Last week, President Donald Trump issued an executive action declaring the Department of Defense is once again to be called the Department of War. Given the track record of the Pentagon, this may indeed be Trump’s most honestion act to date.
“The name ‘Department of War,’ more than the current ‘Department of Defense,’ ensures peace through strength, as it demonstrates our ability and willingness to fight and win wars on behalf of our Nation at a moment’s notice, not just to defend,” the presidential order explains. “This name sharpens the Department’s focus on our own national interest and our adversaries’ focus on our willingness and availability to wage war to secure what is ours.”
Since the president cannot actually rename the Department of Defense without congressional action, what would already be a symbolic act is indeed nothing more than symbolism.
Only time will tell whether the headlines about the “Department of War” will make even the most marginal difference in how the United States is perceived by world leaders already hostile to us.
We suspect it won’t matter much at all, in fact.
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the United States spent 40% of the world’s military spending in 2024. That’s more than the combined spending of China, Russia, Germany, India, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, Ukraine, France and Japan.
It’s not like the rest of the world is unaware of America’s military capabilities or willingness to throw them around with even the most frivolous of justifications. Our military industrial complex demands perpetual crises and perpetual enemies.
As the Costs of War project at Brown University noted in 2021, the United States spent and obligated $8 trillion in waging its post-9/11 wars. In the process, nearly one million people were directly killed in these post-9/11 wars and many more killed indirectly due to the chaos of the wars.
These include conflicts President Donald Trump, the self-styled peacemaker, has kept the United States involved in. This includes his repeated veto in his first term of congressional efforts to end U.S. involvement in Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen and his ratcheting up of the failed war in Afghanistan.
So far in his current term, Trump-the-peacemaker has chosen to bomb Iran, Somalia, Yemen and a boat in this hemisphere because he wants to be perceived as tough. All without congressional authorization, of course, because American presidents don’t bother pretending the constitution exists.
Which, we presume, is the same reason he’s gone through with the Department of War renaming.
As the great former Congressman Ron Paul said, “Let the American people understand what so much of their hard-earned money is being taken to support. It’s not ‘defense.’ It’s ‘war.’ And none of it has benefitted the American people.”
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