The war on terror never ended. It simply evolved into a series of forever wars humming in the background. With never-ending conflict in the Middle East normalized, it’s all too easy to stumble into a new Middle East war.
Over the past week, President Donald Trump has waffled on whether America would directly join Israel’s bombing of Iran, which may soon include commando raids and even ground forces. He gave an amber light to Netanyahu’s belligerence—neither encouraging nor discouraging him to begin bombing the country to halt its nuclear program, even though U.S. intelligence contradicted Israeli intelligence that suggested an Iranian nuke was imminent. When those initial strikes proved successful, Trump began providing some support.
As the U.S. slowly inched toward entering the war more directly, memes of Trump’s and George W. Bush’s faces blended together began appearing on social media, and soon all of the discredited excuses for regime change that led to America’s invasion of Iraq resurfaced: They’ll greet us as liberators, weapons of mass destruction must be eliminated, Mission Accomplished won’t be far off. Although Trump had run for president in 2016 and 2024 as an antiwar candidate and has often expressed skepticism toward endless U.S. military engagements in the Middle East, this week has revealed that we’re still living in George W. Bush’s world. And not just symbolically. So many aspects of W’s regime-change wars and the broader war on terror remain in place that it’s all too easy to drum up momentum for an entirely new season of the franchise in Iran.
The legal architecture of the war on terror was never dismantled. The congressional resolutions passed in 2001 and 2002 that authorized the president to use military force, initially against Al Qaeda and Iraq, respectively, remain on the books long after their relevance has expired. Expansive interpretations of those resolutions have created circumstances where 40,000 American troops are currently in the Middle East. The 2,500 service members who remain in Iraq and 1,500 or so in Syria have long been a significant liability and an easy target. Even as the Pentagon moves some troops out of Syria, they could still face Iranian fire—particularly if the U.S. is involved in a strike against Fordo, the site that Israeli intelligence believes houses much of Iran’s remaining nuclear program—and become the pretext for a more robust American involvement in Israel’s war of choice.
It’s not just that presidents of both parties contorted that outdated legal framework to pursue the operations they wanted to. Lawmakers deserve blame too. Successive presidents have been able to interpret post-9/11 authorizations for the use of military force expansively because Congress has all but abdicated its war powers. The legislature has lost in voice in the policy process and has given the executive way too much leeway in launching wars. Those old war authorizations could be used to justify hostilities against Iran. New efforts to claw back those powers, led by Republican Thomas Massie and Democrat Ro Khanna, alongside a parallel resolution led by Tim Kaine in the Senate, are hundreds of votes away from what is needed for Congress to reassert its constitutional authority.
Another way in which we know the war on terror never ended is that its cheerleaders and practitioners remain in positions of power. Its architects have never faced any form of accountability, as Harvard professor Stephen Walt details in his 2019 book, The Hell of Good Intentions. Bad ideas continue to circulate, and discredited experts from the Iraq War days still have a say. One striking example is Brett McGurk, the Middle East’s coordinator under Biden who started his career by working as a legal adviser to America’s occupation force in Iraq in 2003. Now he is a regular presence on CNN as a global affairs analyst. On air, McGurk takes it as a given that the U.S. is going to get involved in Israel’s new war, even while conceding, “We cannot effectuate this in a way we can predict. We have learned that lesson.” That McGurk has served every president since Bush is part of how we got here. “Without the Biden admin’s Middle East choices―dominated by McGurk―it’s unlikely we would now be on the brink of potentially immense conflict,” writes HuffPost’s Akbar Ahmed.
Every president had a role in this meta–forever war. Bush passed the baton to Obama, Trump, and Biden, who each had the opportunity (and, one could argue, a mandate) to end the war on terror but didn’t, with consequences that go well beyond the Middle East. Obama never closed the prison camp at Guantánamo, and neither did Biden, and Trump is exploiting its liminality in his immigration crackdown, not to mention the enduring presence of the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, both of which emerged from the trauma of the September 11 attacks. Obama helped advance the illusion that counterterrorism operations had no costs to Americans at home by accelerating the use of unmanned aircraft to assassinate targets; though Biden set new rules that limited drone strikes across the Middle East, in his first 100 days of this term, Trump has accelerated air strikes on Somalia and on Yemen and has continued his first-term policy of aggressively using drones abroad. None of them meaningfully broke with Bush—even as all have criticized his handling of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, often vociferously—and, in failing to do so, they continued his war in new forms.
Biden seemed to understand that there were lessons to be learned from the war on terror but couldn’t apply them beyond the narrowest sense. When he completed a Trump policy by fully withdrawing from Afghanistan, he was responding to public opinion, which had long since soured on the presence of American troops in the country. But the pullout was a disaster, leading to the deaths of 13 American service members. The Taliban regained power all but effortlessly. It was a boondoggle and tragedy of such dramatic proportions that Biden and his team undercut their own ability to criticize the forever war they had sought to end. Ultimately, it was also the beginning of the end of Biden’s presidency: The botched withdrawal was the moment when public opinion turned on him; a majority of Americans would not view him favorably—or, for that matter, believe he was up for the job of president—again.
Still, Biden had a second opportunity to officially end the war on terror, when, a year later, he ordered a drone strike in Kabul that killed Ayman Al Zawahri, one of the last 9/11 planners still at large. But even that didn’t lead to a larger rethink of why tens of thousands American troops have been a constant presence in the Middle East.
After Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel, Biden traveled to Israel and warned, “Justice must be done. But I caution this—while you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it. After 9/11, we were enraged in the United States. While we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.” But even that warning was seemingly perfunctory—which mistakes did he mean? Biden didn’t spell them out. And wasn’t Israel, just 10 days after Hamas’s attacks, already making some of those mistakes in Gaza? Almost two years later, it has certainly made them—and is making them again in Iran.
Trump, for his part, came into the White House in January with the mandate of a peacemaker, however incongruous that might sound. He did secure a two-month ceasefire in Gaza (though Israel has now intensified its attacks on Palestinians and failed to implement a workable process for distributing food and aid). Among American voters who chose Trump, 53 percent think that good relations with Iran would make the world a safer place, according to a survey my organization, the Institute for Global Affairs, recently fielded. Good relations appear to be a distant possibility, but it was only a few weeks ago that negotiators were making good progress on a new nuclear deal. Now the intensive intra-MAGA fight over whether Trump does more to support Israel may well determine what happens next.
Throughout, the baseline reality is that the reason it’s so easy for the U.S. to tumble into war is because the questionable institutions, systems, and ideas that enabled quagmires in Afghanistan and Iraq very much remain in place.
Since the war on terror hasn’t ended, it continues.
