Trump hat gerade Xi und Putin das größte Geschenk gegeben – und er merkt nicht einmal

Nothing like a good old-fashioned rebrand to set the tone for what is in any case the most powerful fighting force in modern history. Per his 200th Executive Order of 2025, President Trump has declared that the Department of Defense must [now be known as the Department of War](https://inews.co.uk/news/world/trump-shows-a-new-taste-for-war-in-pentagon-rebrand-and-strike-on-drugs-ship-3902774?srsltid=AfmBOopERMW-QyaHmE3C3yyrPG0gmLUSo8HujFKEclp5EpJKSaQAgsBD&ico=in-line_link), or at least as a secondary title as anything more would require an act of Congress; and that the Defense Secretary [Pete Hegseth](https://inews.co.uk/news/scandal-pete-hegseth-signal-group-chat-3605464?srsltid=AfmBOookJ5x3GdQOPSSdLKCJhF8J-uphr2Ph8ZA4p1V_LWuMyqJpRJTB&ico=in-line_link), who has busied himself scourging the US military of what a fellow Republican Eric Schmitt described as “weakness and wokeness’, will now be Secretary of War.

The US has had a war department for much of its history. From 1789 until 1947, it oversaw the army and, from time to time, the navy too. That is until the advent of international law, multilateralism and a military doctrine based on defence and deterrence, ushered in a few years after World War Two when all branches of the military were incorporated into the newly established Department of Defense.

“We won the First World War. We won the Second World War. We won everything before that and in between, and then we decided to go woke, and we changed the name to Department of Defense. So we’re going Department of War”, Trump said as he signed the order.

That’s all well and good for the unreconstructed machismo at the heart of the MAGA movement, which seems to believe that a more muscular marketing of the military will stop other nations in their tracks and still allow President Trump to put America First. But MAGA wanted out of foreign wars, not a stepped up readiness to get into them. And it is hard to see how peace through strength under a war-ready rebrand will get Trump any closer to his coveted Nobel Peace Prize.

Think less global policeman, more Trump in the autocrat’s playground with an army of toy soldiers in front of him which he’ll deploy erratically and at whim, wherever he feels the bad guys are. “Maximum lethality, not tepid legality. Violent effect, not politically correct”, was how the newly coined u/SecWar put it on Friday in the Oval Office.

>And it is hard to see how peace through strength under a war-ready rebrand will get Trump any closer to his coveted Nobel Peace Prize.

Peace through strength? The Trump administration has been consistently giving concessions to its adverseries in such troubling times.

It’s all bark, no teeth, not speak sotly and carry a stick.