When Joe Biden leaves office on Jan. 20, he’ll retire from public life having notched one unequivocal foreign policy victory. Shortly after becoming president, Biden drastically scaled down the United States’ global drone war. For years, drone aircraft operated by both the U.S. armed forces and the CIA have carried out targeted strikes all across the constantly shifting “global war on terror” theater. Biden’s policy was a sharp reversal from his predecessor, who expanded the drone war to its highest level all while covering up details on the number of strikes and how many people were killed. And it’s all but guaranteed that Biden’s biggest foreign policy success will be quickly undone when Trump regains power.
The fault lies with Congress. Washington lawmakers have shown little urgency in repealing the underlying laws and authorizations that have enabled and expanded the war on terror. Now, they’re soon to be used by Trump, who has promised “retribution” at home and the continuation of unilateral military action abroad, with little to no transparency. Trump will take office fully aware of the challenges he faces and the leeway that inattentive Capitol Hill lawmakers—content to either bask in the “success” of our foreign policy or, more often, serve as courtier-critics amid its failures—have granted the executive branch. Trump is stacking his cabinet with the kind of true believers that will take advantage of the lack of legislative pushback and who will be more radical than those who served in his first term.
Despite the high stakes of war powers potentially reverting to MAGA’s hands, and Biden’s effort to scale back some of the wretched excesses of the War on Terror era, Democrats spent the last four years doing little to rescind the power that the executive branch accrued since 9/11. Instead, they dutifully upheld a broken status quo in which two decades of American policy treated the post-9/11 security state’s legal structure as sacrosanct. They will come to regret their passivity.
Since the 9/11 terror attacks, a growing tangle of legal authorizations and statutes has snowballed across four presidencies. With each administration that knot of war power has snatched up more tangential legal powers with its tentacles, giving subsequent presidents both extravagant power and the unquestioned acceptance that this bloat is necessary to the task of fighting terrorism. There are now 23 years of legal precedent from the war on terror that gives Trump widespread authority for funding counterterrorism partners that engage in abuses and carrying out expanded strikes in regions in which the United States is not legally at war. The president’s outright unilateral power in deciding who ends up in America’s crosshairs has become institutionalized.
Any partial restriction or policy choice to rein in American military force abroad will last only as long as Trump decides, and the powers that justify it only grow more ingrained in the system. The means by which the president can wage unchecked and unaccountable war thus runs constantly in the background of American life, the exclusive power accorded to Congress by the Constitution to be the final arbiter of who the United States fights abroad shucked off by those who are supposed to do the people’s will, and long forgotten.
The inciting document is the 2001 authorization for the use of military force, or AUMF. It notes that “the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.” George W. Bush used the 2001 AUMF to approve the first airstrikes in Yemen and Somalia during his time in office. Beyond large invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, he abused those legal powers to carry out extraordinary renditions and torture, allowing American partners to carry out the violence.
Barack Obama, Biden’s old boss, leaned into a global war with a smaller footprint. A harsh critic of the Iraq War, Obama embraced these post 9/11 war powers to wage covert military action and limited-deployment missions, sending special operations forces as well as both military and CIA drones around the world against perceived threats. The readings of the 2001 AUMF have become broader as the scope of the war on terror has expanded. In 2013, Obama argued the United States was at war with what he referred to as al-Qaida and the Taliban’s “associated forces” as he sought to explain how the shadow war had spread around the planet.
It wasn’t just the scale of the war theater that grew. The legal structures that opened the door to this ramping up of the war on terror expanded in parallel. As Obama widened the drone war, the legal tools that facilitated it become ingrained in the system as well. It was Obama’s national security team that set up the “disposition matrix,” better known as the “kill list.” This was a database of potential threats, with officials reviewing them and authorizing strikes on those deemed to be an imminent danger.
This methodology has been criticized both for its lack of due process and its inaccuracy, with numerous civilians killed as the United States’ joystick-warriors waged battle all over the planet. Among them was 16-year-old Yemeni-American teen Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, whose death brought brief scandal from limited quarters (al-Awlaki’s younger sister was later killed in a January 2017 raid in Yemen authorized by Trump). Another noteworthy incident was the 2015 drone strike that killed American development expert Warren Weinstein and Italian aid worker Giovanni Lo Porto, both of whom were being held hostage by al-Qaeda at the time of their deaths. None of these instances sparked much of a rethink of the way the president was conducting himself.
As the war on terror has ground on, there have been some moments of pushback against its stretched legal underpinnings. When Obama looked for legal authority in 2015 to fight ISIS, he sought, but failed to receive, the blessing of Congress for a new AUMF. This proved to be no impediment as the Obama administration simply continued to invoke the old authorization as the legal authority permitting it to wage war against the group, at all times being fully aware of the outdated nature of the 2001 authorization.
Obama also chose not to try to tighten or restrict rules around the drone war before Trump’s first term—this despite the fact that he took the prospect of losing re-election to Mitt Romney seriously enough to dial them back. Trump took these powers and ran with them. Despite trying to sell himself as a peace candidate while also promising belligerence, Trump stepped up the drone war beyond even Obama. The number of civilian casualties increased considerably as Trump enjoyed the unchecked post-9/11 powers afforded to his office In four years he authorized more airstrikes in Yemen and Somalia than Obama did in eight years. Trump also expanded ground operations, mainly in Africa, while working to make all of the American counterterror operations more opaque to the public and Congress. Trump enjoyed all of the powers afforded to the post 9/11 presidency during his first term and has shown no indication he would change his stance on the use of military force in his second.
As for the outgoing Biden administration, while it did massively scale back the drone war, it obviously did not end it outright. In continuity with the previous two presidencies Biden has continued to deploy special operations forces globally to go after ISIS and other “associated forces.” The threadbare legal underpinnings for these operations remains in effect as well. In his final War Powers Report to Congress in December 2024, Biden invoked the 2001 and 2002 authorizations for the use of military force as well as “other statutes” to discuss U.S. troops and airstrikes in several countries to fight al-Qaeda and ISIS—but also against Iranian forces and their allies in Syria and Yemen. Biden also acknowledged the open-ended nature given by the various statutes, arguing that it is ”not possible to know at this time the precise scope or the duration of the deployments of United States Armed Forces that are or will be necessary to counter terrorist threats to the United States.”
Efforts to constrain or even illuminate these abuses have been equally limited and temporary. No one in Washington of significant import has declared that enough is enough; we are as far away from legislatively undoing 23 years of accumulated blank checks as we ever have been. A major push in the past two years to repeal the 2002 AUMF, used to approve the invasion of Iraq, was undertaken, only to stall in Congress. However, there has been no major legislative effort to end the 2001 authorization or to try and restrict targeted killings, rein in the 127e counterterrorism programs, or limit executive branch powers when it comes to waging war.
Here at the start of 2025, the 2001 authorization is comedically obsolete. Osama bin Laden is dead, along with his long-time deputy-turned-successor Ayman al-Zawahiri. The war in Afghanistan is over—and the United States is out of the country following negotiations and withdrawals done across the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations. The Taliban is back in power after defeating the Western-backed government. Even still, the Biden administration has argued that the War on Terror has not ended. The 23-year-old authority justifying so much of American military action abroad has been stretched far beyond its text. Yet it lives.
This slumbering zombie AUMF will now provide Trump with the power that Biden should have done more to curtail. The former president will retake office with a vastly different geopolitical landscape than he faced in 2017. Then, the United States was locked in its ongoing war in Afghanistan, with American and allied forces starting to push ISIS out of its strongholds in Syria and Iraq; the Trump administration would largely carry on the plans enacted by the second Obama administration.
Eight years later, the war in Ukraine stretches on, the Taliban control Afghanistan, and a wave of coups have reshaped much of western Africa. The war in Gaza, a conflict that has killed thousands of civilians, has spilled into a regional war. Iran and Israel have exchanged several attacks, while American forces in the region have been targeted in multiple barrages of drones and missiles. The United States has spent more than a year in conflict with Yemen’s Houthi movement, a religious and nationalist group that controls much of the country following a civil war, with no end in sight but billions spent. There’s a real risk of any or all of these situations spiralling even further out of control.
With days left until the next Congress takes office and only a few more before Biden leaves, the chances of major action to overhaul the post-9/11 security state are effectively nil. There might be a mad scramble or one urgent call for reform but these legal precedents and approvals are likely to remain. Untangling and ending the knot of powers given to the executive branch over the last two decades was never going to be easy. But there was a time where it could have been done. Congress squandered it; now they will have to watch as their failures consume the world.
The post Democrats Will Regret Not Stripping Trump’s Dangerous War Powers appeared first on New Republic.
