Sort of. According to Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, 19 Russian drones crossed into his country’s airspace last night amid a massive air raid on Ukraine. Several were shot down by Poland’s military, the first time a NATO member has taken such action since the war began. The Poles have now invoked Article 4 of the alliance’s treaty and requested a meeting of its governing body to discuss the crisis.
Could the incursion have been an accident? Unlikely: Russian drones have strayed into NATO airspace before, but never on a scale like this, suggesting something more deliberate. “This is an act of aggression that posed a real threat to the safety of our citizens,” the Polish armed forces said afterward in a statement.
Oddly, the world seems to be getting more dangerous, not less, as the Department of Defense gives way to the Department of War.
But it’s not so odd, is it?
What’s in a name?
An administration that’s serious about repelling foreign threats wouldn’t waste bandwidth on cosmetic nonsense like renaming its military department. Doing so will cost billions of dollars and untold thousands of man-hours to bring the Pentagon’s many facilities into line with the new branding, and for what?
“This is purely for domestic political audiences,” one former defense official told Politico, correctly. Authoritarians are obsessed with performing toughness for their constituents, and nothing says “tough” like shifting from Defense to War. Trust me when I say that you haven’t experienced true cringe until you’ve watched Pete Hegseth babble sweatily in favor of the name change, touting “lethality” instead of “legality” and raising up “warriors” rather than “defenders.”
Never has America had a Cabinet secretary more plainly out of his depth, particularly in a job this important, but Hegseth understands the assignment. He was elevated to the position for no grander reason than that he was a talented performer of tough-guy machismo on Fox News. Of course his biggest change to the Pentagon would be the bureaucratic equivalent of tweaking the network logo.
A country with leaders as shallow as that isn’t the strategic threat it once was, as I’m sure many foreign intelligence agencies have surmised.
Authoritarians don’t just perform toughness, though. They earnestly believe that there’s no problem that can’t be solved with greater ruthlessness. Trump and Hegseth are sincerely convinced, I’m sure, that slapping a scarier moniker on the Pentagon will make U.S. troops more dangerous and intimidate the bad guys into conducting themselves less aggressively.
I’m sure of it because the president suggested as much last week. “We won World War I, we won World War II, we won everything before that and in between, and then we decided to go woke, and we changed the name to DOD,” he complained to reporters. To say that it’s childish to believe that the failures of the most formidable military in world history have mostly been a product of official nomenclature would be an insult to children, but it makes sense that a nostalgic simpleton would conclude that there’s no problem with America in 2025 that being more like America in 1945 can’t fix.
As for Hegseth, he seems to fetishize ruthlessness more than Trump does. From what I can gather, he genuinely doesn’t believe that armed conflict should be governed by laws or rules that might restrain America from gratuitously brutalizing its enemies. As I’m writing this, news is breaking that the Venezuelan boat that the U.S. struck last week on suspicion of drug-running had actually turned back before we proceeded to attack it. That’s Hegseth’s mindset in a nutshell, and it’s reflected in his department’s name change: “Defense” might follow certain regulations and procedures, but in “War” you win by any means necessary.
The problem with trying to intimidate the bad guys with more belligerent branding is that actions speak louder than words. Blowing up small Venezuelan boats is impressive and all, but it’s not going to scare Vladimir Putin now that he’s spent six months successfully stringing the president along on Ukraine, and it’s not going to scare Xi Jinping after Trump wimped out on slapping China with the same punitive sanctions he imposed on India for purchasing Russian oil. The closest the White House has come to flexing real muscle was when it bombed Iran, but even that was a turkey shoot after the Israeli air force disabled much of the country’s air defenses.
The president fights only when he knows he’ll win. Calling the Department of Defense the Department of War won’t fool any major powers about that.
Which brings us to another problem: The tough-guy rebrand here would be more persuasive if it weren’t playing out as the Pax Americana crumbles around us.
Overcompensating.
“Pentagon officials are proposing the department prioritize protecting the homeland and Western Hemisphere, a striking reversal from the military’s yearslong mandate to focus on the threat from China,” Politico reported last week.
The 2018 National Defense Strategy that was prepared for Trump’s first administration warned that it’s “increasingly clear that China and Russia want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model.” The new draft strategy, which is being spearheaded by dovish policy chief Elbridge Colby, is apparently less bothered by the global spread of authoritarianism. Fancy that.
If you didn’t see the postliberal right folding on China coming from a mile away, you must not read this newsletter.
The president wants a world in which other nations continue to answer to the United States (i.e. to him) but without the obligation to project power abroad. That is, he wants a unipolar global order with a multipolar foreign policy, and things unfortunately don’t work that way. It’s hard not to read Russia’s incursion into Poland last night as a demonstration of the point, especially coming so soon after Xi’s New World Order jamboree in Beijing. If the United States really does intend to pivot to “the homeland” and let the barbarians run roughshod over its interests in the Eastern Hemisphere, Putin’s skirmish with NATO is an invitation to Trump to execute that pivot. This is his chance.
All he has to do is nothing.
Netanyahu’s attack on Hamas in Qatar can also be read as a test of the White House’s ongoing interest in other countries’ conflicts. The president clearly wants to focus on “warfare” closer to home—in Chicago, in Greenland, and in Venezuela, where he may or may not be preparing to launch a major attack—and to scale back more far-flung entanglements. Friends like Israel and foes like Russia and everyone in between are watching that and converging on the same conclusion, that Trump is keen to menace his neighbors and throttle his domestic enemies and simply not very interested in being sidetracked by other nations’ affairs. They have a free, or freer, hand.
And so now we have Russian drones over Poland. This is what’s known as “provocative weakness.”
You’re free to believe if you like that a U.S. retreat abroad will mean a safer, more prosperous America. But consider the situation today in Warsaw. If you’re Donald Tusk, what do you do if another dozen Russian aircraft cross your border tonight? Do you wait for Trump to issue another strongly worded (or not so strongly worded) statement that he has no intention of following through on, or do you decide you have no choice but to take matters into your own hands and hit back?
Would war erupting between Russia and Eastern Europe be good or bad for America’s interests, beginning with its economic interests?
Rebranding the Defense Department as the Department of War in the midst of all this smells of overcompensation, like a middle-aged man with erectile dysfunction buying a sports car. Trump and Hegseth can bloviate all they like about draining the wokeness out of their “warfighters,” but the hard truth is that world leaders increasingly don’t take the administration seriously, with one reportedly even refusing to take the president’s calls. They understand, I think, that changing the name to project “toughness” is actually a half-assed attempt to disguise the fact that, in a postliberal regime, the people whom the U.S. military is primarily meant to intimidate are other Americans.
Maybe they should have renamed it the Department of Sanitation, in keeping with the troops’ new duties.
An inevitable war.
Trump has spent three years boasting that Russia wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine if he were still president in 2022, a claim Putin shrewdly endorsed following their brief, pointless summit in Alaska. But that’s always been silly and has never seemed sillier than right now.
To believe it, you need to believe either that the president would have frightened Putin into standing down by rattling his saber, or soothed Putin into standing down by performing some art-of-the-deal negotiating jujitsu. But there’s no reason to believe either of those things anymore, assuming there ever was.
Trump has all but given up on persuading Russia to stop bombing. And he’s so reluctant to antagonize Putin that he still hasn’t imposed the sanctions that hawks in Congress have spent months begging for, never mind ordering up the enormous weapons shipments that the Biden administration routinely approved for Ukraine. Even when American assets in Ukrainian territory are struck by Russia, the president can’t muster much more than a grumpy post.
Sending drones into Poland on Trump’s watch feels like confirmation of what was already obvious to everyone to the left of Marjorie Taylor Greene: An isolationist who’s ambivalent at best about NATO and keen to make friends with Russia will not deter Putin as effectively as the Atlanticists from both parties whom Americans routinely elected for most of my life.
And it’s always been a little strange, frankly, that Donald Trump isn’t more willing to admit that.
A dogmatic isolationist would have greeted Russia’s invasion three years ago by declaring “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine,” as our vice president once did before he ascended to his current office. The point and pleasure of “America First” is the moral license it grants to ostentatiously not care about the consequences of the Pax Americana’s collapse. A bunch of Slavs from one country killing a bunch of Slavs from another? What’s it got to do with me?
“I wouldn’t have gotten America involved in Ukraine” should logically be the Trumpist line on the war, not “Russia wouldn’t have attacked in the first place if I were in charge.”
The fact that Trump felt pulled to make the second argument rather than the first can be understood in a number of ways. Maybe he retains some vestigial admiration for the Pax Americana, or at least for the fact that it entitles him as president to make himself a central character in even other nations’ disputes. Maybe it’s a function of his narcissism about his negotiating prowess or his foolish belief that he has a special rapport, and therefore supposedly special persuasive powers, with Putin. Maybe it’s an artifact of his strongman image, built on the idea that he’s capable of intimidating anyone into doing anything he wants.
Or maybe it’s a product of the peacemaker reputation he’s been trying to cultivate since his first term, from meeting with Kim Jong Un to brokering the Abraham Accords. It would be in keeping with his grandiosity that he may have earnestly believed he could secure an end to all conflicts—world peace—through a mixture of charm and bullying.
Instead, Russia is bombing Ukraine more aggressively than ever and has begun to probe what the U.S. and NATO might be willing to tolerate by way of incursions into Poland. If that’s all you had to show for your tough-guy image, with the balance of military power globally changing before your very eyes, you might resort to cosmetic bravado like changing “Defense” to “War” too.
