When President Harry S. Truman signed the law creating the Defense Department from the remnants of the War Department in August 1949, Joseph Stalin was 16 days from proving the Soviets could detonate a nuclear weapon, and Mao Zedong was less than two months from declaring the creation of the People’s Republic of China.
It was a terrifying time for Americans, and the new name was intended to reflect an era in which deterrence was critical — because war, if it broke out among the superpowers, could be planet-ending. For decades, the odds of avoiding that nuclear exchange, or direct superpower conflict, seemed slim at best. So to many historians, the greatest accomplishment of the Cold War is that it largely stayed cold, despite wars in Korea and Vietnam, the Cuban Missile Crisis and arms races that followed.
All of which makes President Trump’s planned executive order on Friday seeking to restore the Pentagon to its old name — the War Department — more than just a throwback, a restoration of tough-guy nomenclature. At a moment when deterrence is more critical than ever — in cyberspace, outer space and a world where Russia and China are celebrating an uneasy partnership to challenge American pre-eminence — Mr. Trump argues that the answer is to go back to the good old days.
“Everybody likes that we had an unbelievable history of victory when it was Department of War,” he told reporters two weeks ago. “Then we changed it to Department of Defense.”
Certainly in recent months Mr. Trump has shown less interest in building deterrence than he has in investing in new weaponry. He has dismantled broad swaths of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security, because its mission of defending against foreign and domestic cyberattacks included securing election systems. He even ordered the Justice Department to investigate the agency’s chief during the 2020 elections, for his declaration that it was one of the most secure in history, contradicting his insistence that it was rigged to elect Joseph R. Biden.
Mr. Trump fired the four-star general heading both the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command, part of a broader purge of apolitical military officers who were appointed in the Biden era. Morale among senior officers is suffering, as they wonder whether it is worth pursuing top command positions if a declaration from a MAGA influencer that they are secretly members of the so-called deep state is all it takes to end a three-decade-long career.
Mr. Trump’s one big investment in defense is the Golden Dome, his plan to build a coast-to-coast missile defense. But to America’s adversaries, the system, involving weapons in space, looks as much like offense as defense.
When it comes to renaming the department, no one is more enthusiastic than Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. If Mr. Trump gets his way, will get the title of secretary of war — the president has already called him that in public — joining a long line that started with Henry Knox, for whom Fort Knox is named.
“We won World War I, and we won World War II, not with the Department of Defense, but with a War Department,” Mr. Hegseth said on Fox News on Wednesday. “As the president has said, we’re not just defense, we’re offense.”
“We think words and names and titles matter,” he concluded. Clearly he does: It is Mr. Hegseth who talks repeatedly about bringing “lethality” and a “warrior ethos” back to the American military. When he arrived at the Pentagon, one of his first moves was to ban the oft-used phrase in the building that “our diversity is our strength.” (“The single dumbest phrase in our military history,” he told the troops.)
But words matter to other nations as well, allies and adversaries alike. And this change in name, assuming Congress is willing to rewrite the Truman-era laws, plays right into the narrative that Russia and China propagate about the United States.
In their telling, all of America’s talk about being a peace-loving, law-abiding international player is thin cover for a country that truly just wants to strike at any target it regards as a threat. To bolster their cases, their state-controlled commentators point to Mr. Trump’s unilateral decisions to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities in June or sink an open skiff of alleged drug runners, killing 11 people off the coast of Venezuela.
“This is a backward-looking decision,” said R. Nicholas Burns, the former U.S. ambassador to China who spent decades as a foreign service officer, including ambassador to NATO. “It plays into China’s narrative in its unrelenting contest for global influence with the U.S. Beijing will brand this unfairly as evidence the U.S. is a threat to the international order and China is a defender of the peace.”
Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth may be granting President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia a similar opportunity. Long before he invaded Ukraine in 2022, Mr. Putin insisted the “root causes” of his determination to restore some of the old boundaries of the Russian empire included the American-led drive to expand NATO to Russia’s borders in the 1990s. The West’s response has always been that NATO’s presence is entirely defensive.
But the United States undercuts that case when it insists that it’s tired of playing defense, as the president and the defense secretary have insisted repeatedly in recent weeks. To them, the restoration of a War Department heralds the fact that there is a new sheriff in town, with a new way of looking at the use of force.
At one level, of course, what Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth are doing is little more than rebranding — a concept the president knows well, as he renamed real estate projects in hopes that by sounding better, they would sell better. The mission of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines does not change. Nor does the combination of defensive and offensive missions at the units sitting on the cutting edge of new technology, such as the United States Cyber Command or Mr. Trump’s beloved Space Command.
But at another level, renaming the world’s most powerful military force — the trillion-dollar defense budget (perhaps better called the war budget) is roughly three times larger than China’s — will be seen as part of the continuum of the Trump revolution.
In that world, American soft power is out, and hard power is celebrated. Shuttering the U.S. Agency for International Development, silencing the Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, and cutting billions of dollars in foreign aid in the State Department budget sent a message: The United States is out of the democracy-promotion business, and out of the benevolent-nation business.
Mr. Trump and his aides have made it abundantly clear they view soft power as no form of power at all. Secretary of State Marco Rubio this week celebrated giving up one of his four government titles — administrator of U.S.A.I.D. — to Russell T. Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget. “Russ is now at the helm to oversee the closeout of an agency that long ago went off the rails,” Mr. Rubio wrote. “Congrats, Russ.”
As Mr. Rubio’s comments made clear, those programs — once considered vital to attracting the world to American values — rank somewhere between unaffordable charity and wastefulness, disconnected from American interests.
David E. Sanger covers the Trump administration and a range of national security issues. He has been a Times journalist for more than four decades and has written four books on foreign policy and national security challenges.
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