Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden long preached restraint in military affairs—primarily when lecturing Republicans.
Yet their records read more like global bombardment schedules, with barely a pause for reflection.
Both men expanded executive war powers well beyond anything President Trump has done with his recent B-2 and Tomahawk strikes in Iran—yet faced little scrutiny from media or legal elites. Only one post-War Powers Act (WPA) president rivals their disregard for Congress: William Jefferson Clinton.
And what is the collective legacy of Obama and Biden? A pattern of unauthorized force, wholesale evasion of the WPA, and legal justifications that contort the 2001 and 2002 Authorizations for Use of Military Force (AUMFs) beyond recognition—especially when compared to the standards Democrats now apply to President Trump.
President Obama dropped 26,172 bombs in 2016 alone—an average of 72 per day—across seven countries: Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan.
The year before, that number was 23,144. Many of these operations took place in nations where Congress had issued no explicit authorization for hostilities. Libya, Somalia, and Pakistan were not named in either the 2001 or 2002 AUMFs.
Obama rarely sought new authorizations to cover his widening campaigns—preferring to reinterpret existing AUMFs rather than confront a divided Congress.
In 2013, after the Assad regime used chemical weapons, Obama briefly floated seeking a new authorization for military strikes in Syria—but ultimately pivoted to a diplomatic workaround brokered by Putin’s Russia.
The following year, as ISIS surged across Iraq and Syria, his administration launched a sustained air campaign. Although a draft AUMF targeting ISIS was submitted to Congress in 2015, it never passed.
Still, Obama pressed forward, justifying the operations under the 2001 AUMF by asserting that ISIS was an “associated force” of al-Qaeda—even though the two groups were open rivals, often hostile to each other.
At the same time, the administration dramatically expanded AFRICOM operations with little oversight or debate, conducting drone strikes and special missions in at least 13 African nations—none of them explicitly covered by existing AUMFs.
Legal justifications often leaned on classified or selectively released Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memos that stretched the definition of “enemy combatant” to include groups only loosely affiliated with al-Qaeda or merely ideologically adjacent to past adversaries.
In practice, the envelope of legal authority was drawn large enough to fit virtually any target of convenience.
Perhaps the most striking example of Obama’s overreach came in Libya in 2011. With NATO under U.S. command, Obama ordered an air campaign that lasted over seven months. Congress was neither consulted nor asked for authorization.
When the 60-day clock under the WPA expired, the administration claimed that the operation didn’t qualify as “hostilities” because no U.S. ground troops were involved.
This contorted reading of the law drew bipartisan rebuke. On June 3, 2011, the House passed House Resolution 292, condemning the administration for failing to seek congressional approval and expressing disapproval of its interpretation of the WPA.
Senator Rand Paul captured the moment bluntly, warning that Congress had become “not even a rubber stamp, but an irrelevancy” in matters of war.
But perhaps Obama himself had the sharper take. In a chilling observation to senior aides, he reportedly said in 2011:
Turns out I’m really good at killing people. Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine.
This line, never rebutted by Obama, underscores the irreconcilable incongruity between the former president’s soaring oratory and his stone-cold, interventionist, death-by-drone reality.
The press often framed Obama’s remote warfare as calm, cool, measured leadership.
The expert class celebrated his embrace of a modern, 21st-century style of conflict—even as he sidestepped the very War Powers constraints they demanded under GOP presidents.
These operations became a near-daily affair: mostly ignored, and when acknowledged, held up as evidence of Obama’s technocratic, cultivated mystique.
Concerns about process and legality were muted if voiced at all—like a species of cicada that only emerges when a Republican resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
President Biden—or whoever was exercising command and control of military operations during his presidency—undoubtedly followed in Obama’s footsteps.
From 2021 through 2024, Biden authorized more than 80 airstrike operations in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. Many targeted Iranian-backed militias that did not exist in 2001 and bore no connection to 9/11.
Still, Biden leaned on the same decades-old 2001 and 2002 AUMFs for legal justification.
In March 2021, he ordered strikes in Syria without prior congressional authorization and with, at best, a tenuous link to the 2001 AUMF. In February 2023 and again in April 2024, he launched Tomahawk missiles at targets in Iraq and Yemen. Each Block V Tomahawk missile costs $2.4 million.
In some operations, dozens were fired, driving per-mission costs north of $100 million—without accounting for the layered expenses of intelligence gathering, logistical support, fleet deployment, refueling, and post-strike security.
These operations accelerated the depletion of U.S. missile inventories. Analysts warned that our Tomahawk stockpile reached critical lows under Biden’s tenure, driven by repeated use in Yemen.
While Trump’s single-day strike on Iranian nuclear sites drew calls for impeachment and cries of constitutional crisis, Obama and Biden conducted multi-month air campaigns without similar outrage.
The only consistent theme in this selective scrutiny is simply that, selectivity.
The price tag for these unauthorized operations under presidents Obama and Biden is staggering—both financially and in terms of degraded strategic and logistical readiness.
U.S. munitions stockpiles were drawn down to dangerously low levels, with little effort by either administration to restore the nation’s capacity to deter or respond to future threats.
In an era of fiscal tightening and global instability, these costs are anything but abstract. They are concrete, measurable—and largely unacknowledged by the very leaders who incurred them.
Now, President Trump, Secretary Hegseth, and Congress are left to prioritize rebuilding military strength and restoring America’s ability to project power when necessary. The new approach places national security where it belongs: firmly in service to the American people, not in service to global abstractions.
Presidents Obama and Biden didn’t merely stretch the War Powers Resolution beyond recognition—they built a political consensus that war powers could be reinterpreted, even redefined, at the discretion of the Executive.
In doing so, they normalized undeclared, unending warfare. Along with President Clinton before them, they rendered the WPA a dead letter—at least whenever a Democrat occupies the Oval Office.
That erosion was abetted by successive Congresses, either complicit in their silence or too fractured to defend their institutional prerogatives. The result was not just neglect of constitutional checks but the collapse of any pretense that enforcement would apply evenly across party lines.
So when Democrats and their media allies erupted over President Trump’s limited, targeted strike on Iran—invoking lofty rhetoric about “norms,” “legal integrity,” and “constitutional order”—their protestations rang hollow.
This isn’t a return of congressional oversight. It’s a clear overreach and performative outrage—disguised as a virtue. It is the weaponization of the WPA—a statute riddled with constitutional infirmities and practically unenforced, save for when the target aligns with the preferred narrative.
One could argue that today’s Democrat party is no longer even the party of Obama or Biden. With AOC and “The Squad” ascendant, the party now embraces fringe, anti-military, collectivist ideology—breaking from its historic foreign policy posture.
But Biden was president less than six months ago. And during his tenure, those same progressive voices said little about his airstrikes, drone campaigns, or evasions of legal process.
Their silence then was more than simple complicity. It defines the extent of their credibility now.
Charlton Allen is an attorney and former chief executive officer and chief judicial officer of the North Carolina Industrial Commission. He is founder of the Madison Center for Law & Liberty, Inc., editor of The American Salient, and host of the Modern Federalist podcast. His commentary has been featured in American Thinker and linked across multiple RealClear platforms, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearWorld, RealClearDefense, RealClearHistory, and RealClearPolicy. X: @CharltonAllenNC
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