If you needed any more proof that President Donald Trump’s quest to be considered “the ultimate peace president” and secure a Nobel Peace Prize is a farce, then look no further than his executive order on Friday rebranding the Department of Defense as the Department of War.
NBC News reports that Trump’s executive order “won’t rename the Defense Department, but it will authorize Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to use secondary titles like ‘secretary of war’ and ‘Department of War’ in official correspondence and public communications and during formal ceremonies, according to a White House preview of the order.” (Fully renaming the department would require congressional approval.) The Department of Defense website is already redirecting to war.gov.
Trump is not a student of history, but he does understand that names can telegraph meaning.
The Department of War name is a throwback — to 1789, when Congress established the War Department to oversee the operation of the new nation’s military. The department was renamed the National Military Establishment in 1947 as part of a reorganization of U.S. military services, and then amended two years later to the Department of Defense.
“Everybody likes that we had an unbelievable history of victory when it was Department of War,” Trump told reporters in August. “Then we changed it to Department of Defense.” He added, “Defense is too defensive. And we want to be defensive, but we want to be offensive too if we have to be.”
Trump is not a student of history, but he does understand that names can telegraph meaning. As David Sanger, a New York Times reporter and the author of several U.S. foreign policy books, points out, the 1949 change to the Department of Defense was an adaptation to a changing global arena — the name change took place during the Cold War, just weeks before the Soviet Union proved it could detonate a nuclear weapon. “It was a terrifying time for Americans, and the new name was intended to reflect an era in which deterrence was critical — because war, if it broke out among the superpowers, could be planet-ending,” Sanger wrote on Friday. The Cold War never got “hot” directly between the U.S. and the Soviet Union — even if the U.S. did wreak havoc across the Global South through support of murderous dictators and bloody proxy wars.
Referring to the Defense Department as the “Department of War” signals Trump’s interest in staking out a more openly aggressive posture, exploiting the United States’ position as the world’s pre-eminent military power without apology. Just as Trump considers naked power grabs and coercion as his natural right domestically, so too he considers it his natural right across the world. He delights in talking about annexing Canada, seizing the Panama Canal and taking control of Greenland. He blames Ukraine for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and supports Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza — and has floated the idea of the U.S. participating in taking over Gaza. To be clear, the U.S. Department of Defense is plenty aggressive already. Since World War II, the U.S. has intervened militarily in other countries on hundreds of occasions and launched terrible wars under the banner of “defense” and “deterrence” or “pre-emptive attacks.” In other words, the Department of Defense is an agent of imperialism and brutality. Even so, Trump seems interested in reviving a kind of 19th-century America ethos, one in which the U.S. seized territory from other countries during war — or at least Trump wants to maintain the right to do so. And while prior to Trump, the U.S. was inconsistent about upholding a “rules-based order,” it at least paid lip service to the ideal. Trump appears inclined to explode its scaffolding. This appetite for expanding the frontiers of U.S. war-making and domination was on display this week during Trump’s strike on what he claims was a drug-carrying vessel operated by the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang. According to The New York Times, Trump is “claiming the power to shift maritime counterdrug efforts from law enforcement rules to wartime rules” and “used the military in a way that had no clear legal precedent or basis, according to specialists in the laws of war and executive power.” Trump also blew up negotiations over a new Iran nuclear deal by bombing Iran and oversaw a pointless and destructive offensive bombing campaign against the Houthis in Yemen. Despite all that, and despite his attempt to resurrect a Department of War, Trump somehow still maintains that the Nobel committee ought to laud him for helping bring about peace.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer for MS NOW. Sign up for his newsletter. 
