Waiting for the Barbarians

Why The Department of War?

There’s a maddening evasiveness to the way the Trump administration is pitching the potential billion-dollar “rebrand” of The Department of Defense. From the executive order earlier this month:

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. This name sharpens the Department’s focus on…our willingness and availability to wage war to secure what is ours.

In introducing the Department of War Restoration Act, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah added: “It should always be clear to anyone who would harm our people: Americans don’t just play defense.” Pete Hegseth chimed in with his usual nuance, “We’re not just defense, we’re offense.”

Here’s the thing.

“Ensure peace,” “secure what is ours,” “anyone who would harm our people”: these phrases still frame the United States’ potential for “offense” in terms of deterring threats…which is, in a word, “defense,” at least under the capacious definition by which the US military has operated since 1949, when the former Department of War first became DoD. Preemptive drone strikes, proxy wars, ghostly WMDs: previous administrations have found room for all of these under the “defense” umbrella. We have always been purportedly defending something, whether “the homeland” or global democracy. To insist that defense doesn’t cover every call to war is to invite the question none of the renaming fanfare has yet answered: why else would we be fighting?

The Department of Defense, like the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security, was named for its ostensibly noble ends, not its more assailable means. Trump could easily have preserved the blanket justification for U.S. military intervention inherent in such a name. DoD might have become the Department of Freedom, or the Department of Winning Big, or, if he wanted to go full 1984 while also staying on-message for his Nobel campaign, the Department of Peace.

So, why replace ends with means, leaving the “what is it good for” slot vacant?

The MAGA nostalgia factor goes a long way. It was the Department of War back when men were men, as Trump and co. have been quick to point out, no doubt sure they embody the “warrior ethos.” Trump’s 2D strongman aspirations are well-served by the name change because a bully is never on defense. And maybe the historic rewards of “offense”—conquest, plunder—were a little gauche for even Trump to name outright. The Department of Imperialism doesn’t quite roll off the tongue.

It also can’t be underestimated that war is the end Trump is chasing.

Trump ran for office in 2016 on the narrative of an invading immigrant force; he entered his first term with a declaration of “American carnage,” then left by inciting an attack on the Capitol. He escaped the image of a hawk because his first-term foreign policy was largely isolationist, but now, amid tariff escalations and burdened alliances, the Iran bombing and an inconsistent, self-serving orientation towards Ukraine and Gaza, we all see his position for what it is: the world as a zero-sum game, a war of all against all in money or blood.

At home as much as abroad, Trump needs an us and them. He is the winner of a coup who, in lieu of governing, can only continue the revolution. Even as he redefines executive overreach, there is a swamp, a deep state, a war on big government to be waged. (Not to mention a liberal pedophile ring to be eradicated, though he’s been quieter on that lately given his implication in an actual pedophile ring.) Despite holding the seat of power, his brand runs on offense. He is planning on celebrating the 250th anniversary of our nation with a UFC fight at the White House. America, no-holds-barred. Just as no founder intended.

“I’d like to see it [the nation] heal,” the president said in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination last week. “But we’re dealing with a radical left group of lunatics, and they don’t play fair and they never did.” Even as other Republicans messaged the rejection of political violence on either side, Trump was drawing battle lines. He’d like to see healing, but alas—it’s us vs. them time. (The award for the administration’s most weirdly militaristic eulogy goes to Kash Patel, who addressed Kirk’s memory in a press conference with “I’ll see you in Valhalla.”)

For Trump the showman, war is the ultimate spectacle. War is a show you can’t cancel, where the stakes are always high, the violence inevitable, the powerful lethally so, and everyone else a fear-captive audience. His National Guard deployments have been advance skirmishes, test pilots in war as an endemic national condition. The Department of War would formalize it as our status quo. It’s always war o’clock somewhere.

Trump speaking to U.S. troops in Doha, Qatar, May 2025.

The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has described what he calls a “state of exception,” an idea first pioneered by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, who used it (approvingly) in the context of the state of emergency that operates as a pretext for authoritarians to seize power through martial law. The firmly antifascist Agamben explains a state of exception as a state of emergency extended indefinitely, capable of transforming the very basis of national sovereignty. Whether fast or insidiously slow, the power of the people is seized and never given back.

This is the deep threat to democracy in a Department of War: it institutionalizes the neverending exception of neverending conflict. As of now, the name may remain no more than the equivalent of a vanity plate on the bumper of DoD, if Congress declines to follow Trump’s illegal whim. But his ambition is plain, regardless.

Who will we fight, under the Department of War? I don’t think it matters, from Trump’s standpoint. Any enemy, without or within, is a kind of solution. Another way to forestall a mass realization that those who would “harm our people” are already in power.