Department of Aggression
Yesterday saw two efforts to signal an end to the "rule-based international order."
September 6, 2025
Yesterday was an odd time for Trump to criticize Japan’s defense spending:
A senior U.S. defense official has called for a significant and urgent increase in Japan’s defense spending, citing the threats that it faces in the increasingly tense regional environment.
“I think there are a lot of things that the Japanese establishment thinks are just set in stone, but they really need to understand the urgency of the situation,” the official told media outlets, including The Asahi Shimbun, in August.
Don’t get me wrong. The Administration is trying to get all our allies to spend more on their own defense. And many Republican presidents have pressured Japan to build up its military, despite lingering regional concerns stemming from Japan’s brutal colonialist occupation, and its at best reluctant expressions of regret.
But here’s the thing: Japan has a huge and well-prepared military, ranked roughly fifth among all nations. What distinguishes Japan is not the lack of soldiers, but that the (American-written) Constitution expressly forbids the use of force except in self-defense in case of attack on the nation.
Previous Republican administrations have pushed Japan to allow its Self-Defense Forces to step outside their borders. As the US and NATO invaded Afghanistan, George Bush pushed Japan to join in; eventually, the nation’s leaders settled on a reading of the Constitution that allowed it to send medics, logistics personnel and other non-lethal support.
Japan is the only nation in human history to foreswear the use of its military for wars of aggression.
Also yesterday, the Administration announced a name change at the Department of Defense. Despite lacking the authority to do so without Congress, signage is already being changed. The full costs are likely to be in the billions.
We now have – kinda sorta – a Department of War.
Viewed just in itself, through Pete Hegseth’s breathless and absurdly poetic explanation – “"Maximum lethality, not tepid legality. Violent effect, not politically correct." – it seems like just a masturbatory exercise, the product of some testosterone-addled, incel-rapist fratboys of the kind who congregate in the Oval Office. Or just Pete Hegseth.
This is not the kind of thing that professional, sober military officers, long schooled in the distinctive culture of the American armed forces, would push. In fact, the Politico article I linked to above was originally titled:
It’s a move by civilians who are not very bright. As Heather Cox Richardson noted,
the men who changed the name to “Defense Department” and tried to create a rules-based international order did so precisely because war was not a game to them. Having seen the carnage of war not just on the battlefield but among civilians who faced firebombing, death camps, homelessness, starvation, and the obscenity of atomic weapons, they hoped to find a way to make sure insecure, power-hungry men could not start another war easily.
The pressure on Japan gives me another perspective on what they are up to. Consider Trump’s explanation: “Defense is too defensive...we want to be offensive too if we have to be.”
I mean, they are offensive. But joking aside, this is an utterly remarkable thing to say.
Although the U.S. has arguably waged aggressive wars and lesser engagements, there has always been a bright if not terribly insuperable line: we use our military power to defend the U.S. and its allies. The Iraq War with its “smoking guns” and Vietnam with its falsified Gulf of Tonkin Incident are the most transparent examples of lying to make unnecessary wars seem justified, but in a sense, they are exceptions that prove the rule: the executive branch had to make a convincing case that it was acting in self-defense to get the engagements off the ground.
The Department of Defense came about in the wake of worldwide carnage and devastation caused by multiple wars of aggression. Until the end of World War II, the idea that sovereignty included a right to “offensive” wars was a given. Renaming the Department of War the Department of Defense was a signal that the United States under former General Dwight Eisenhower was committed to the idea that no nation has a right to invade another. It was a commitment to the “rule-based international order.”1
When Trump says he wants to be offensive, he is rejecting the consensus that has kept the peace for seventy years.
And this is where Japan comes in. It may be the only country that has a constitution prohibiting wars of aggression, but that stance is the very embodiment of the rule-based international order, the commitment among nations to reject the right to overrun weaker nations by force, and to stand up for those nations when they are victims of wars of aggression. The Department of Defense is not constrained in the same way as the Japan Self-Defense Forces, but they share the same ethos, in principle, at any rate.
Though it was not, I think, the intent of earlier Republicans who wanted Japan to beef up their military spending, pushing the nation to change its constitution and to expand its ability to project force was always an attack on the rule-based international order.
Today, it is hard not to think the move to undermine the status quo is rather intentional. Announcing the rebrand to the Department of War as a potentially “offensive” force sends a message to Putin and Xi that the 20th Century paradigm – and with it, the Pax Americana – is over.
Pressuring Japan makes a bit of sense in light of the more dangerous world we create when we excuse Putin’s murderous invasion, a possible green-light to China’s ambitious in regard to Taiwan. But it is also yet another signal of our disengagement with our allies in the defense of peaceful nations, and a non-aggressive military stance.
On balance, I do not think the changes will mean that the U.S. uses its military aggressively, to become an old-fashioned empire. I think the risk, in the short term, is more the signal Trump is sending to those around the world who will.
But I could be wrong. Before the military blew up a boatload of civilians in international waters earlier this week, they got rid of the generals and the military lawyers who would have stood in the way of an unlawful order. The fact that the military was used to kill noncombatants – every other such strike that I am aware of was carried out with the understanding that terrorists are a form of unconventional hostile forces, but these men were not terrorists nor invaders in any but a metaphorical sense – is a bad sign that perhaps we will be “offensive too.”
Also known as the “Liberal International Order,” which among the MAGA crowd in the White House might be reason enough to scrap it.