Department of War: George Orwell Would Feel Validated

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President Donald Trump's decision to rename the US Department of Defense as the ‘Department of War’ comes in the midst of his personal campaign to win the Nobel Peace Prize. The ‘President of Peace’, as the White House has called him, has once again signed one of his many executive orders. With this latest document, he has officially established the Department of War.

Reading this news evokes two contradictory thoughts. In his dystopian novel 1984, published in 1949, George Orwell, in a deliberate inversion of reality, described four ministries each of which exhibits a ‘reversal of the facts’. And now Trump is renaming the Pentagon the ‘Department of War’—a mirror image of Orwell's vision? But is Trump really distorting the truth by using the term ‘Department of War’?

The second thought: Finally, some honesty! The armed forces are not primarily tasked with defending the USA; they are constantly involved in military operations somewhere in the world. Most recently, the US military attacked nuclear facilities in Iran. Since 2000, the US military has conducted at least a dozen military operations. In Afghanistan and Somalia, in Iraq and Iran, in Libya and Syria, in Yemen and Haiti. As a chilling warning to everyone, the president stated, the US military fired on a boat in the Caribbean Sea which according to Mr. Trump had departed from Venezuela. He said the boat was operated by a drug cartel. Apparently 11 people were killed.

The military is being deployed globally, including within the United States. The president is slandering his domestic political opponents: Chicago is “about to find out why it’s called Department of WAR,” he says. Masked, armed officials are rounding up immigrants on the streets or in factories. The opposition is the enemy.

‘Doublethink’

Perhaps what is being orchestrated in Washington right now isn't so contradictory after all. Orwell wrote: “Even the names of the four Ministries by which we are governed exhibit a sort of impudence in their deliberate reversal of the facts. The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Mnistry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture, and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink.” According to Orwell, ‘doublethink’ is the ability to simultaneously accept two contradictory beliefs and consider both to be true. Isn't that precisely what the Trump administration practices constantly? News that doesn't fit their narrative is labelled as ‘fake news’. If the official employment data doesn't suit the president, then the agency's chief statistician is fired. During Trump's first term in office, the Washington Post documented more than 22,000 misleading or false statements made by Trump.

Didn't Orwell precisely describe, a quarter of a century ago, what Trump practices today? To know and not to know, to believe in carefully constructed lies while simultaneously believing in the truth, to hold contradictory opinions that negate each other and yet believe in both. ‘Doublethink’ makes it possible to ignore inconvenient facts; abrupt policy shifts are just as feasible as changing perceptions of the enemy. Orwell developed all of this in various essays in the 1930s and described it in his novel 1984 as the perfect tool for manipulating public opinion and maintaining power. The ‘doublethink’ of US President Trump is now merely acknowledged with a shrug of the shoulders. Many shy away from addressing it; some even believe they can win his favour with flattery—both in the US and internationally. 

The president, who, according to his own claim, has ended seven wars through his mediation and intervention, can simultaneously portray himself as a peacemaker while rebranding the Department of Defense as the ‘Department of WAR’. President Harry S. Truman signed the legislation in 1949 that transformed the Department of War into the Department of Defense. Despite the difficult geopolitical situation at the time, with the Cold War looming, the US government signalled with the name change its intention not to wage war, but rather to defend the country. However, as we know today, things turned out quite differently: the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Afghan War—to name just some of the most costly American military interventions. Maintaining power and upholding American global dominance was not foreign to any of Trump's predecessors. But at least they managed to keep the Cold War cold, preventing it from escalating into a hot war.

‘Lethality’ and ‘Warrior Ethos’

So why the return to Department of War now? When signing the decree, Trump simply stated that the Department of War was a "much more appropriate name, especially in the light of where the world is right now."  Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who will now be known as the Secretary of War, remarked: "We won World War I, and we won World War II, not with the Department of Defense, but with the Department of War." He also quoted the President: "We are not just defense; we’re offense." So, this isn't just a matter of changing the sign on the door; it's more than just a name change: Hegseth had already spoken about restoring ‘lethality’ and the ‘warrior ethos’ to the armed forces even before his appointment as Defense Secretary.

With this name change, the US government not only generates consternation among friends and allies, but it also feeds into the narrative of Russia and China, which they have been propagating long before Donald Trump took office, that the image of the peace-loving US, committed to upholding international law, is being reduced to absurdity by its actual foreign and security policy. ‘Soft power’, a defining characteristic of American policy for decades—based on values, American development aid, and advocacy for a free press and respect for human rights—is no longer in vogue. The Trump administration uses ‘hard power’, military might, to ruthlessly enforce its ‘America First’ policy through coercive tactics, such as imposing tariffs, threatening the annexation of Greenland or Canada, or asserting control over the Panama Canal.

In this sense, the rebranding of the Department of Defense is a consistent, albeit backward-looking, policy that evokes memories of the Monroe Doctrine and the phases of American interventions around the world. But how does this square with Trump’s credo, with which he promised his MAGA base that he would not intervene in the world’s crises and wars with American troops? It’s possible in the world of ‘doublethink’!

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Is Trump Adding to the Backsliding of the ‘World’s Biggest Democracy’? (10-minute read)

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Herbert Wulf is a Professor of International Relations and former Director of the Bonn International Center for Conflict Studies (BICC). He is presently a Senior Fellow at BICC, an Adjunct Senior Researcher at the Institute for Development and Peace, University of Duisburg/Essen, Germany, and a Research Affiliate at the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Otago, New Zealand. He serves on the Scientific Council of SIPRI.