When Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon executed an ill-conceived invasion of Iraq in 2003, was it really pursuing American defence? All but a handful of unreconstructed Iraq hawks would disagree. So it’s welcome news that President Trump has restored the Defense Department’s original name, the Department of War.

Talk of renaming the DoD has roiled Republican circles for some time. During the 2024 GOP primary, Nikki Haley brainstormed about changing the name of the Department of Defense to the “Department of Offense”. That was an unmistakable throwback to circa 2003 neoconservative blowhardery, and a good reminder of why the Haleys of the world are no longer at the helm of the conservative movement.

Trump’s choice of restored name for the department, by contrast, has a long and honourable pedigree. The Department of War was created by the first US Congress in 1789. The Cabinet-level leaders of this agency were known as secretaries of war.

The emphasis on “war” was a relic of an age that was more forthright about war-declaring and war-making. It wasn’t until after the Second World War, under the Truman administration, that the department came to be called the Department of Defense, following a brief interval when it was known as the National Military Establishment.

Far from restraining war, the renaming to do “DoD” coincided with the rise of a trigger-happy security state that increasingly sidestepped the legislative branch in determining whether America goes to war, as required by law. Congress, for its part, abdicated its constitutional power to declare war. Military interventions, whether just and necessary or otherwise, became something the executive branch launched and the legislature “authorised”.

Framed as “defence,” war was easier to swallow. Without a draft, Americans could no longer feel the gravity of war, and the imperative to avoid it, if possible. The ramifications were especially tragic in the case of the post-9/11 wars, when the adversary was defined in a loosey-goosey manner, authorising open-ended commitments in pursuit of vague strategic objectives like promoting “freedom” in Iraq.

Yet if Trump’s Department of War renaming is a step forward for honesty, it doesn’t necessarily imply that he will be more restrained in matters of war and peace. On the same day as the renaming announcement, the US government reported the killing of a dozen alleged Venezuelan drug smugglers who, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio could likely have been arrested instead.

Still, honesty — the avoidance of euphemism in public affairs — is almost always preferable to the opposite. For years now, much of the Left-liberal establishment has sought to change the world mainly by altering how we speak about it: “undocumented immigrants,” “sex assigned at birth,” “unhoused persons,” “justice-involved persons,” and so on. Such euphemisms mystify the realities they claim to describe. In the same way, the “Department of Defense” could obscure the fact that the department has engaged in offensive wars of choice, some of which turned out disastrously — like the one in Iraq.

Calling it “war” could remind Americans of the sheer gravity of armed conflict and, just maybe, impel them to question their leaders when they promote adventurism under the banner of “defence”.

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Sohrab Ahmari is the US editor of UnHerd and the author, most recently, of Tyranny, Inc: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What To Do About It

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