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“I will not send you to fight and die in stupid foreign wars that never end,” Donald Trump promised a crowd in Pennsylvania in 2024. While the disastrous conflict in Iran, which has escalated in recent days, may make it seem like the president has reneged on that promise, that’s inaccurate. It would be wrong to say that the president has dragged the US into yet another disastrous forever war in the Middle East because, as government officials keep insisting, what’s happening in Iran isn’t actually a war.
“I wouldn’t call it a war,” JD Vance told reporters early this month, for example, after being asked whether the fighting in Iran might be over by the November midterms. “Right now, there is no active shooting.”
Maybe not, but there has been quite a bit of active bombing. Earlier this month, a US missile strike hit a wedding at a private home in southern Iran, killing at least four people, including a four-year-old child and a 16-year-old. That’s fairly restrained compared to the massacre in March when a US precision-guided missile hit an elementary school in Iran, killing 150 people, including 120 children, but it’s still something I would personally file under “possible war crimes”.
But not only does the Trump administration keep insisting this isn’t a real war, they’re also adamant there aren’t any real crimes being committed: the vice-president would like to stress that you shouldn’t believe your eyes or ears when it comes to the civilian deaths being reported. Despite a weapons expert and a visual analysis by the New York Times concluding that the bomb that hit the wedding party in a residential area of the country was American, Vance has a hunch the whole thing might have been made up by some untrustworthy brown people.
“The Iranian state media has not been a very good scribe about what’s happened in the conflict thus far,” Vance said at that same press briefing, in relation to the wedding massacre. “So I’m extremely skeptical of this.”
The vice-president may be skeptical, but I’m confused. If this isn’t a war, what is it? A little skirmish? An interminable series of special military operations? A very bloody screw-up? Trump himself has called it a war on several occasions. Last Wednesday, for example, he said: “The war is going to end immediately after the election.” However, rather confusing matters, he also recently suggested he agreed with Vance that it wasn’t a full-fledged war. “I call it a military conflict because it’s small potatoes for us,” Trump said last month. Those are some very expensive potatoes: the not-a-war already has a price tag of tens of billions. Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, has roughly estimated that it has cost the typical US household $1,200. And then of course there’s the human cost: the thousands of lives that have been lost.
What we call this “military conflict” isn’t just semantics, it matters greatly. Not least because the constitution is very clear that a president can’t unilaterally start an official war on a whim; only Congress has the power to declare a war. Trump isn’t the first president to launch major military action without going to Congress for a declaration: Harry Truman classified the Korean conflict as a “police action” to bypass Congress and presidents since have engaged in similar semantic sleights-of-hand. But, as the historian and foreign relations expert Fredrik Logevall noted in an interview with the Harvard Kennedy School: “What’s extraordinary about President Trump in the current context is that he has not really bothered to even consult with Congress, never mind seek the approval of Congress.” In other words, he’s acting like a dictator.
Trump, to be fair, has been clear that he’s exploiting the Truman Playbook. “I won’t use the word ‘war’ because they say if you use the word ‘war,’ that’s maybe not a good thing to do,” Trump said at a fundraising dinner in March. “They don’t like the word ‘war’ because you’re supposed to get approval. So, I’ll use the word ‘military operation’, which is really what it is. It’s a military decimation.”
Avoiding a formal declaration of war might also help the US government bypass certain “wartime” obligations to its service members and their families. Libby Klinner, the widow of an airman killed in combat operations against Iran in March, recently posted on Instagram that she wasn’t receiving certain benefits because the US wasn’t technically at war.
“The Air Force recently told me that because we haven’t officially declared war, my kids and I aren’t eligible for some benefits,” Klinner wrote. “So not only was my husband killed in a war he never wanted to participate in, but now the benefits we’re left with are being dictated by semantics and public perceptions.”
After this post went viral, it seems the government has stepped in smooth things over. Vance recently said the administration would ensure Klinner receives “what she is entitled to.” He added: “We will certainly work that on the back end.”
The government might be able to fix Klinner’s benefits, but they’re going to have a hard time remedying the economic and political damage this not-a-war is inflicting. Trump’s popularity is plummeting, and a majority of Americans are fed up with this “small potatoes” conflict that has been going on for six months and making everyday life more dangerous and expensive. According to an estimate from Brown University last week, the conflict has cost Americans $100bn in extra energy costs. That bill is going up by $1m every two minutes. This week oil prices also climbed over $100 a barrel for the first time since July.
Meanwhile, with hostilities escalating and no off-ramp in sight, it looks like Trump is out of options. All he has left is empty promises. The president has insisted that energy prices will tumble “right after the election” and, in a sign he is completely desperate, promised every American adult $5,000 if Republicans retain control of both chambers of Congress in November. The Trump administration can call the war whatever they like, but future generations will define it as a disastrous act of hubris.
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Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
