University of Southern California law professor Mary Dudziak appeared Wednesday on MSNBC to explain why she believes the United States has been in a permanent state of war.

“The idea of wartime is doing a lot of work in American politics,” she said. “The way we think about history is history passes through two different kinds of time, from wartime to peacetime to wartime et cetera.”

ADVERTISEMENT

“That’s the way we learn about it in school, that’s the way that we imagine it. When we use to concept of wartime, we assume that wartime is by definition temporary.”

But Dudziak noted that over the past 100 years, there had been few times when the United States was not engaged in a some sort of military conflict.

“And let me just tell you the Obama version of this,” she added. “Obama comes into office having campaigned on ending two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but then it morphs into a war on terror. He says we are at war with al Qaeda. We have lost the limitation of countries and it is now formulated as a war without end.”

Watch video, courtesy of MSNBC, below:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy