The 'Department of War' rename means China and Russia can accuse the US of warmongering
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Nothing like a good old-fashioned rebrand to set the tone for what is in any case the most powerful fighting force in modern history. Per his 200th Executive Order of 2025, President Trump has declared that the Department of Defence must now be known as the Department of War, or at least as a secondary title as anything more would require an act of Congress; and that the Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has busied himself scourging the US military of what a fellow Republican Eric Schmitt described as “weakness and wokeness’, will now be Secretary of War.
The US has had a war department for much of its history. From 1789 until 1947, it oversaw the army and, from time to time, the navy too. That is until the advent of international law, multilateralism and a military doctrine based on defence and deterrence, ushered in a few years after the Second World War when all branches of the military were incorporated into the newly established Department of Defence.
“We won the First World War. We won the Second World War. We won everything before that and in between, and then we decided to go woke, and we changed the name to Department of Defence. So we’re going Department of War,” Trump said as he signed the order.
That’s all well and good for the unreconstructed machismo at the heart of the Maga movement, which seems to believe that a more muscular marketing of the military will stop other nations in their tracks and still allow President Trump to put America First. But Maga wanted out of foreign wars, not a stepped up readiness to get into them. And it is hard to see how peace through strength under a war-ready rebrand will get Trump any closer to his coveted Nobel Peace Prize.
Think less global policeman, more Trump in the autocrat’s playground with an army of toy soldiers in front of him which he’ll deploy erratically and at whim, wherever he feels the bad guys are. “Maximum lethality, not tepid legality. Violent effect, not politically correct”, was how the newly coined @SecWar put it on Friday in the Oval Office.
That aptly describes the US air strike last week on a vessel allegedly belonging to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua in international waters; lethal, and most likely extrajudicial given there was no immediate threat from the eleven killed on board, or any congressional authorisation for targeting them. The US decision to drop bunker-busting bombs on Iran’s nuclear facilities earlier this summer also has questionable legal foundation – a stretch, some analysts say, to see it as a proportionate act of collective self-defence in the face of imminent Iranian attack as the US has argued.
Donald Trump of course cares little for matters of law, not for the UN Charter and its prohibition on the use of force, nor for those domestic lawyers who continue to battle him over a whole range of matters but, most pertinent to the war department, the deployment of the National Guard, a reserve component of the US military, to Washington DC. He just had to watch his arch-rival over in China preside over the most phenomenal display of military might perhaps ever to hit the world‘s television screens. He wants to show he’s good at war too.
But he shouldn’t need to. China’s troops look exceptional in formation and its hardware is formidable; Taiwan and its allies will be taking careful note. But China‘s armed forces are not battle-hardened like their American counterparts after the long succession of wars the US has tried so hard to disentangle itself from.
The Pentagon has a host of other more pressing spending priorities than changing the seals and insignia at hundreds of thousands of US military bases. And bigging up historic victories, as a cornerstone of a nationalist, imperialist vision, that‘s a speciality of Vladimir Putin‘s, not one a US President should seek to emulate.
Trump‘s autocratic rivals can now present the US as a war-mongering wildcard, a rhetorical gift as they pitch themselves as the guardians of peace and international law in a new, multipolar world order. “We’re in the business of war fighting,” Pete Hegseth proclaims in one of his latest posts on X. That’s a business that’s easy to get into and hard to stop.
Diana Magnay is an international correspondent for Sky News
ImperiumRome on September 9th, 2025 at 15:59 UTC »
After reading the article, I'm still not sure what exactly this "gift" Trump has been giving the Chinese is. Don't get me wrong, he did plenty of such things, but none was spelt out in the article. The main gist of the article, I think, is that Trump and his henchmen seemed too happy invoking imperialistic image of America, which is bad for PR.
Well, perhaps, but then it's not exactly new to anyone paying attention or actually learn history. And let's not forget the Iraq war, which led to the common joke: if you have oil, Americans will come and bring you democracy.
There's also the current Israel-Palestine conflict, no matter who is right or wrong, it isn't exactly popular among people in developing world, and who do they see as standing behind Israel ? What Hegseth has done so far to damage US reputation is just a drop in the bucket.
Envojus on September 9th, 2025 at 11:44 UTC »
Peace through strength? The Trump administration has been consistently giving concessions to its adverseries in such troubling times.
It's all bark, no teeth, not speak sotly and carry a stick.
theipaper on September 9th, 2025 at 10:20 UTC »
Nothing like a good old-fashioned rebrand to set the tone for what is in any case the most powerful fighting force in modern history. Per his 200th Executive Order of 2025, President Trump has declared that the Department of Defense must now be known as the Department of War, or at least as a secondary title as anything more would require an act of Congress; and that the Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has busied himself scourging the US military of what a fellow Republican Eric Schmitt described as “weakness and wokeness’, will now be Secretary of War.
The US has had a war department for much of its history. From 1789 until 1947, it oversaw the army and, from time to time, the navy too. That is until the advent of international law, multilateralism and a military doctrine based on defence and deterrence, ushered in a few years after World War Two when all branches of the military were incorporated into the newly established Department of Defense.
“We won the First World War. We won the Second World War. We won everything before that and in between, and then we decided to go woke, and we changed the name to Department of Defense. So we’re going Department of War”, Trump said as he signed the order.
That’s all well and good for the unreconstructed machismo at the heart of the MAGA movement, which seems to believe that a more muscular marketing of the military will stop other nations in their tracks and still allow President Trump to put America First. But MAGA wanted out of foreign wars, not a stepped up readiness to get into them. And it is hard to see how peace through strength under a war-ready rebrand will get Trump any closer to his coveted Nobel Peace Prize.
Think less global policeman, more Trump in the autocrat’s playground with an army of toy soldiers in front of him which he’ll deploy erratically and at whim, wherever he feels the bad guys are. “Maximum lethality, not tepid legality. Violent effect, not politically correct”, was how the newly coined u/SecWar put it on Friday in the Oval Office.