal or constitutional system. A president declares a war over while effectively preparing its continuation. A Congress that allows exactly that because silence is more convenient than opposition. And a world that watches, because watching has become the primary activity. When history books one day describe this chapter, it will not be as the day a war ended. It will be as the day a country stopped telling the truth about what it was doing.

It gets even more absurd. The world is watching. Both are true today. Both will be truer tomorrow. The price will be paid by the entire world. Farewell.