Trump Wants This Symbolic Gesture to Earn Him the World’s Respect. Everyone Will Probably Laugh at Him.

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The first thing to say about President Donald Trump’s executive order changing the name of the “Department of Defense” to the “Department of War^[2]” is that it’s purely performative and won’t change a thing, except maybe the clench of Pete Hegseth’s jaw. (When Trump announced the new name, the former Fox News host and National Guard major tweeted^[3] it in exuberant all-caps.)

That doesn’t mean the shift isn’t troubling. It reflects a shallowly provocative attitude toward world politics (shallow or provocative would be bad enough, but shallowly provocative is dangerous). It is puzzlingly out of step with Trump’s own efforts to tout himself as a peacemaker. And in his professed aim to restore America’s mighty stature, Trump completely misreads history.

Let’s first deal with the history. Trump first dropped hints of a name change at the Pentagon last month, telling reporters^[4] that when “we won World War I, World War II, it was called the Department of War. … We had an unbelievable history of victory when it was Department of War. Then we changed it to Department of Defense. … We’re going to have to go back.” Besides, he added, it sounds “like a better name.”

Is it possible that Trump really believes we (supposedly) stopped winning wars—the draw in Korea, the loss in Vietnam, etc.—because the federal department in charge of the military changed its name from “War” to “Defense”? Winning requires not just “defense,” but “offense,” he said—as if the U.S. military hasn’t gone on the offense, in one way or another, almost nonstop since WWII.

More than that, the old Department of War^[5] was never what Trump seems to think it was. George Washington created it in 1789, but the Navy broke away and formed its own department, separate from the Army, in 1798. The Air Force did the same in 1947, after its huge advances in World War II.

It was in 1947 that President Harry Truman signed the National Security Act, which among other things consolidated all the branches of the armed forces into the National Military Establishment, supervised by a civilian secretary of defense. In 1949, after someone realized that its acronym sounded like “enemy” when spoken out loud, the NME was incorporated into a Department of Defense.

Under both the NME and the DOD, the job of the secretary of defense was to be “the principal assistant to the President in all matters relating to the national security.” (Italics added.) In other words, the official heading the department was not to advise solely on military matters. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were designated “the principal military advisers to the President and the Secretary of Defense.” (The secretary wouldn’t need “military advisers” if his or her only job was to provide military advice.)

As Steven Rearden wrote in his authoritative book, History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense: The Formative Years, 1947–1950^[6], “Perhaps the premier accomplishment of the National Security Act was its recognition that the military had a vital part to play in the development of national policy in peacetime as well as wartime.”

This is even more obvious today, with the dense overlaps of military, economic, environmental, and technological issues in all aspects of security. In this sense, Hegseth’s rah-rah obsession with the “warrior ethos” is dangerously narrow. (His obsession on this point is a bit performative as well; he trots it out to justify his campaign against “wokeness” in the military, when in practice it’s been an excuse to fire senior Black^[8] and female^[9] officers.)

What will the rest of the world—friends, enemies, terrorists, soldiers, cyberwarriors, and just ordinary citizens—make of this change? Will they tremble in fear, sigh with relief, or be in any way impressed with Trump’s stab at semantic glory? Unlikely. If anything, they will—and should—see it as childish games-playing.

I’m pretty sure no other country on Earth has a military establishment that goes by the name “Department of War” or “Ministry of War,” or anything of the sort. (The last ones to give it up were Brazil and Portugal after their dictatorships were toppled.) Many of the titles are euphemisms, like Kim Jong-un’s Korean People’s Army, or Xi Jinping’s People’s Liberation Army. One might argue that “Department of War” at least has a ring of honesty about it. OK. But one might also argue that the title will be cited to confirm the view—and thus bolster our adversaries’ propaganda—that the United States is a militaristic nation hell-bent on inflaming the planet in war. Trump and Hegseth might think that’s a good image to put forth, but really it isn’t.

It’s more likely to incite laughter, especially given Trump’s frequent claims to be a man of peace—so much so that he publicly lobbies, all but begs, to be given the Nobel Peace Prize^[10]. Even when he’s ordered the provision or use of deadly force on the battlefield, he has expressly denied that he’s getting involved in a war. He sent B-2 aircraft to drop bombs on Iran’s nuclear sites—but then sent Vice President J.D. Vance on TV to say “We’re not at war with Iran^[11].” He resumed delivery of arms to Ukraine, but then stressed, “It’s not my war^[12],” or “It’s Biden’s war and I got stuck in the middle of it^[13].”

Whenever he’s dispatched troops to fight what he calls a “war,” it hasn’t really been for what any reasonable person would call a war. He sent Marines to stave off what he called an “invasion^[18]” of migrants from across the southern border—but whatever else it may have been, this was not an invasion: There was no organized campaign by armed men to conquer territory, despite Trump’s political campaign to depict them that way. He sent troops to Washington, D.C^[19]., to quell crimes that supposedly posed a danger to national security—when, in fact, crime in the nation’s capital had been declining^[20]. This week, he ordered U.S. Special Forces to fire on a boat in international waters, killing all 11 people onboard^[21]. Trump and Hegseth claimed the boat was carrying a cargo of illegal drugs to American cities. They have presented no evidence for this claim. Even if it was true, the Coast Guard traditionally intercepts such vessels, boarding them, confiscating the drugs, and arresting the carriers. The U.S. military has no authority to engage in these missions, much less to kill people—any more than it would have the authority to open fire on a gang of criminals that it suspects are on their way to rob a bank.

Trump and Hegseth labeled their victims “terrorists,” as if that justified the attack. But even if the men on the boat were bad guys, they didn’t pose the sort of threat—like that of al-Qaida or Houthi militias—that might justify an armed response. (No U.S. official has claimed that the victims were warned to halt or that there was any exchange of fire.)

The point here is that, if this display of firepower is what Trump and his men have in mind when they talk up the “warrior ethos” and the need to win wars, it’s a rather puny gesture to warrant changing the name of an entire bureaucracy—the nation’s largest—to the Department of War. In fact, if our only real wars amount to fighting crime in America’s cities or blowing up speedboats in the Caribbean, why does the department that’s headquartered in the Pentagon (whatever it’s called) need a $1 trillion budget?

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