Bush, mind you, was a staunch unilateralist who had little affection for the U.N., or Europe, or NATO. (“Preserve the myth, and laugh,” one Bush official said then of the trans-Atlantic alliance.) But Bush felt compelled to invoke international law and win over skeptics at home and abroad—who were strident, and often eloquent, in their opposition to his “preemptive” Iraq war.

“In this temple of the United Nations, we are the guardians of an ideal, the guardians of a conscience,” France’s foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, perorated before the invasion, calling on Washington “to give priority to peaceful disarmament” of Iraq.

Today, U.S. President Donald Trump appears to be planning what is, if anything, an even more flimsily justified preemptive war than Bush’s invasion was, having dispatched aircraft carriers, fighter jets, and surveillance planes against Iran in the biggest display of U.S. force since the Iraq War. But the silence from across the Atlantic is nearly deafening. The Europeans seem to be so snakebit over Trump’s threats to invade Greenland and abandon Ukraine—the two issues they’ve fought Trump hardest on—that they’re fearful of voicing too many objections about Iran. European officials have urged diplomacy and restraint but have not openly condemned the possibility of a U.S. attack.

“The Europeans are gun-shy. They don’t want to get into yet another fistfight with Washington,” said Charles Kupchan of Georgetown University, an expert in transatlantic relations and former national security official in the Clinton and Obama administrations. “I think part of it is that nobody is bothering to call them, so the Europeans have no idea what Trump is up to. In 2003, there was an enormous amount of diplomatic engagement.”

The U.N., meanwhile, is seen less as a “temple” than a leper colony—at least by the White House. Trump appears to pay no attention to the Security Council, where his exiled former national security advisor, now-U.N. Ambassador Mike Waltz, delivers little-publicized statements out of the headlines.

“I don’t need international law,” Trump said in January, and he has repeatedly dismissed the U.N. as all but useless while more recently setting up a dubious “Board of Peace” as an alternative, with himself as lifetime chairman.

Democrats are, for the most part, rather meekly demanding more details about and justifications for what Trump plans. But at the same time, few of them are seriously questioning the legality of the imminent Iran war or turning it into a major issue—even though the midterm elections are just eight months out. Senators complain that the Trump administration has provided little information to justify the recent buildup of naval forces and air assets, but the language has been mostly mild.

“We’ve had no real briefing, information or anything else. So it’s hard to justify something without rationale,” said Democratic Sen. Jack Reed, the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Another Democratic senator, Tim Kaine, and a small group of House members are pushing for a measure to force Trump to seek congressional approval, but its prospects are questionable.

During Trump’s State of the Union on Tuesday, many Democrats (even uber-progressive, anti-war Sen. Elizabeth Warren) stood to applaud the president’s threatening remarks against Iran.

While many leading Democrats went along with Bush’s Iraq War in an environment of heightened patriotism after 9/11, there was at least an intense debate at the time. Among those who led it was then-Sen. Joe Biden, who—working in bipartisan fashion with Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana—pushed hard for a resolution in the run-up to the war that would have required the Bush administration to delay the use of force until the U.N. approved a new resolution.

All in all, it is a measure of how much our world has changed, how degraded our political debate has become, and how—after nearly a quarter century of “forever war”—we appear to be inured to the idea that U.S. presidents will do as they please with the military, without checking with Congress or allies.

More than ever, the United States seems to view itself as “judge, jury and executioner all rolled into one,” as former State Department counselor Rosa Brooks wrote presciently in her 2016 book, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything.

Trump, of course, has turbocharged this trend with a series of unilateral strikes beginning last summer, when he joined Israel’s attacks on Iran’s nuclear sites while demanding “unconditional surrender” from Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Following that, Trump authorized an operation to capture Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. And even then, European and congressional reaction was muted.

Things were very different 23 years ago. “Not only did Bush work hard to build a substantive case, domestically and internationally, the administration sought to develop domestic and international legal justifications,” said William Wohlforth, an international relations expert at Dartmouth College. He also noted that the Bush team went to great lengths to establish new international legal criteria for preemptive war.

Bush and his chief cheerleaders for the Iraq War, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, were probably as unilateralist and arrogant—especially in their dismissive attitude toward U.S. allies—as the Trump team is. But they felt constrained by constitutional and international norms, all of which appear to be fading fast today. Bush sought an Iraq War resolution from Congress—and in October 2002, the “Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution” gave him a bipartisan mandate, passing the House with a 296-133 vote and the Senate 77-23.

And while he strained (and ultimately failed) to establish any links between Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda—the true culprits of 9/11—Bush still made a compelling case that the United Nations could not permit its resolutions against Saddam to be defied. In November 2002, Bush won a 15-0 U.N. Security Council vote forcing Iraq to open up to U.N. inspection and surrender any weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Stunningly, all five permanent members, including Russia and China, supported it.

Today, “it’s a new normal,” Kupchan said in an interview. “The contrast between what Bush did in 2003 and what Trump is doing now underscores just how much norms have changed, because even though the Bush people were unilateralists, they still operated in an America and a world where there was at least a pretense of doing it by the book. That means going to Congress, discussing the issue in the U.N., and working behind closed doors with allies. And those days are gone.

“It’s not just Trump. I think there’s been a gradual erosion over time that stems both from the change in the international environment, and the degree to which lots of different countries are turning their backs on institutionalized multilateralism,” Kupchan added. “Until Trump, there was at least acknowledgement that the system was eroding. There was regret about the many uses of force under the name of counterterrorism. But Trump revels in turning his back on norms.”

Despite the dubious intelligence cooked up by the Bush administration’s Iraq War hawks in 2002 and 2003, the whole process actually worked well for a while. The moment when Bush went wrong came when even after Saddam caved to the pressure—giving U.N. inspectors free run of his palaces and sites, though they found little indication of WMD (and their assessments proved far more accurate than the CIA’s)—the president decided to invade anyway.

That was when, in the eyes of the world, U.S. power went from being legitimate to illegitimate.

It was also, arguably, one of the most catastrophic moves in the history of U.S. foreign policy—and it played a big role in discrediting the Republican establishment and helping to pave the way for Trump, who ironically rose to power mocking the Iraq War. By mistaking a small nonstate actor—al Qaeda—for a giant state-sponsored terrorist menace, and by invading a Muslim nation in the heart of the Islamic world, Bush engendered a whole new wave of radical Islamism that culminated in the rise of the Islamic State and new iteration of al Qaeda.

While Trump is confronting a Shiite—not a Sunni—threat in Iran, he may be risking something similar, though of course what he plans now is not even close (yet) to the scale of Bush’s war. And given that Trump is apparently not planning a ground invasion, the stakes may not be as high.

“Most people believe that Trump will limit this to an air campaign,” Wohlforth said. “In the Venezuela case, he showed the administration’s theory of the case: We don’t give a damn who runs a country as long as they do what we want—we’re not going to get involved in nation-building or regime change.”

Another big difference between then and now is that while the Bush administration sought mightily to conjure evidence of Iraqi WMD—waging an internal battle within the CIA and intelligence community over sources and methods—the Trump administration has produced next to no evidence of an Iranian threat. Indeed, it can’t even seem to get its story straight.

Though Trump said he had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear enrichment capacity with strikes last June, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters on Wednesday the Iranians are “not enriching right now,” Trump envoy Steve Witkoff just said on Feb. 21 that Iran is “a week away from having industrial-grade bombmaking material.”

Today, just as the Bush administration never carried out a serious internal debate about whether invading Iraq was a wise move while the job against al Qaeda in Afghanistan remained unfinished, Trump is also sending the U.S. military into the unknown. And even if his unilateral move against Iran—which has already cost nearly a half billion dollars, even before any attack—turns out well in the end, it will be little more than a historical accident rather than the result of serious policymaking or deliberation.

Still, Trump may be risking more than he knows by making a big move back into the Middle East. At a time when the U.S. defense industrial base can barely provide enough munitions to supply Ukraine, a big expenditure of weaponry against Iran could help invite aggression by China against Taiwan.

“In six years, Trump has moved from the doctrine of ‘preemptive assassination’ that led to his killing of [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Gen. Qassem] Suleimani, to a full-fledged embrace of performative militarism and preemptive war that fosters a cult of forever war,” said Yale Law School scholar Harold Koh, President Barack Obama’s former State Department chief counsel, in an interview. “Trump’s saber-rattling toward Iran simplistically flattens a complex issue into a false bipolar choice between ‘attack’ or ‘do nothing.’”

But the Trump administration has not yet bothered to argue that issue—or much of its case—to the public. The president himself has shifted from suggesting he is intent on regime change in Tehran to saying he mainly wants Tehran to surrender its nuclear program. During violent protests across Iran in January, he posted on Truth Social: “Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING – TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!! … HELP IS ON ITS WAY.” But in his State of the Union address, Trump suggested that he’d live with a regime that made the necessary concession. “They want to make a deal, but we haven’t heard those secret words: ‘We will never have a nuclear weapon,’” he said.

“There was a narrative with the Iraq War,” Kupchan said. “They made the case to the American public, though it turned out to be a false bill of goods. The Trump people haven’t done that. They haven’t spun this into a narrative. They are sort of all over the place.”