The U.S. Is Definitely Still at War

Biden told an obvious lie last week in his speech explaining why he wasn’t running for reelection.

It didn’t get a lot of notice at the time, but Biden told an obvious lie last week in his speech explaining why he wasn’t running for reelection. He said:

I’m the first president in this century to report to the American people that the United States is not at war anywhere in the world.

Biden has been telling some version of this lie for almost three years. The president has an incentive to pretend that the U.S. isn’t at war anywhere. It allows him to keep up the pretense that he ended endless war when he ordered the withdrawal from Afghanistan. It also keeps people from paying too much attention to the unauthorized wars that U.S. forces are still fighting in different parts of the world. This may be Biden’s attempt to respond to Trump’s equally dishonest claim in his convention speech that the world was at peace when Trump was president. Whatever the reason for it, it isn’t true and Americans should understand that the president is trying to pull the proverbial wool over their eyes.

Van Jackson talked about this line from Biden’s speech with his colleagues Julia Gledhill and Matt Duss on his podcast last week (start at 13:57). All of them expressed some amazement that Biden would say this in a national address when it was so clearly untrue. As Jackson said, “We’ve bombed three countries this year!” It’s true that Biden has said things like this before, but it was still a strange thing for him to brag about when he has started a new conflict on his own in January without Congressional authorization.