President Donald Trump wants the world to know: The United States is on a war footing. It’s why he changed the name of the Department of Defense to the “Department of War,” he and others have said. It’s among the reasons why he has threatened rivals and even allies with attacks and invasions, and also commissioned a series of lethal boat strikes in the Caribbean.
But Trump also deeply desires to be known as a peacemaker. He has sought honors and acclaim, including the Nobel Peace Prize, which eluded him this year despite — or perhaps because of — his open lobbying campaign.
The past week brought that seeming contradiction into view yet again, as the president repeatedly switched between touting his peace deals and threatening new conflicts. He defended his administration’s boat strikes in the Caribbean and threatened a land war with Venezuela — then touted the wars he has “ended” and reveled in the rebranding of the U.S. Institute of Peace to bear his name. On Friday, he received a new peace award created by FIFA, the international soccer federation, in another tribute tailored to Trump. “This is truly one of the great honors of my life,” he said.
It’s one of many times this year that the president has cast the two topics as intertwined. For Trump, there appears to be no conflict at all.
“Think of all of the wars I ended,” Trump said at a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday. “And I should get the Nobel Prize for every war. But I don’t want to be greedy.” In the same meeting, he said the boat strikes, which officials say have killed at least 87 people, are essential to stop the flow of illegal drugs into the United States even as Democrats have called the attacks unlawful and wrong.
“I want those boats taken out, and if we have to, we’ll attack by land also,” Trump said.
Administration officials say there is no conflict between the president’s warmongering and peacemaking, pointing to a doctrine of “peace through strength,” a Reagan-era idea that Trump has adopted.
“Strength is the best deterrent,” reads a new national security strategy released Thursday. “Strength can enable us to achieve peace, because parties that respect our strength often seek our help and are receptive to our efforts to resolve conflicts and maintain peace.”
Democrats and human-rights advocates say Trump’s frequent pivots between peace-claiming and saber-rattling are dangerous and inconsistent. They questioned his role in ending armed conflicts around the world and accused him of destabilizing relationships with some of America’s closest allies.
“He threatened to take Greenland from Denmark. He threatened to make Canada the 51st state. He threatened to retake the Panama Canal Zone,” said Sen. Chris Coons (D-Delaware), a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
“It’s difficult to take the Trump administration’s talk of ‘peace’ seriously when the president is escalating military operations in Venezuela and has been totally unwilling to pressure Putin to end the war in Ukraine,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-New Hampshire), the top Democrat on that committee.
What a sick joke: as Trump threatens to bomb Venezuela, he names the Institute of Peace after himself. https://t.co/xpWwFdX35P
— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) December 4, 2025
Some of the sharpest criticism came this week after the Trump administration abruptly renamed the Institute of Peace, an independent nonprofit group created by Congress to focus on conflict resolution around the world. One of the bitter ironies for the president’s critics was that Trump gutted the organization earlier this year by removing its leaders and terminating its staff, crippling many of its peace-related functions and prompting litigation. The White House has defended the moves by saying the institute was ineffective.
A protester outside the institute’s headquarters in downtown Washington held up a sign Thursday that read “war is peace” — a line from George Orwell’s book, “1984,” about a government that told its citizens how to think — as Trump and foreign officials prepared to head to the freshly rebranded building to sign an accord. Behind him, the words “Donald J. Trump” glistened in the sun, the silver letters affixed to a sign and standing out compared to the engraved and recessed original name, “Institute of Peace.”
“I’m concerned about truth,” said the protester, Dave West, a retired schoolteacher who taught history and government in Montgomery County, Md., a D.C. suburb. “The Department of Defense is now the Department of War. The Institute of Peace is now the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace. It seems like Orwell, unfortunately, was talking about the United States today.”
Several politicians agreed with West’s sentiments. “Orwellian is about the nicest term I can come up with,” said Coons. “He dismissed USIP as a useless entity that was a bloated bureaucracy before fighting with its board and shutting it down, and now he wants his name on it.”
George Foote, a lawyer for former USIP staff, said that changing the name of the building was “an insult” and illegal.
“Only the board has the legal right to change the name of its building,” Foote wrote in an email. “We are litigating Trump’s right to terminate board members and we will eventually prevail.”
The resurrection of the Department of War also faces legal scrutiny, because the Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the power to create executive branch agencies. Congress jettisoned that name after World War II in favor of the Department of Defense in part to signal that the U.S. military’s new priority after the brutal conflict would be on deterrence rather than aggression.
Trump’s deputies and supporters, including congressional Republicans, have countered that Trump’s strategy is perfectly clear — that “he hates war and he thinks wars are a waste of money and lives,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in Tuesday’s Cabinet meeting. By using America’s might to put pressure on other countries, the president is helping end global conflicts, Rubio suggested.
“No other leader in the world could have pulled off what happened in Gaza,” Rubio said, pointing to Trump’s efforts to bring peace in the region.
That kind of language has become common in Trump’s second term, as foreign leaders, Cabinet secretaries and congressional allies have sought to please a president who responds well to praise. Some argue he deserves more credit.
“Renaming the Institute of Peace after the President of Peace gives the most influential dealmaker in our lifetimes well-deserved recognition,” Rep. Buddy Carter (R-Georgia) said in a statement. Carter has also introduced legislation calling for Trump to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. “If ending eight wars isn’t Nobel-worthy, I don’t know what is.”
Gianni Infantino, the head of FIFA and a Trump ally, oversaw the soccer federation’s new peace prize and awarded it to Trump on Friday at the Kennedy Center, where the draw for next year’s North America-based World Cup unfolded. The ceremony was televised as soccer teams from sixty different countries waited to learn who they could face in the upcoming tournament, ensuring that Trump’s honor reached a global audience.
“This is your peace prize,” Infantino told Trump on stage, bestowing him with a trophy and a certificate and encouraging him to wear a medal around his neck.
Several scholars were quick to point out some of Trump’s exaggerations about ending armed conflicts — and wondered why he’s so keen on honors for what they see as questionable achievements. They noted a flare-up of violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, with Rwandan-backed rebels launching new attacks this month, even as the countries’ leaders met with Trump to sign a peace agreement at the new Donald J. Trump Institute for Peace.
“His kind of ‘deals’ can hardly lead to lasting peace,” Herbert Wulf, a professor at the Bonn International Centre for Conflict Studies in Germany, wrote in an email, criticizing Trump’s approach to international relations as too short-sighted and transactional. He called the rebranding of the peace institute “yet another boastful move by the president.”
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