The President of the United States and the American Secretary of Defense say they want to return to the era when America won wars. However, they largely ignore the greatest achievement of the last 80 years: avoiding conflict between superpowers.
When American President Harry S. Truman signed the law creating the Department of Defense from the remnants of the War Department in August 1949, Stalin was just 16 days away from demonstrating that the Soviets could detonate a nuclear weapon, and Mao Zedong was less than two months away from declaring the creation of the People’s Republic of China.
It was a terrifying time for Americans, and the new name was meant to reflect an era where deterrence was essential - as war, if it broke out between superpowers, could mean the end of the planet.
For decades, the chances of avoiding that nuclear duel or direct conflict between superpowers seemed very slim. Therefore, for many historians, the greatest achievement of the Cold War is that it largely remained cold, despite the wars in Korea and Vietnam, the Cuban missile crisis, and the arms race that followed, as stated in an analysis published by The New York Times.
All of this makes the executive order aimed at renaming the Pentagon to its old name - the Department of War - more than just a return to the past, a restoration of nomenclature. In a moment when deterrence is at a more critical level than ever - in cyberspace, in outer space, and in a world where Russia and China celebrate a difficult partnership to challenge American preeminence - Trump argues that the answer is to return to the good old days, as reported by the cited newspaper.
"Everyone likes that we had an incredible history of victory when it was the War Department. Then we changed it to the Department of Defense," he told reporters two weeks ago.
Trump Has Undermined America's Deterrence
For anyone who has followed the revolution that has engulfed America's national security institutions in the last seven months, the president's order was not a surprise.
"In a way, it makes sense: this administration is simply taking us back to the pre-Truman era. It has dismantled the processes, institutions, and norms that were established after World War II," said Douglas Lute, a career military officer who played key roles in the National Security Council in the Bush and Obama administrations and served as the U.S. ambassador to NATO.
"More substantial than the name change is what they have done. Once the trust that serves as the glue of the alliance structure is eroded, we will pay a very high price to recover it, if we can ever recover it," he said, citing doubts among American allies that the United States will defend them and Trump's hesitations in the relationship with Russia.
Certainly, in recent months, Trump has shown less interest in building deterrence. He has deactivated large areas of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security, as its mission to defend against external and internal cyber attacks included securing electoral systems.
Furthermore, Trump ordered the Department of Justice to investigate the agency head during the 2020 elections for his statement that they were some of the safest in history, contradicting his belief that they were rigged in favor of Joe Biden.
Trump dismissed the four-star general who led both the National Security Agency and the U.S. Cyber Command as part of a broader purge of non-political military officers appointed in the Biden era. The morale of senior officers is suffering, wondering if it's worth pursuing higher command positions if an accusation from a MAGA influencer that they are a secret member of the so-called deep state is enough to end a three-decade career.
Trump's major investment in Defense is the Golden Dome, his plan to build a missile defense from one U.S. coast to the other. But for America's adversaries, the system, which involves space weapons, looks as much like offense as defense.
Hegseth, an Ideologue of Force
When it comes to renaming the Pentagon, no one is more enthusiastic than Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. If Trump implements his idea, Hegseth will be titled Secretary of War - the president has already referred to him as such in public - joining a long list that began with Henry Knox, after whom Fort Knox is named.
"We won the First World War and we won the Second World War, not with the Department of Defense, but with a Department of War. As the president said, we are not just defense, we are offense," Hegseth said on Fox News on Wednesday. "We believe words, names, and titles are important," he concluded.
Obviously, they are important: Hegseth is the one who repeatedly talks about restoring "lethality" and a "warrior ethos" in the U.S. military, writes the American newspaper. When he arrived at the Pentagon, one of his first actions was to ban the frequently used expression in the building that "our diversity is our strength." "The dumbest expression in our military history," he told the military.
How Beijing and Moscow View Washington's Move
But words matter for other nations too, both allies and adversaries. And this name change, assuming Congress is willing to rewrite the laws from the Truman era, fits perfectly into the narrative about the United States that Russia and China propagate.
In their discourse, all of America's talk about being an international peace-loving player respectful of the law is a thin cover for a country that truly only wants to attack any target it considers a threat. To support their arguments, state-controlled media in Russia and China mention Trump's unilateral decisions to attack Iran's nuclear facilities in June or to sink an open boat with alleged drug traffickers, killing 11 people off the coast of Venezuela.
"This is a retrospective decision. It fits into China's narrative in its tireless competition for global influence with the U.S. Beijing will unfairly label this as proof that the U.S. poses a threat to the international order, and China is a defender of peace," said R. Nicholas Burns, former U.S. ambassador to China, who spent decades as a foreign service officer, including as ambassador to NATO.
Trump and Hegseth may offer Russian President Vladimir Putin a similar opportunity. Long before invading Ukraine in 2022, Putin insisted that among the "root causes" of his determination to restore some of the old borders of the Russian empire were American-led efforts to expand NATO to Russia's borders in the '90s. The West's response has always been that NATO's presence is entirely defensive.
But the United States is now undermining this assertion by insisting they are tired of playing defensively, as the president and defense secretary have repeatedly stated in recent weeks. For them, restoring a Department of War signals that there is a new sheriff in town, with a new perspective on the use of force.
Soft Power Is Eliminated, Hard Power Is Valued
At a certain level, of course, what Trump and Hegseth are doing is little more than rebranding - a concept the president knows well, as he has renamed real estate projects in the hope that they will sell better.
The mission of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines does not change. Nor does the mix of defensive and offensive missions at units on the cutting edge of new technologies, such as the U.S. Cyber Command or Trump's beloved Space Command.
However, at another level, renaming the world's most powerful military force, with a defense budget of $1 trillion (perhaps it would be better called the war budget) about three times larger than China's, will be seen as part of the Trump revolution.
In this world, American soft power is eliminated, and hard power is valued.
The closure of the U.S. Agency for International Development, silencing of Voice of America and Radio Free Asia broadcasts, and cutting billions of dollars from foreign aid in the State Department's budget have sent a message: The United States has exited the realm of promoting democracy and that of benign nations, concludes the American newspaper.
T.D.