When Joe Biden leaves office on January 20, he’ll retire from public life having notched one unequivocal foreign policy victory. Shortly after becoming president, Biden drastically scaled down America’s global drone war. For years, drone aircraft operated by both the U.S. armed forces and the CIA have carried out targeted strikes all across the constantly shifting “global war on terror” theater. Biden’s policy was a sharp reversal from his predecessor, who expanded the drone war to its highest level, all while covering up details on the number of strikes and how many people were killed. And it’s all but guaranteed that Biden’s biggest foreign policy success will be quickly undone when Trump regains power.

The fault lies with Congress. Washington lawmakers have shown little urgency in repealing the underlying laws and authorizations that have enabled and expanded the “war on terror.” Now they’re soon to be used by Trump, who has promised “retribution” at home and the continuation of unilateral military action abroad, with little to no transparency. Trump will take office fully aware of the challenges he faces and the leeway that inattentive Capitol Hill lawmakers—content to either bask in the “success” of our foreign policy or, more often, serve as courtier-critics amid its failures—have granted the executive branch. Trump is stacking his Cabinet with the kind of true believers who will take advantage of the lack of legislative pushback and who will be more radical than those who served in his first term.

Despite the high stakes of war powers potentially reverting to MAGA’s hands, and Biden’s effort to scale back some of the wretched excesses of the “war on terror” era, Democrats spent the last four years doing little to rescind the power that the executive branch accrued since 9/11. Instead, they dutifully upheld a broken status quo in which two decades of American policy treated the post-9/11 security state’s legal structure as sacrosanct. They will come to regret their passivity.

Since the 9/11 terror attacks, a growing tangle of legal authorizations and statutes has snowballed across four presidencies. With each administration that knot of war power has snatched up more tangential legal powers with its tentacles, giving subsequent presidents both extravagant power and the unquestioned acceptance that this bloat is necessary to the task of fighting terrorism. There are now 23 years of legal precedent from the “war on terror” that give Trump widespread authority for funding counterterrorism partners that engage in abuses and carrying out expanded strikes in regions in which the United States is not legally at war. The president’s outright unilateral power in deciding who ends up in America’s crosshairs has become institutionalized.

Any partial restriction or policy choice to rein in American military force abroad will last only as long as........

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