President Donald Trump caused a stir this week with his announcement that he would change the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War. The rebranding will not change the official name of the organization, which would require action by Congress. But it will require the expenditure of money and labor to change the wording on letterheads, monuments and anything featuring the Defense Department’s name on installations domestically and worldwide. The estimated cost, which will come to hundreds of millions of dollars, is already vexing Pentagon officials who prefer to focus on genuine threats to U.S. security.
Aside from what appears to be a consequential and arguably distracting use of tax dollars and labor, the move’s messaging is problematic and puzzling from the perspective of several international relations traditions. From a realist perspective, one of the defining challenges for states is the so-called security dilemma: how to maintain their own security without alarming their neighbors into taking actions that undermine that very security. In fact, when the original War Department was reorganized and renamed the Department of Defense in 1947, it was an effort to soften the reality of the United States’ postwar primacy by signaling that Washington would use its power for the defense not only of its own interests but also the collective social good. Trump’s reversal of that rebranding will, according to some, inflame security dilemmas, rattle U.S. allies and hand its adversaries rhetorical tools for their own purposes.
From an institutionalist perspective focused on regulative rules, the new brand is also a dangerous repudiation of long-standing norms underpinning the postwar order. Trump’s insistence on associating the U.S. with the projection of offensive force clashes with the U.N. Charter, which forbids all but defensive wars. Indeed, as David Sanger points out, it obfuscates some of the greatest foreign policy achievements of U.S. hegemony and global postwar history: the dramatic decline in interstate wars, the decline in legitimacy of territorial conquest and, most importantly, the absence of any great power wars since the advent of the U.N. system.