It is tempting to be alarmed by the administrations most recent executive order to rename the Department of Defense and return it to its previous title of the Department of War. Certainly, listening to an abusive womanizing alcoholic TV personality turned Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, say the name change is to show how the US is going to go on the offensive and use “maximum lethality” is incredibly disturbing, seeing as that already seems to include the military preemptively firing on civilian boats in international waters with no warning or opportunity to surrender, on of suspicion of drug trafficking. There is no doubt in my mind that this change premeditates much more aggressive use of US weapons in many different parts of the world, almost certainly illegally by standards of international diplomacy and law, and I hope it is a change that forces past allies of the US to strongly consider dissolving their military commitments and allegiances to the US. This is the move of a war hungry authoritarian planning on bullying everyone he possibly can.
At the same time, I actually do find it to be one of the most honest executive orders of the second Trump Presidency, and think the idea that the branch of the US government that includes the military was ever going to be about “defense” and not imperial control and intervention was a pretty pathetic lie. While technically, the US has never officially been at war since the end of WWII, because according to the US constitution, only congress can formally declare war, most historians would say that there have been maybe 17 years in United States history where this nation was not at war. That really shouldn’t be surprising to anyone, and it is not even that uncommon for nations with imperialistic intentions, like most of Europe back to the collapse of the Roman Empire, but it should be a stark reminder to anyone in this country who thought that Trump was an isolationist and opposed to US involvement in wars overseas that he is only opposed to US involvement in wars that are not directly and immediately profitable to the US, and more importantly, US war profiteering companies. In that regard, Trump is being incredibly transparent in his admiration for periods of wanton Imperialism in US history, including Westward Expansion and the Gilded Age.
So will this just be a name change to make DT feel like a big strong boy? Or is this actually indicative of policy changes that are already in progress to increase US militaristic aggression around the world? Personally, I think it is a fair bit of both. For Trump personally, I think it probably is about the projection of his personally power. The big boy dictators of the world just got together and did their own horn tooting and military parading that didn’t look nearly as much like a pathetic joke as Trump’s military parade earlier this year, and I think he is well past tired of having people tell him that he has obligations to nations and allegiances around the world that are not immediately profitable to him. However, I think there are wolves all around him looking at places like Venezuela and Gaza as future sites of future US imperialist development and economic exploitation. Behavior that is distinctly US American and something that has happened many times under nearly every political party that has ever held power in the US, but probably never before with such blatant disregard for including Congress in planning and executing this imperialist violence.
As much as today’s democrats will talk a big game about the changes they will make if they ever usurp power from Donald Trump, if the US has already toppled the government of Venezuela and begun Trump’s rebuilding fantasy in the Gaza Strip, the US will do nothing but continue to allow US companies to exploit those opportunities under the pretense of obligation to peace and global prosperity…just as we did in Afghanistan and Iraq, and throughout the Middle East, and South and Central America and East Asia, and Africa through Wars like our War on Terror, our War on Drugs (Both wars that have not ended), as well as the Cold War, and everything before it.
So while the specific talk of “Lethality” and the desire to stop letting anyone else in the world tell us who we are going to kill when we feel like it is upsetting and something relatively new and deeply rooted in Trumpism’s authoritarian strain of Patriarchal Misogyny that should raise warning flags even for US citizens who have largely drank the US imperialist Kool Aid, I think for the rest of the world the only people who are probably really being put on notice by these rhetorical maneuvers are the leaders of traditional US global allies that are now going to be up against it trying to justify dealing with Trump as a wayward friend and not a bully that is here for everyone’s lunch money.