There is good news and bad news for critics of the United States’ bloated 21st century war machine. The good news: The “war on terror” is dead.

The bad news? It seems to have become a part of the walking dead—a kind of zombie war on terror that is continuing and radically expanding, even as the fears and threats that originally motivated all its excesses are seemingly vanishing from the American psyche.

Consider the following facts: Despite the public release only a few years ago of evidence showing the Saudi government’s direct complicity in the crime of September 11, 2001—the central, instigating act of terrorism that drove and justified every aspect of the “war on terror” that followed—associating with or even taking money from that same government appears to carry no stigma. The Biden administration’s efforts to pledge American lives and treasure to defend that same government elicited relatively little controversy. And this year, dozens of top US comedians, from the left-leaning Bill Burr to the right-leaning Andrew Schulz, happily took its money to help whitewash its image. The Saudi government’s expanding encroachment into US sports and entertainment in general continues only to receive an eager welcome.

Meanwhile, after spending more than a decade fighting the shadowy threat of al-Qaeda, the US government has now seemingly come to terms with the terror group’s ongoing influence in the region. It has enthusiastically gone along with the installation of an al-Qaeda-linked militant, Ahmed al-Sharaa, as the leader of Syria, whose former president Washington spent years trying to remove from power expressly because of his alleged support for terrorism—including the very al-Qaeda its new president hails from.

Trump may be the first president to use this zombie “war” for ends that it was never meant for, but history suggests he will not be the last, unless we make the collective political choice to put a lid on and roll back the radical growth of executive war-making power that has accumulated year after year since 9/11.

Sharaa swiftly had the $10 million US bounty on his head removed, the terrorist designation of the al-Qaeda offshoot he led has been revoked, and just a few weeks ago, he was given a warm welcome during the United Nations General Assembly in New York, where on one stage, former CIA Director David Petraeus acknowledged the two had been on opposite sides of the civil war in Iraq 20 years ago, in between lavishing him with praise and declaring himself a “fan.”

It’s not just al-Qaeda. The Biden administration had explored teaming up with the Taliban to fight ISIS’ branch in Afghanistan, while the Trump administration is now inching toward........

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