Editorial Roundup: United States

Excerpts from recent editorials in the United States and abroad:

Sept. 13

The Philadelphia Inquirer on Donald Trump's plan for the Iran war

During a recent cable news appearance, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick claimed no American lives had been lost in the Iran war, an error he blamed on confusion with President Donald Trump’s earlier invasion of Venezuela. And perhaps it is difficult to keep one’s wars straight in an administration that has attacked seven countries in less than two years.

But while Lutnick’s claim was horribly wrong in fact, it was an accurate reflection of the administration’s consistently reprehensible diminishment of the costly war it started more than six months ago without congressional authorization or public support. The day after the secretary’s gaffe, Vice President JD Vance denied the very existence of the conflict, telling reporters, “I wouldn’t call it a war,” just days after an American bomb killed five civilians attending a wedding in southern Iran. The day after that, Trump himself dismissed the war as “small potatoes,” adding, “There’s no fighting,” even as the conflict continued to escalate, drive up energy prices, and threaten to draw in other countries.

In reality, the war has had tremendous repercussions for U.S. service members and civilians in the Middle East, American security and credibility, and global trade and stability. The only aspect of the conflict that is not serious is Trump’s handling of it.

Despite the administration’s best efforts to obfuscate the human cost of the conflict, the war has killed 18 American service members and wounded nearly 800, taken thousands of lives in Iran and the Middle East, injured tens of thousands across the region, and displaced hundreds of thousands. And the fighting has likely cost American taxpayers more than $100 billion in direct spending, with energy and other economic repercussions that could approach $1 trillion in the United States alone.

The intangible costs aren’t small potatoes, either. Iran remains under the control of an emboldened regime able to fire on U.S. bases in the region, impede traffic through the crucial Strait of Hormuz, and resume its pursuit of a nuclear weapon without the international limits and monitoring Trump dismantled during his first administration.

The war has also depleted the military’s supplies of critical munitions, leaving us more vulnerable to adversaries, and strained our forces with marathon deployments and logistical disruptions. Rather than responding to these problems with the urgency they deserve, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth appears preoccupied with hunting for those who disclosed them to the press, purging ranking personnel who might disagree with him, and blocking promotions of Black and female officers. The Army has lost half its four-star generals, its chief of staff, and its top civilian leader — Army Secretary Dan Driscoll — who reportedly warned the president of the force’s flagging experience, readiness, and morale on his way out.

Nor does the administration appear better prepared to end the war than it is to win it. Trump told the Republicans’ midterm convention Wednesday that the conflict was necessary to prevent an Iranian bomb and nearing its final stages. But peace negotiations have fizzled, the countries are exchanging strikes on warships and tankers, and Energy Secretary Chris Wright recently acknowledged that another deal on Tehran’s nuclear program may never be reached.

The trouble is that Trump and his lieutenants don’t appear to have a strategy for waging war on — or making peace with — Iran. What they have instead is a plan to manage the public relations fallout of the conflict by lying about its casualties, costs, and extent in the hope voters won’t punish their party for it in the midterm elections. It’s not even good PR, let alone defense or diplomacy.

In that sense, it’s not surprising Trump and Co. can’t figure out how to get out of the war they began. They would have to start by acknowledging they’re in it.

ONLINE: https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/editorials/iran-war-trump-consequences-denial-cost-casualties-20260913.html

Sept.

The New York Times on 9/11, 25 years later

On that nearly cloudless morning 25 years ago when terrorists hijacked four airplanes and launched the deadliest attack on America since Pearl Harbor, the country’s initial response was inspired and unifying. Firefighters and police officers climbed the stairs of burning buildings in the face of mortal risk. Passengers on a doomed jet stormed the cockpit and saved countless lives. Within weeks, the United States, with the world’s support, went to war against the attacks’ plotters and their protectors in Afghanistan.

America would claim some major successes. Al Qaeda, in its original form, was crushed, with almost every leader eventually killed or captured. There has been no terrorist attack against the United States since 2001 that approaches the death toll of that day — 2,977 — largely thanks to work by U.S. forces, intelligence agencies and law enforcement. In the days after Sept. 11, Americans wondered when they might again live without constant anxiety about terrorism. For years, most of us have done so without even realizing it.

Yet this recitation of post-Sept. 11 accomplishments masks a harder truth. The principal legacy of America’s response to that horrible day is not a stronger, more resilient nation. It is instead two long, bloody wars — one of which, in Iraq, was started on false pretenses — that mostly weakened the United States, at home and abroad. It is an America more isolated from the world.

More than 7,000 service members were killed and more than 53,000 wounded in the war on terror. By one estimate, it cost more than $8 trillion and 900,000 lives. It drained resources that could have been used to strengthen the country against emerging rivals. Some of the steepest costs are the hardest to measure: the damage to our social compact and our domestic politics. Many soldiers who answered the call to defend the country and fought in the misguided wars, along with their families and communities, understandably feel betrayed by their leaders.

On this 25th anniversary, we honor the victims of Sept. 11 and the veterans of the wars that followed. And we ask that America face the mistakes that it made and work to build a stronger nation. That work will not be easy. President Trump is compounding the errors that followed Sept. 11 with his own reckless war and far more damaging version of go-it-alone foreign policy. At the same time, artificial intelligence is making new kinds of attacks possible. Confronting today’s challenges will be easier if the nation grapples honestly with the past quarter-century.

For much of the period after the disaster of the Vietnam War, America adhered to its lessons. Go to war only with defined and achievable goals. Prevent “mission creep.” Most of all, win. Victory deters enemies, attracts allies and strengthens the confidence of citizens that the government can be trusted when it asks for sacrifice in pursuit of larger goals.

The shock of the Sept. 11 attacks reset America’s national security assessment. It was so traumatic that it seemed to call for different rules. It heralded a new kind of threat: Large-scale attacks against Americans no longer required the resources of a nation, such as an army or navy. Transnational networks of extremists could use the resources of globalization — transportation, communication, technology — to attack America. The Bush administration announced a sweeping response, what became known as the “global war on terror.” In doing so, it neglected some enduring lessons that remained as true as they had always been.

The first of the three big mistakes occurred in Afghanistan. The war against the Taliban and the Qaeda forces there was a justified and necessary response to the attacks. Within months, the U.S. military destroyed Al Qaeda’s camps (even if killing Osama bin Laden would take nearly a decade) and drove the Taliban from power. But President George W. Bush and his team then allowed themselves to engage in classic mission creep.

When the Taliban offered to surrender, cede control of the provinces they held and allow a new government to take power, the United States declined. American officials did so even though Hamid Karzai, who would soon become the country’s interim president, wanted to accept. They instead sought to hunt down Taliban fighters and leaders and rebuild Afghanistan from the ground up as a democratic society.

The effort would prove as doomed as the history of such efforts in Afghanistan and the Middle East suggested it would. The United States should have pursued narrower, achievable goals in Afghanistan and declared victory when it could have. Ultimately, the grand visions came to naught. In August 2021, almost 20 years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Taliban fully returned to power.

The second major mistake occurred in 2003, when the United States started an unnecessary war in Iraq. There, the long-running effort to prevent Saddam Hussein from acquiring nuclear, chemical and biological weapons morphed into a fear of terrorists doing even more damage than they had done on Sept. 11. The theory — preposterously thin in retrospect — was that Mr. Hussein would give these weapons to terrorists to use against America and its allies. “Iraq’s weapons of mass terror and the terror networks to which the Iraqi regime are linked are not two separate themes,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared in 2003. “They are part of the same threat.”

As it did with nation-building in Afghanistan, the trauma of Sept. 11 played a role in obscuring the foolishness of the plan. There was legitimate uncertainty before the war about whether Mr. Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. But there was no solid evidence that he did, nor any sign that he was collaborating with Qaeda terrorists. The United States asked its soldiers to fight and die for a flimsy theory.

Iraq today is a better place than it was under Mr. Hussein’s sadistic regime, but the price has been steep. Tens of thousands of civilians died, and the war created a power vacuum that fueled sectarian conflict and spawned a new generation of terrorist groups, notably ISIS. Less quantifiable but no less real is the enduring damage to America’s reputation and to its ability to rally support for its foreign policy goals.

The third mistake was the betrayal of American values in the service of defeating terrorism. Abroad, the United States tortured prisoners, through beatings, humiliations, simulated drownings and more, and imprisoned people at Guantánamo Bay for years without charging them with a crime. At home, the government used broad new powers to track and monitor Americans and foreigners alike.

Any democracy must balance civil liberties and national security, and the choices can be difficult. After the Sept. 11 attacks, the United States was right to expand its surveillance capabilities to prevent future attacks, and it has succeeded at doing so partly because of that expansion. Yet the expansion clearly went too far.

The Fourth Amendment holds that the government must obtain a warrant to search citizens or their property without their consent. A post-Sept. 11 law, largely allowed by the courts, instead enabled government officials to sweep up many more communications with no warrant. Law enforcement can often monitor citizens’ phone calls, texts and emails, based on limited suspicion.

The most intrusive civil liberties encroachments were reserved for Muslims. Days after the attacks, Mr. Bush declared that America’s enemy was “a fringe form of Islamic extremism” and “not our many Muslim friends.” Nonetheless, law enforcement and the intelligence community used their new powers inappropriately against Muslims. Law enforcement officers spied on mosques and ran operations designed to entice congregants into plotting attacks.

In 1838, a young Abraham Lincoln gave a speech in Illinois on the perpetuation of America’s political institutions. Declaring that all the armies of the world “could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years,” he said the danger to American democracy was nonetheless real. “It cannot come from abroad,” the future president said, but rather, “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

After Sept. 11, America’s leaders were right that the country was vulnerable to a new kind of foreign attack but wrong to break with our values and the lessons of past wars. Their actions are not the only reason America finds itself with an angry political culture, but they have contributed. Mr. Trump rode to power partly by criticizing the nation’s post-Sept. 11 response more harshly than any other prominent politician — only to repeat some of the mistakes himself, including through a self-defeating war of choice in Iran that suffers from mission creep.

Twenty-five years later, it is important to step back from today’s cynicism and remember the heroism and national unity in the hours and days after the attacks. That is the spirit that can help build a better path forward.

ONLINE: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/11/opinion/911-war-on-terror-heroes.html

Sept. 10

The Washington Post on Donald Trump's “dividend check” if the GOP holds the House and Senate

Socialism will not be stopped with more socialism.

President Donald Trump’s proposal to pay every adult citizen $5,000 if the GOP holds the House and Senate this fall is a desperate gimmick that betrays a profound lack of seriousness about the looming fiscal crisis. “If the Republicans win, you win with us, and you get $5,000,” Trump said Wednesday night at the party’s midterm convention in Dallas.

This would cost an estimated $1.2 trillion next year, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. The money would need to be borrowed on top of the $40 trillion national debt — and paid back with interest.

Trump said revenue from tariffs would cover what he branded as a “dividend,” but the government refunded more money from tariffs it collected illegally than it collected from legal ones in May, June and July. The taxes on imports that remain in effect are expected to generate less than $200 billion this year. That sum, paid by Americans, is already factored into this year’s deficit of more than $2 trillion. Also, the president previously said he would earmark the tariff revenue to cover nearly $6 trillion in other costs.

Flooding the economy with money would only worsen inflation, since it would mean more dollars chasing the same amount of goods. That would raise the prices of basic staples, as Americans experienced following the two rounds of stimulus checks during the pandemic.

But don’t count on checks in the mail. Trump has repeatedly promised payments that never materialized, including from savings that the U.S. DOGE Service was supposed to identify before its failure. Last November, Trump called for a $2,000 check funded by tariffs. (On Thursday, Trump separately announced that nearly a million Americans will receive $500 rebate checks before the election after being overcharged for their Obamacare plans.)

Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir and a Trump donor, tweeted from the convention: “I am hugely in favor of winning the midterms, and love much about this admin, but am strongly against bread and circus bribes.”

After Trump’s speech, Fox News anchor Bret Baier asked Vice President JD Vance to respond to critics describing the checks as bribery that would bankrupt the country. Vance replied that tariffs are creating “incredible wealth.” That might be true for lobbyists and lawyers who specialize in seeking exemptions for their clients, but they’re raising prices for everyone else.

Trump’s speech underscored why so many Americans who care about fiscal sanity feel politically homeless. As Trump bragged in Texas about the government taking stakes in chipmaker Intel and Venezuelan oil fields, a democratic socialist defeated the incumbent Democratic mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, in a primary. A Quinnipiac poll released Thursday showed that 59 percent of Democrats now consider themselves supporters of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Pandering politicians routinely promote expensive ideas in the months before elections. Usually they’re offering new programs, more subsidies or tax cuts that won’t be paid for. The electorate has become habituated to promises of “free” buses, “free” child care and “free” medical coverage, as well as student loan debt cancellation. Trump’s checks-for-votes scheme is just more explicit.

ONLINE: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/09/10/america-cannot-afford-trump-5000-checks-if-gop-wins-midterms/

Sept. 13

The Wall Street Journal on a bipartisan bill to expand the child tax credit

If Democrats retake Congress next year they promise to feud with President Trump and investigate his every move. But it’s also possible that Democrats lure the President into more spending and bad policy, as it did in the last two years of his first term. Pay attention to a recent bipartisan bill to expand the child tax credit.

A House bill introduced this month would remove the $2,500 income requirement to start collecting the benefit. We say benefit because up to $1,700 of the $2,200 per child credit is available in a check to those without income tax liability. It’s more a welfare check than a tax credit. The bill would start to offer the credit at $1 of income. Sponsors include Democrat Chris Pappas of New Hampshire and Republican Carol Miller of West Virginia, among others.

But the current $2,500 income requirement functions as a de facto work requirement and requires recipients to demonstrate some connection to the labor force. By rough math, a filer can clear that bar with 9 weeks of part-time work at $15 an hour.

The argument from supporters is that the neediest children are boxed out of the credit. But the entire welfare state, from food benefits and Medicaid to disability and cash assistance, exists to help families with the lowest earnings.

Programs that attempt to understand the household’s circumstances and require a certain number of hours of work for the able-bodied are far better for children than checks. It’s true the credit defies tax fairness by reducing liability for too many affluent parents. But that’s an argument against offering it to married couples who earn $400,000, not for eliminating the bias for work.

The bill at least retains the program’s structure of rewarding additional work as it starts paying out benefits, known as a “phase in.” But Democrats aspire to nix that, too. Their 2021 Covid-era child tax credit offered $3,600 for young children, with the full amount available to those without earnings and partially paid monthly. The cost to the fisc would vary depending on the expansion, but $1 trillion over 10 years is a ballpark for Democratic ambitions.

Both parties are descending into naked bidding on income transfers. A big risk is that the U.S. lurches into a universal basic income, even as the evidence on early experiments suggests they reduce work and upward mobility.

That universal basic income won’t arrive in one headline bill. It will come from dozens of incremental additions to the welfare state, each presented as essential for lowering costs for working parents or promoting traditional lifestyles. Watch out after the midterm election, when the real bidding for 2028 will begin.

ONLINE: https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-road-to-a-universal-basic-income-ee06f422?mod=editorials_article_pos3

Sept. 11

The Boston Globe on the U.S. government's dubious use of its counter terrorism apparatus

International terrorism long predated Sept. 11, 2001. But the hijacking of commercial jets that crashed with murderous effectiveness into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a Pennsylvania cornfield 25 years ago today brought it home to Americans like never before.

Over the coming years, the nation would become dedicated to the idea of defeating international terrorism — first with the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan, followed by the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and then with a stealthy war fought with drones and commandos against terrorist cells from Pakistan to the Philippines.

But over time, the focus has blurred. Politicians diluted and distorted what “terrorism” meant. And 25 years later, the apparatus that was built to counter legitimate threats has engaged in mission creep, too often being deployed for more dubious purposes.

The Department of Homeland Security was created by George W. Bush in 2003 after the shortcomings and blind spots of the country’s domestic antiterrorism system were made shockingly clear by Al Qaeda.

What began as a sensible effort to improve coordination and communication between agencies dedicated to securing the border and countering domestic terrorism has metastasized into an agency of 260,000 employees replete with its own heavily armed police force operating under the auspices of ICE, the division of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Though DHS has grown steadily under presidents from both parties, President Trump has put ICE on steroids, expanding its budget to $85 billion this year and more than doubling its number of officers and agents to 22,000. These include the masked men wearing body armor and carrying semiautomatic weapons who arrest, sometimes violently, undocumented immigrants. By one accounting, ICE agents have killed at least nine people in raids, several of them American citizens.

The Trump administration has twisted the lessons of 9/11 in another almost equally ominous way: broadening the definition of terrorism itself.

Defining terrorism has always been fraught. But in the immediate wake of 9/11, the word was widely understood to refer to secretive networks dedicated to killing or maiming civilians for a political cause. Over time, the word was also applied to lone-wolf actors inspired by online instigators.

But in the parlance of the president and his senior advisers, it is now routinely applied to anti-ICE protesters, criminal drug gangs, people who endorse Palestinian causes, and liberals who oppose Trump administration policies.

Rümeysa Öztürk, the Turkish student who was arrested and nearly deported, was called a “terrorist sympathizer” by the Department of Homeland Defense because she coauthored an op-ed for a Tufts student newspaper criticizing Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza. She called on Tufts University to divest itself of companies with ties to Israel, echoing a resolution passed by a student group — but DHS accused her of “glorifying and supporting terrorists.” A court later dismissed the deportation order, saying the administration had not proven its case.

Stephen Miller, Trump’s senior adviser for homeland security, and Kristi Noem, then the secretary of homeland security, both labeled Robert Pretti a “domestic terrorist” after ICE agents shot him dead during a scuffle in Minneapolis last year. The administration later walked back those comments when video showed that Pretti, an ICU nurse at a VA hospital, did not attack the ICE agents, though he was carrying a firearm.

The president himself has repeatedly referred to people protesting police brutality or ICE tactics as “domestic terrorists.” In 2020, he called Portland, Ore., a “beehive of terrorists” while threatening to send National Guard troops to quell demonstrators protesting police violence. Trump said that “professional agitators” and “professional anarchists” had fomented the protests, though an Associated Press analysis of 200 people arrested then found that 95 percent were local and the vast majority had no criminal record in the state.

“Antifa” — the president’s catchall designation for left-wing activists — is among the administration’s central targets in its domestic terrorism crackdown. The administration has not clearly demonstrated that Antifa exists as an actual organization. Nevertheless, Trump signed an executive order a year ago — shortly after the assassination of Charlie Kirk — designating Antifa “a militarist, anarchist enterprise that calls for the overthrow of the U.S. government” including through terrorism.

That order authorized federal agencies to “investigate, disrupt, and dismantle” Antifa and anyone supporting it. Among those agencies is the Treasury Department, led by Scott Bessent, who has vowed to crack down on charitable and nonprofit organizations that finance “left-wing terrorism.”

Congressional Democrats have raised concerns about reports that Bessent would try to revoke the nonprofit status of progressive organizations like George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations. (Paradoxically, Bessent worked at one of Soros’s funds early in his career.)

The administration also has justified sinking dozens of boats off Latin America by saying they were being used by “narco-terrorists.” At least 260 people have died in those attacks, even though the administration has offered little evidence that the people it killed were ferrying drugs.

John Yoo, a conservative law professor who helped developed the legal rationale for Bush’s war on terror, has argued that the Trump administration has blurred the lines between “crime and war” in using the US military to attack alleged drug traffickers who had not been convicted or even indicted in a court of law, and who were motivated by profits, not political objectives.

“The U.S. has long considered drug trafficking a matter for the criminal justice system,” Yoo said in a Washington Post op-ed. “The difference in purpose dictates different tools.”

Terrorism — international and domestic — is a real threat, and drug trafficking is a real crime. The federal government is right to try to detect and thwart both. But the Trump administration, by lowering the bar for defining terrorism, has made it too easy to deploy the fearsome powers of government against people who have often turned out to be innocent.

Democrats are hoping to turn that abuse of power into midterm election victories, mainly by chanting “abolish ICE.” The slogan elides the fact that most Americans support border security and some form of immigration enforcement. But the Democrats are also legitimately voicing the disapproval of voters fed up with the broad-brush branding of anti-Trump protesters as terrorists and the deployment of military-style ICE raids against generally nonviolent immigrants.

Republicans, libertarians, and independents who have raised concerns about unchecked federal police powers in the past should be doing so again. Once the federal government gains a power, it is hard to pare it back. That will be true under Democratic presidencies as well.

Sept. 11 should be a day to remember the nearly 3,000 people who died in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania a quarter century ago. But it should also be a time to remember that the forces created to protect the country against terrorism can be, and are being, used against us.

ONLINE: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/09/11/opinion/sept-11-anniversary-dhs/

Sept. 9

The Guardian says Venezuela is paying for Donald Trump's vanity

Imperialism does not require a flag to be planted or a governor dispatched. It can be a powerful nation deciding who governs a smaller, weaker country, and on what terms and for whose benefit its resources will be developed. Donald Trump’s kidnapping of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, putting his deputy – Delcy Rodríguez – in his place as president, and then her signing a deal handing a fifth of the country’s proven oil reserves to the US, amount to a modern version of 19th-century gunboat diplomacy. Regime change supplied America’s commercial concession.

This won’t bother Mr Trump. But it should. The US president has oversold his neocolonial spoils. The additional production Venezuela is supposed to bring online might bring down oil prices eventually, but not anytime soon. Crucially, what Mr Trump calls “the biggest oil deal in history” won’t cause the price at the pump to fall before November’s midterms. When so many American voters are struggling to pay energy bills, it’s hard to see how unrealised Orinoco Belt riches are going to help Republican candidates.

The US president also promotes the idea that he is transforming the US’s industrial landscape through fossil fuels. Although the Venezuela oil grab might be highly profitable for a few selected companies, the windfall is dwarfed by the size of the US economy. Mr Trump is not getting cheap energy but a spectacle of American power. That may be enough for him.

Before Mr Maduro was captured, Mr Trump had decided that Venezuela’s oil belonged to the US. The Venezuelan strongman was offered exile if he gave Washington want it wanted. When he dithered, a US armada assembled off Venezuela’s coast. Yet Mr Trump did not replace Mr Maduro with María Corina Machado from the democratic opposition. He instead backed the authoritarian regime that could secure the oilfields from ambitious army generals and spare the costs of occupation.

The US doesn’t rule Venezuela directly, but it is exercising power through a lifelong socialist, Ms Rodríguez. She is remaking Chavismo, the revolutionary movement launched by Hugo Chávez, in her image – enraging some leftists. Ms Rodríguez has granted North American Blue Energy Partners (Nabep) concessions to 17 oilfields in Venezuela for decades to come. Nabep’s boss, Alejandro Betancourt, a controversial Venezuelan oil billionaire, popped up in Caracas for this week’s visit by the US energy secretary, Chris Wright. Nabep has in turn granted the Pentagon a 35% equity stake at no cost to the US taxpayer.

The charge of “Yankee imperialism” was often dismissed as kneejerk anti-Americanism. Mr Trump has turned it into an American boast. Ms Rodríguez argues that she is no puppet. Cooperation with Mr Trump, she says, will bring Venezuela investment and could generate $200bn in oil revenues. Unequal bargains have often benefited local rulers and intermediaries. The question is: what kind of economy and social order will that revenue produce? Oil cash is not the same as sovereign development.

Mr Trump is a playground bully handed the world’s most powerful military. He mistakes coercion for greatness and sovereign nations for toys. He uses US power to feed his bottomless ego – recently claiming himself to be a bigger historical figure than Caesar, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Stalin and Mao. When he departs the stage, others will have to rebuild what he has squandered: the US’s authority, its alliances and its reputation.

ONLINE: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/09/the-guardian-view-on-donald-trumps-oil-deal-venezuela-pays-for-his-vanity