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Why the Trump administration doesn't mention the "L" word

2026-03-15 18:39:45Pikëpamje SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX
The logo of the US Department of War

Gal Beckerman – The Atlantic

What's going on in Iran right now? The Trump administration and Republican lawmakers have tried to do semantic things to avoid answering this very easy question with the word war, even though it is very clearly a war. Even the writers on Saturday Night Live couldn't help but notice the absurdity.

“War? Who called this war?” Colin Jost said on this weekend’s show, playing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in testosterone-fueled rage mode. “This isn’t war; it’s a tough situation. We’re just going to connect and see where it goes.”

Four days after this situation in the skies over Tehran, House Speaker Mike Johnson said: "We are not at war now."

This was, rather, a “very specific and clear mission – an operation.” Operation seems to be the government’s favorite buzzword, even though it involves the assassination of an ayatollah, the torpedoing of an Iranian naval vessel, the blowing up of fuel depots and a desalination plant, and the loss of (so far) eight American servicemen along the way.

Why don't Republicans call this war what it is? First, there is a strong legal reason to avoid the "W" word. Under the Constitution, only Congress can declare war.

But President Trump, with the approval of his party, has reserved this leverage for himself, as have other recent presidents before him. So the logic is that if we don't call it "war," there's no reason to declare war.

Individual members of Congress are immediately inventing new definitions of what war actually is; Senator Josh Hawley, channeling his inner Sun Tzu, said that, for the purposes of a congressional declaration, it only counts as war once there are “American troops on the ground.”

Something deeper than constitutional fraud is going on. Leaders are shunning the term not just to avoid responsibility, but because Americans clearly want nothing to do with what it implies. For most people, after the experience of Iraq and Afghanistan, war is just another word for “swamp.”

For several generations, it is less likely to conjure up images of a flag rising over Iwo Jima than it is to conjure up images of torture at Abu Ghraib, an improvised roadside bomb blowing up soldiers in Fallujah, or the panicked American retreat from Kabul.

The operation is much less stressful. It is more naturally preceded by the word “successful.” Many people associate operations with surgery, which can be dangerous, of course, but you are usually unconscious while it happens. It sounds pretty painless. So does the surgical blow that sounds more laparoscopic, an outpatient procedure that tightens, but only for a moment.

The Trump administration is not the first to want to distance itself from the word. What we now call the Korean War, which began in 1950, was called a “police action” by President Harry Truman, partly to avoid congressional approval, but also because the entire world was still recovering from World War II.

This “police action” cost more than 36,000 American lives. Even the Vietnam War—also never authorized by Congress—was initially called a “conflict.” As recently as 2011, Ben Rhodes, an aide to President Obama, described the United States’ bombing campaign of Libya as a “kinetic military action.”

This is not to say that war never leaves presidential lips. But when it does, it is usually invoked as a war against an abstraction, such as Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” or Richard Nixon’s “War on Drugs,” or even George W. Bush’s “War on Terrorism” (which was doubly confusing because terror is a tactic; you can fight a war against nunchucks).

These wars are declared with more confidence because Americans accept that they are endless. There is no real consequence to declaring war on poverty (poverty will not fight back) and no real measure of when its purpose has been achieved. The use of war here is intended to telegraph urgency and seriousness—a willingness to fight. But on the other hand, the responsibility that this entails is absent, as is any clear boundary or mission.

As much as Trump officials hate to use war literally — even when they do wage it, literally — they seem to love the rhetoric socially and aesthetically. They even insisted that people start calling the Defense Department the “War Department” because, as one fact sheet put it, it “sends a stronger message of readiness and resolve.”

(Officially, its statutory name has not changed.) Defense sounded cautious; war sounds like you’re going to punch someone in the face. Or as Hegseth put it, expressing his philosophy in a pair of rhyming lines, “Maximum lethality, not lukewarm legality; violent effect, not politically correct.”

Hegseth has been a particularly big promoter of a “warrior” ethos; he enjoys a speech in which he can exhort soldiers to “kill the enemy and break their will.” Inserting the words war and warrior into his sentences, while being careful, for example, to describe the overthrow of the Venezuelan government as a “campaign against narcoterrorism,” can create cognitive dissonance.

You could sense the confusion in a whiplash-inducing clip of Mike Johnson speaking last week: After insisting, “We’re not at war,” he referred to the “Department of Defense,” but then quickly rephrased his sentence and switched to “Department of War.” I don’t blame him; it’s hard to get the idea across that the government agency that desperately wants to be called the War Department, as Johnson put it, “has no intention of being at war.”

This is more than just an ugly game. It reveals what the Trump administration has shown many times: an interest in surface over substance and publicity over politics. Its officials like a catchy name like DOGE, but not responsibility for what happens when “government efficiency” is attempted with a chainsaw. Hegseth’s stance often reminds me of the futurist poet and proto-fascist FT Marinetti, who also had romantic notions about war.

In his 1909 Futurist Manifesto, Marinetti called it “the only hygiene in the world,” praising violence, militarism, and destruction as necessary tools to purge old traditions and accelerate technological and cultural change. It was easy for Marinetti to conjure up such sanitizing dreams in the abstract, in the years leading up to World War I, before millions of corpses piled up.

I do not want to equate some abstract sense of “war” with fascism. War, as a word and as an act, is sometimes a moral imperative, but the arguments for it must be made clear and the consequences understood and foreseen. (See the speeches of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill for examples of leaders who knew how to do this.)

The selective use of the word matters because the administration is trying to have it both ways: project aggression and wreak havoc, but throw up its hands when it comes time to deal with the consequences. In a short Truth Social video announcing the airstrikes on Iran on February 28, Trump used the “W” word while referring to American casualties — but only to say, ruefully, “that happens a lot in war,” as if someone else had started it. All he did was launch an operation.


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