The “Department of War” Is Designed to Fight American Citizens
How to resolve the tension between “lethal war-fighting warriors” and “no more wars” isolationism.
1. Quantico
There is an inherent tension in MAGA between the obsession with “warriors,” and “war fighting,” and “lethality,” and the “Department of War” on one hand, and the “no more wars,” “we ain’t the world’s policeman,” America First isolationism on the other.
During his carefully choreographed TED talk yesterday Pete Hegseth spoke at great length about the motivating idea behind the “Department of War.” The short version of his argument was—and I’m paraphrasing here—
We’re changing the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War because woke terminology is what made you pussies so bad at your jobs and using butch terminology will make you good again.
Hegseth talked about the need for drill sergeants to be abusive assholes1 and how critically important it is to be able to do pullups on the battlefield. He called his speech “liberation day” for “America’s warriors.”
But how are we supposed to square all of this look-how-hard-I-am talk with MAGA’s other insistence that America should not get involved with wars?
The America First foreign policy doctrine is one of malign isolationism: It courts strategic adversaries, so as not to antagonize them. And it antagonizes our allies in order to make sure they know they cannot count on our assistance.
The goal of America First is to never deploy the military in combat any closer or more protracted than remotely blowing up a couple Venezuelan boats or dropping bunker busters on Iranian mountains.
In the America First view of foreign policy, we should never put our lethal warriors on the ground, where they have to directly engage hostiles with the ability to return fire. Doing so would represent a failure of leadership.
So why does Secretary Hegseth demand a million-member standing army of merciless, ultra-hard, physically fit warriors if President Trump is committed to never getting entangled in foreign wars?
There are two possible answers to this question.
The first is seeing Hegseth’s posturing as a form of gender-affirming care.
The second is somewhat more alarming . . .
First, you need to understand that the world is undergoing a revolution in military affairs, right now.