When We’re Not Sure If We’re At War - 9/9/25

Staying on top of political news in the Trump era means watching the online arguments about Sydney Sweeney and Cracker Barrel. It requires following the various bold-letter media dramas featuring Jeffrey Epstein, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Eric Adams, and the newly paved White House patio. But after consuming last week’s coverage regarding a pending economic downturn, National Guard deployments, and spreading gerrymandering combat, along with newly heightened challenges in Ukraine, Gaza, China, and India, it’s possible that you may have missed the United States quietly redefining the concept of war. 

When international traffickers are intercepted attempting to bring illegal narcotics into this country, they have historically been treated as criminals. In other words, just as someone who is suspected to have broken a law in the US, they are arrested and charged with a crime. If they are found guilty, they are penalized, often with incarceration. But last Tuesday, when American military forces destroyed a vessel believed to be transporting cocaine and fentanyl from Venezuela, Donald Trump and his advisors made it clear that the eleven men on board who were killed were considered to be military enemies committing an act of war against the United States.

This is a critically important distinction. Although American politicians have regularly talked about our country’s “war on drugs” for more than half a century, a drug trafficker has almost always been classified as a lawbreaker rather than an enemy combatant waging war. Practically speaking, the difference is that while our public safety officials arrest lawbreakers, our military troops are authorized to kill enemy soldiers.

In recent years, there has been a growing argument that because the most powerful cartels now use military-grade weaponry, it now makes more sense to engage with them as if they were another nation’s troops engaged in formally declared warfare against the United States. But that would represent a sweeping policy and legal change, one that would deserve considered discussion and debate with input from all three branches of government. At the time this column was written, there was no evidence that such discussion had taken place.

But if the Trump Administration made a hasty decision without an appropriate deliberative process, the president’s opponents were just as disappointing by their rush to reflexively condemn the president for an action that may have been in the country’s best interests. The point is that there are legitimate arguments to be made on both sides of such a difficult and intricate decision. On a political landscape less polarized than this one, thoughtful leaders on both sides would have considered a wide range of options before reaching their conclusion. But we haven’t lived in a world like that one for some time, so even such seminal questions as these are now settled by knee-jerk partisanship.

(It’s worth noting that this seminal change was made the same week that Trump announced his plans to rename the Defense Department as the Department of War. It’s also notable that the president signed that executive order the same day that it was reported that Pentagon officials are proposing the department prioritize domestic and regional missions, a striking reversal from the military’s longtime mandate to focus on the threat from China and a seeming shift from offense to defense. In retrospect, the Department of Irony may have been an even more suitable alternative naming possibility.)

We have become so accustomed to the divisions in our politics that the lack of bipartisan cooperation—or even conversation across party lines—on fundamental matters of national security and even more basic questions over when and how a nation goes to war are no longer discussed in a serious way. As 26 European countries gathered to discuss the future of Ukraine on one continent last week, and the leaders of Russia, China, and India embraced on another, both the volatility of the existing world order and the US’ shrinking role in securing and protecting the rickety framework on which that order rests became unsettlingly apparent.

This bifurcation is reparable, of course. History demonstrates that external threats have a way of forcing us to put aside our internal differences when it becomes absolutely necessary. I have no doubt that this country will rise to that challenge again. But in the meantime, the breathless discussion of how a restaurant chain advertises itself and the manner in which a young woman wears her jeans are daunting reminders of how long the path back will be.