Global Dialogues

The proposal of President Trump to turn the Defense Department into the War Department is profoundly ominous. It recalls a time when brute force was adored and crude power exercised, a time when the practice of cruelty was widely tolerated among nations.

What was known as the Department of War became the Department of Defense in 1949 as the result of the need of the United States after World War II to coordinate expanding forms of military service in accord with a radically revised understanding of the international use of force. As one analysis notes, prior to the mid-twentieth century and the campaign to outlaw war except under limited conditions, “powerful states freely resorted to war to enforce their claims, and weaker states were forced to submit or risk annihilation, yielding a near-constant churn of conflict. With no prohibition on conquest, national borders shifted regularly through violence, and empires expanded by force, entrenching global inequalities.” 

Scholars like Niall Ferguson and Nigel Biggar celebrate the benefits of colonialism without acknowledging the full measure of massive harm done in its name by “powerful states” who resisted international norms designed to regulate the cruel treatment of colonized peoples. Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire (2022) by Caroline Elkins reveals the lurid details in Ireland, South Africa, Palestine, India, Kenya and elsewhere, and her book, together with Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights (2010) by Roland Burke, rehearse the story of opposition by colonial powers to applying postwar international human rights standards to their possessions.

Against this background, the central purpose of the UN Charter, adopted in 1945 by the international community, was “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war” by reconceiving the use of force as a bulwark of collective defense against wars of aggression and conquest. It was left to the Security Council to “determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of peace, or act of aggression” as the basis for authorizing force, permitting member states, individually or collectively, to initiate a use of force only as an exercise of the “inherent” right of self-defense against an “armed attack,” according to Art. 51. 

The moral impulse to limit force to self-defense is age-old and widely affirmed across cultures and traditions. It was enunciated in the seventeenth century as the only justifiable cause for war, but two catastrophic world wars and the painful experience of colonialism were required before it became the cardinal principle of the international law of war.

It is this history President Trump disregards by seeking to rename the Department of Defense, and his behavior underscores his lack of appreciation. He seems incapable of comprehending the relevance of the right of self-defense to the Ukraine war, and his threats of force against Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal, not to mention his recent authorization of an unprovoked attack on a Venezuelan civilian vessel, bespeak either lack of awareness of the right or callous indifference to it. For good reason, the name (and therefore purpose) of the Department of Defense needs defending.

David Little is a research fellow at Georgetown University's Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs.