{"id":408480,"date":"2025-09-08T18:52:47","date_gmt":"2025-09-08T18:52:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/408480\/"},"modified":"2025-09-08T18:52:47","modified_gmt":"2025-09-08T18:52:47","slug":"donald-trumps-department-of-war-will-just-deliver-bloodshed-and-destruction-judith-levine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/408480\/","title":{"rendered":"Donald Trump\u2019s \u2018Department of War\u2019 will just deliver bloodshed and destruction | Judith Levine"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Friday, Donald Trump signed an executive order<\/a> restoring the Department of Defense to its original name, the Department of War.<\/p>\n

That name \u201chad a stronger sound\u201d, Trump told<\/a> reporters in August. \u201cAs Department of War we won everything,\u201d he added, \u201cand I think we\u2019re going to have to go back to that.\u201d In June, at the Nato summit<\/a>, he called Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, his \u201csecretary of war\u201d.<\/p>\n

In the Department of War, Trump and Hegseth see the embodiment of a revived \u201cwarrior ethos\u201d purportedly lost to overweening \u201cwoke-ness\u201d in the armed forces. Hegseth has opined<\/a> that women don\u2019t belong on the battlefield and DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) has rendered American fighting forces \u201ceffeminate\u201d. Introducing a bill<\/a> last week to the same effect as Trump\u2019s order, Greg Steube, a Florida Republican senator, said the new-old name would \u201cpay tribute\u201d to past fighters\u2019 \u201crenowned commitment to lethality\u201d.<\/p>\n

And the president, who fashions himself a dealmaker for peace, now has a department named to reflect his excellence as warrior king.<\/p>\n

In a way, an administration that habitually calls things the opposite of what they are \u2013 the 20 January executive order Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government; the waste-and-chaos-generation \u201cdepartment of government efficiency\u201d \u2013 is, for once, speaking truth. The Department of War, created in 1789, became the defense department in 1949, with an amendment to the National Security Act of 1947 unifying the branches of the military. But the Department of Defense has never been a department of defense. It is a department of war.<\/p>\n

The last time the US declared war \u2013 or had to defend itself, for that matter \u2013 was in 1941, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Still, since it\u2019s been the \u201cdefense\u201d department, the Pentagon has waged at least four undeclared wars. Trump is right: we haven\u2019t won much. The Korean War was a draw. In Vietnam, we lost outright. And after hundreds of thousands of deaths, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan left those countries and the region more unstable and plagued by terrorism. The US has engaged in more than 200<\/a> military interventions, more than half of them since the end of the cold war in 1989.<\/p>\n

Trump was going to be the peace president. \u201cI\u2019m not going to start a war,\u201d he promised<\/a> in his 2024 victory speech. \u201cI\u2019m going to stop the wars.\u201d It didn\u2019t take long to break that vow and keep totting up those interventions.<\/p>\n

Ten days into his second term, Trump undertook the next chapter of the war on terror, launching airstrikes<\/a> in north-western Syria and, a day later, in Somalia. In March<\/a>, he initiated strikes in Yemen against Houthi militants, who had taken control of shipping routes in the Red Sea. The operation \u2013 blemished by the inadvertent deaths of dozens of immigrants<\/a> in a detention center and the loss of a $67.4m fighter jet<\/a>, which fell off an aircraft carrier into the sea \u2013 was halted<\/a> 51 days later. The Houthis, Trump allowed, didn\u2019t \u201cwant to fight anymore\u201d, an allegation a Houthi leader disputed soundly.<\/p>\n

In late June, after Israel shot missiles into Iran and Iran responded in kind, the US bombed three Iranian nuclear enrichment facilities. The president, who had withdrawn<\/a> the US from the multilateral \u2013 or, as he put it, \u201cone-sided\u201d \u2013 2015 Iran Nuclear Agreement during his first term, had weeks earlier entered into new nuclear negotiations with that country. Over bipartisan objections<\/a>, he attacked anyway.<\/p>\n

Hours later, in a televised address from the White House<\/a>, Trump claimed that the objective of the strikes had been the \u201cdestruction of Iran\u2019s nuclear enrichment capacity\u201d, and pronounced the salvo a \u201cspectacular\u201d success. At the same time, he warned on Truth Social<\/a> that any Iranian retaliation that killed Americans would \u201cBE MET WITH FORCE FAR GREATER THAN WHAT WAS WITNESSED TONIGHT\u201d. While the world braced<\/a> for a region-wide conflagration, Trump boasted<\/a> to Nato: \u201cNow this incredible exercise of American strength has paved the way for peace with a historic ceasefire agreement late Monday.\u201d July clocked in as the deadliest month<\/a> of the Gaza war. In August, as Israel continued to starve the Palestinians, UN-backed experts declared<\/a> Israel\u2019s \u201cman-made famine\u201d engulfing northern Gaza.<\/p>\n

A few weeks after the attacks, US intelligence<\/a> concluded that they had barely made a dent in Iran\u2019s nuclear capability. Needless to say, this displeased the commander-in-chief, and in August, Hegseth fired<\/a> the general whose agency made those assessments.<\/p>\n

This summer, the US \u201cwar on drugs\u201d was unofficially militarized, including incursions into other countries. Last week, the president announced<\/a> that a navy ship \u2013 one of three deployed to waters outside Venezuela \u2013 had \u201cshot out\u201d a vessel originating there, carrying narcotics and piloted by members of the Tren de Aragua trafficking gang. Eleven people were killed. Nicol\u00e1s Maduro, the Venezuelan president, whom the US has charged as a narco-trafficker, called the ships<\/a> an \u201cextravagant, unjustifiable, immoral, and absolutely criminal and bloody threat\u201d, and put his own military on alert for attacks closer to home. Last month, Trump directed the military to pursue drug cartels inside Mexico, which Claudia Sheinbaum, the president, called an \u201cinvasion<\/a>\u201d. And then there\u2019s Greenland, which Trump has vowed to annex, one way or another.<\/p>\n

To realize \u201cpeace through strength<\/a>\u201d, Trump\u2019s 2026 budget proposed more than $1tn for defense<\/a>, a 13% increase from the previous year. Even the defense department requested<\/a> less: a mere $961.6bn. The $831.5bn war chest<\/a> Congress finally approved includes funding for the project closest to Trump\u2019s, um, heart \u2013 the continent-wide Golden Dome space defense system, which he said last week would protect the \u201chomeland\u201d for \u201chundreds of years<\/a>\u201d. Talking it up in May<\/a>, Trump and Hegseth said the system could be built in three years and cost $125bn; Congress allocated about $13bn for initial development. But other calculations put the figure between $2.5tn and $6.2tn.<\/a> And aside from its dubious feasibility and cost, experts<\/a> warn that the project would accelerate the arms race. Strength, maybe. Peace, not so much.<\/p>\n

In a 1936 speech<\/a> justifying his reluctance to join the war in Europe, Franklin Delano Roosevelt insisted that the US \u201ccould best serve the cause of a peaceful humanity by setting an example\u201d. FDR had served as assistant secretary of the navy during the first world war, and the trauma was fresh in memory. He had seen \u201cblood running from the wounded\u201d, \u201ccities destroyed\u201d, \u201cchildren starving\u201d, \u201cthe agony of mothers and wives\u201d, he said: \u201cI hate war.\u201d<\/p>\n

By contrast, Trump, who takes credit for ending seven wars<\/a> and believes he deserves a Nobel prize, skirted military service and has seen war only on television. Yet he relishes it \u2013 and, most of all, revels in being commander-in-chief. His first military self-celebration \u2013 which marked the ceremonial birth<\/a> of a new American fascism \u2013 was a bust, so now he\u2019s planning another one<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s Department of War burnishes his vanity, but it is not just a vanity project. It is extravagantly expensive. It will occupy US cities. And now, in word as in deed, it celebrates the nation and the president as aggressor, conqueror, unrestrained international lawbreaker and flouter of anything so \u201cwoke\u201d as peace.<\/p>\n