Morning Glory: We are in a war. Biden doesn't know it. Trump does.

Is the United States at war this April, 2024? Was it at war in November, 1941?

Of course we are, just as we were on the eve of Pearl Harbor. Just as then, many Americans including the president were unaware of it.

If you have any doubt ask the families of Sgt. William Jerome Rivers of Carrollton, Georgia; Spc. Kennedy Ladon Sanders of Waycross, Georgia; and Spc. Breonna Alexsondria Moffett of Savannah, Georgia, killed in Jordan in January. President Biden, on the Sunday after the murders by drone, announced that the drone came from "radical Iran-backed militant groups operating in Syria and Iraq."

Get it? Iran ordered those soldiers killed. We are in an undeclared war with Iran, as is Israel though by the time this column appears, Iran may have abandoned its cloak of cowardice and struck directly at Israel from Iranian soil and brought the barely hidden war into the open.

Though President Biden may not fully grasp it because he is increasingly and obviously infirm (and our enemies know it)— the triumvirs he rules in the name of —Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, Secretary of Defense Austin and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan— surely do know this fundamental fact. If they don’t they are stupid, and they are not stupid. They do seem, however, afraid.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE FOX NEWS OPINION

The United States is at war with a three-tiered partnership of evil actors. Like a law firm with a managing partner, senior partners, junior partners and associates, our enemies confront a firm led by China, with senior partners Russia and Iran and junior partners North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela and many associates the most visible of which are Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis. The South American and Mexican drug cartels, like the remnants of ISIS and ISIS-K, are wannabe serious enemies but denied either formal territory or significant armaments they are dangerous to Americans but not "existential threats."

The partnership led of predatory states, led by Xi Jinping at the top of the Leninist Chinese Communist Party, is. They are our enemies and until and unless we begin to treat that partnership of enemies as bent on our defeat and the defeat of our allies we will not be able to rally the West to its own defense.

HOUSE REPUBLICANS REBUKE BIDEN FOR ‘ONE-SIDED PRESSURE’ ON ISRAEL

There are two obvious, "hot" fronts in this war: Israel and Ukraine. The Democrat Party has increasingly and now quite obviously begun its betrayal of Israel. The Republican Party is in an internal struggle over our support of Ukraine, which is an intra-party struggle I hope breaks decisively towards Kyiv.

Former President Trump may disagree on the details of how to wage this war, but he knows it is ongoing and many of the people he will bring back to a new administration he heads will get it exactly right.

I promote continually Senators Tom Cotton and Joni Ernst and former Secretary of State as Trump’s among best choices for a running mate because they understand this central conflict of our time between the free states and their allies and this partnership of predators. Each of these people can persuasively articulate the situation while deftly and continually taking this message of realism about the world to the American people. In doing so, any of them would contrast as sharply as anyone else the haplessness of Vice President Harris and the triumvirs.

I’d like the former president to name as well his key national security appointees which could include the two not named above as well as experienced warriors like Senators J.D. Vance of Ohio and Dan Sullivan of Alaska as well as former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe and Ambassador Rick Grennell (either of whom could serve as Chief of Staff or head of the Centea Intelligence Agency) and experienced ambassadors like former Ambassador David Friedman back in Israel and Ambassador George Glass dispatched to a critical ally like Saudi Arabia or the UAE. All and more carry with them the reputation as serious and tough. This is a "war Administration" in the making though its central purpose would be to avoid the formal outbreak of war via the robust display of confidence and strength.

Trump will also need an Attorney General who understands and obliges the Federal Bureau of Investigation to stop wasting resources on folks attending Latin Mass or exercising their rights before local school boards and focus on the genuine threats within. 40,000 Chinese nationals who have crossed our southern border in the past 18 months. How can even one Bureau employee be writing memos about Catholics who are tradition-minded or parents upset over their schools drift into inanity instead of tracking down these tens of thousands of individuals and finding out what they are doing? Are they "building any army within" as Trump suggested as a possibility two weeks ago? Nobody knows because we don’t have the resources allocated to the border to stop their entry or track them once turned loose with a "date" for a hearing.

Weakness is provocative and no Administration has been as weak and thus as provocative as Biden’s. Biden is rehabilitating not only the reputation former President Carter but even that of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain —Chamberlain at least belatedly ramped up production of the fighter airplanes that won the Battle of Britain while Biden is overseeing a shrinking Navy. So awful are Biden’s decisions and the rhetoric he brings to the public airwaves that his capacity to continue even until January much less for four more years is in some doubt.

The turn against Israel is without precedent. Imagine FDR telling Churchill during the period prior to the invasion of France but after Poland had been brutalized that the British leader needed to embrace a "six or eight week" ceasefire with Hitler, and that the United Kingdom needed to flood Germany with supplies because the German people were suffering after the invasion of Poland? Absurd, of course, but clarity was not in short supply among Democrats then.

Trump wins this election going away if he hammers on Biden’s turn against Israel and his idiotic salvos against Prime Minister Netanyahu—who helms a unity government. "This isn’t Netanyahu’s war," Yossi Klein Halevi—a fierce critic of the Israeli Prime minister—told Dan Senor on the "Call Me Back" pod this week. "It is Israel’s war."

It is also our war, and the moderate Arab states’ war, and the United Kingdom’s war no matter what the equally confused British Foreign Secretary David Cameron might think or say. Cameron is bringing his Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to near certain and catastrophic defeat at the polls, and for the first time ever I am cheering on the Labor Party because the Tory Party needs a thorough rehabilitation until it emerges with someone like former Defence Secretary Ben Wallace at its fore.

"What is most worrying now is that literally any scenario is possible," Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk declared in late March. "We have not had a situation like this since 1945," Tusk continued. "I know it sounds devastating, especially to people of the younger generation, but we have to mentally get used to a new era."

"We are in a pre-war era," Tusk concluded. "I don’t exaggerate. This is becoming more and more apparent every day."

If Trump embraces and repeatedly articulates this reality and the need to save the tenuous peace by rapidly building our defenses and promising seriousness at every level of the national security team, the former president will be the next president. Trump ended his term with serious people like Pompeo at State and Ambassador Robert O’Brien as his National Security Advisor. If he promises to bring them and more like them and those named above into his Administration, an even bigger win than his upset in 2016 is possible. And that win would cause our NATO, our Pacific allies, Israel and its Abraham Accord partners to breath much, much easier. 

Hugh Hewitt is one of the country’s leading journalists of the center-right. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996, where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990, and it is today syndicated to hundreds of stations and outlets across the country every Monday through Friday morning. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and this column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio show today.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM HUGH HEWITT