The list of questions surrounding Donald Trump’s military offensive in Iran is not short. At this point, neither the president nor anyone on his team has explained in a coherent way why the administration launched this offensive, what its objectives are, what the plan is to achieve those goals, whether the war is legal, how much it’s expected to cost or how long it’s expected to last.
But hanging overhead is a different kind of question: Is the United States currently at war?
On early Saturday morning, when Trump announced the operation, his prerecorded video message included this line: “The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost, and we may have casualties. That often happens in war.”
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A day later, however, Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, a prominent White House ally and surrogate, appeared on Fox News and told viewers, “We are not at war with Iran.” Also on Sunday, Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida appeared on MS NOW and insisted that the U.S. is not at war, while Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told NBC News, “I don’t know if this is technically a war.”
On Monday morning, however, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth suggested more than once during a briefing that the U.S. is currently engaged in a war. (But then, he would say that, having taken the trouble to rebrand his whole department as the “Department of War.”) A few hours later, however, Mullin appeared on CNN and insisted, “This isn’t a war.”
A day later, NOTUS reported, “In the talking-points memo that the White House reportedly sent to Hill Republicans, the suggested boilerplate response to the straightforward question, ‘Is the U.S. at war with Iran?’ notably does not answer the question.”
When the question is “Is the United States currently at war?” and the answer is “It depends on whom you ask,” there’s a problem.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
