Welcome to Doomsday Scenario, my regular column on national security, geopolitics, history, and—unfortunately—the fight for democracy in the Trump era. I hope if you’re coming to this online, you’ll consider subscribing right here. It’s easy—and free:

First, a thank you. This newsletter list started the new year around just 3,000 and has grown now to over 20,000. I really appreciate how many of you have joined, continue to read vigorously, and respond with your own notes and thoughts. I read them all. I was speaking this week about my new book in Ann Arbor and Grand Rapids and in both places, readers came up to me to say how much they appreciate these columns amid these very strange times. I’m hoping to both make this newsletter more regular this fall, but also to experiment with a couple new formats that help capture some reading recommendations and other short-format items that highlight news developments and stories relevant to past columns.

Second, I wanted to share a couple recent media appearances I’ve had — in particular, I appeared on Weekend All Things Considered and on Amanpour & Co. discussing my argument that across August America tipped into a new stage of authoritarianism. I also spoke with Publisher’s Weekly about my interest in oral history, and the audiobook of THE DEVIL REACHED TOWARD THE SKY, read by audio rock star Edoardo Ballerini and a full cast, received an “Earphones Award” from Audiofile Magazine, which wrote, “Artfully arranged into a cohesive whole, they vocalize the excitement of the development of the atomic bomb and the horror it wrought… Listeners may be so engrossed they don't think of the production's tremendous complexity--if they do, they'll find it all the more astounding.” 

Now onto today’s two-part subject — wars, both the Department Of, and what we might face in America’s near future.

Why It’s Not the War Department 

Today, at some point, Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order that requires officials in the executive branch to refer to the Department of Defense as the Department of War. Note my phrasing: What he’s doing is far different and more performative than what most of the news headlines and outlets reported — mainly that he was renaming the Defense Department as the War Department.

He can’t do that; the Department of Defense was created in statute by Congress and renaming it would require an act of Congress. Instead, he’s inventing some new strange process that allows “secondary names” and that applies only to the executive branch. This is the “Gulf of America” but for the nation’s warfighters.

I found the coverage last night of the name change particularly galling; indeed much of the media’s coverage of Trump’s second term executive orders has been uniquely terrible and credulous. I said early this year that Trump has basically figured out that Executive Orders are tweets that get bigger headlines. It seems almost every time the president signs one, the media makes it seem like it has the full force of law, when they absolutely do not.

In this case, Trump appears at some point in August to have decided that the “Department of War” sounds more masculine and tougher and has just days later plowed ahead with a time-consuming and wasteful effort — just imagine how much stationary and how many business cards the Pentagon is going to have to reprint! — to appease his own sense of what the country should be.

The comments about the name change keep saying things like “the department was previously called the Department of War until World War II” or “the name reverts to what it was called through World War II,” but that’s just plain wrong, and I wanted to take some time today to explain not only why it’s wrong but why it matters that it’s wrong.

It’s worth pausing at the start to note how the attempt to rename the Pentagon fits into the broader classic authoritarian frame of how Trump is corrupting and personalizing the military — one of the few still widely respected institutions in American life — in ways that will be very hard to undo. From firing top commanders, mostly women and minorities, and installing handpicked leaders like the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who don’t have the most basic normal requirements of the role, to deploying National Guard troops to police American cities against the will of local citizens, we’re watching a genuine crisis in “civil-military relations” unfold.

The DoD name change hits at two of my consistent themes: Trump’s utter incurious lack of understanding history and the dismantling of the institutions built and tended by the Greatest Generation. 

The War Department was one of the first parts of the US government, dating back to 1798, but what it really oversaw was just the army; there was a separate Department of the Navy, which was also established in 1798, was the only military branch specifically authorized in the Constitution, by Article I, Section 8, and which also oversaw the Marines Corps. The Founders were, for obvious reasons, deeply wary of standing armies, and so the goal and plan for most of the country’s history was that while we always had a Department of the Navy chugging along, the “War Department” shrunk down massively in peacetime and only really bulked up during, well, an actual war. At the end of the 1800s, the US army was just 39,000 people — about 1/12^th the size of the French army — and even on the eve of World War II, the US army ranked only 19^th in the world, smaller than the standing army of Portugal. 

It was after World War II that the US began to think differently about its world obligations and what that meant for the military. Part of the problem was that there was no combined authority who oversaw the whole military other than the commander-in-chief himself — through the war, the army chief of staff, Gen. George C. Marshall, and chief of naval operations, Adm. Ernest J. King, were co-equals, reporting to separate secretaries, War Secretary Henry Stimson and Navy Secretary Frank Knox and, after 1944, James Forrestal. It didn’t make for a very smooth coordinated operation, since the different services and departments had different service priorities.

After the war, policymakers began to talk about a new concept they called “national security.” As I wrote in my book RAVEN ROCK, previous generations of policymakers had used terms like “national interest” or “national defense,” but the idea of “national security” presaged something bigger and grander: It wasn’t enough to be confident that an enemy could be stopped at the border — the United States needed to engage with the world beyond and stop threats long before they reached our shores. “Our national security can only be assured on a very broad and comprehensive front. I am using the word ‘security’ here consistently and continuously rather than ‘defense,’” Navy Secretary James Forrestal explained in one 1945 congressional hearing.

 “I like your words ‘national security,’” Senator Edwin Johnson responded.

As the Cold War started, Congress passed the National Security Act of 1947, which created a unified structure known as the National Military Establishment, which brought together the War Department and the Navy Department, created a new Department of the Air Force, as well created the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the National Security Council, the CIA, and other hallmarks of our postwar national security apparatus. For the first time, all of the nation’s armed services were under the same roof and authority. Two years later, the so-called “NME” was renamed officially the Department of Defense, in part — allegedly — because the acronym sounded too much like the word “enemy.”  

The Department of Defense was something new — it wasn’t “just” a new name for the Department of War. It was fundamentally different, had a different posture, and was meant to capture a different, larger role for the United States in the world. Changing the name to the “War Department” simply because Trump thinks it sounds cooler is a complete waste of everyone’s time and energy — and, moreover, seems certain to make the US less safe, as the aggressiveness of the new name seems certain to only underscore our adversaries’ worst fears about us.

Devolving the “Department of Defense” to the “Department of War” feels like renaming the “Transcontinental Railroad” to the “Pony Express.” Sure, they’re both “ways to send news and information across the country,” but it’s a term from a different era that referred to a different, lesser thing entirely. Maybe more romantic? Maybe. But also anachronistic and incomplete.

One thing that should worry us from this episode — and that we should talk about more — is how clear it is that Trump operates without guardrails in this second term. Trump’s latest hare-brained and wasteful idea to rename DoD is exactly the type of thing that the “grown-ups” in the first term would have been able to redirect, stymie, and slow-roll, but in this second term it now goes from “random musing” to “mad king edict” in just a matter of days. We saw a similar evolution throughout August as the federal takeover of DC and the deployment of National Guard troops steadily escalated and now seems, as early as even today perhaps, to expand to other hostile military-backed invasions of cities like Chicago. There is no one left in Trump’s orbit to turn the temperature down. That should worry us greatly both in international affairs and domestic concerns.

Which brings me to a second topic — what wars the US might actually face in the months and years ahead. 

Five Conflicts To Watch (and More)

One of the weirder parts of this week — who can even keep up!? — was Trump as an off-hand comment in his Tuesday press conference announcing that the US conducted a clearly illegal military strike against a drug smuggling vessel from Venezuela. How do we know it was illegal? As the NYT writes, “Pentagon officials were still working Wednesday on what legal authority they would tell the public was used to back up the extraordinary strike in international waters.”

When you’re still looking for your legal rationale AFTER you’ve conducted your military operation, it makes clear it wasn’t legal to begin with. In this case, the military establishment and command structure had a duty to push back against it more forcefully then they evidently did. (Again: No guardrails!)

The US going to war with Venezuela wasn’t on anyone’s top bingo card at the start of this year, but neither was a military invasion of Greenland or Canada. As part of its new and aptly-timed “War Issue,” I spent a chunk of the summer reporting for POLITICO Magazine on what conflicts the world might most likely face in the coming years:

I encourage you to go read the full piece, where I look at the possibility and stakes of conflict in what we came to call the “most-feared invasion” (China and Taiwan), the “ultimate test for NATO” (Russia and the Baltics), the “aggrieved neighbors” (India and Pakistan), and “the tensest border” (India and China).

The piece led me to think about one big wildcard, too — and that’s the instability and uncertainty surrounding everything the US is doing right now, the bellicose rhetoric of the Trump administration and what it could portend for US tensions in the years ahead — from the rumblings of a military takeover of Greenland to Mexican drug cartels. For the first time this year, the nation’s intelligence leaders cited foreign illicit drug cartels as the top threat to the United States — citing the pipeline of fentanyl and other drugs that continue to kill more than 50,000 Americans a year. As I wrote in the piece, “The Trump administration seems serious — at least some days — about expanding military actions in Mexico, covert or overt, with or without that government’s cooperation.”

Now, barely a week after this piece published, we’re already looking at the US ratcheting up military action against Venezuela, with a naval fleet steaming for the country for an operation that will be somewhere on the spectrum between a routine anti-narcotics sweep and an existential threat to Nicolás Maduro’s regime.

Part of reporting out the piece, speaking to diplomatic, intelligence, and military thinkers, and devouring intelligence assessments also led me to consider the next and second tier of potential world conflicts. What I found almost more interesting than the main article was that beyond those five somewhat predictable major potential conflicts lie a wider range of possible lower-level conflicts in tense or evolving regions that could spiral into more major wars that would destabilize regional security and possibly pull larger countries into the fight.

Here's the list of what I heard from the geopolitical experts about what they’re worried far further from the day’s normal headlines: 

Azerbaijan and Armenia — Putin’s war in Ukraine has affected and altered the geopolitical calculus all over the world, and few places is that truer than the long-standing dispute over the ethnically Armenian region of Nagorno-Karabakh controlled by Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan decisively won a brief and bloody war in 2020, and its leader Ilham Aliyev may sense an opening in Russia’s distraction to settle the issue once and for all.

Balkans and Kosovo — More than a quarter century after NATO fought its only war, potentially dangerous flashpoints are appearing in the Balkans again. Bosnia faces real threats to its postwar framework from Milorad Dodik, the head of the country’s Serbian political faction. Similarly, US officials perennially worry that intentional provocations or inflammatory incidents in the northern Kosovo city of Mitrovica could lead to a Serbian intervention, ostensibly to defend their ethnic brethren a la the Kalingrad train scenario above, that would spill into another war in Europe.

China and Philippines — Whereas conflicts between China and Taiwan or Russia and the Baltics might rank as the highest consequence scenarios in the geopolitical analysis, one of the highest probability conflicts on the global stage might very well be a conflict between China and the Philippines in the disputed waters around the disputed island chains of the South China Sea. China’s aggressive actions to remake the map of the South China Sea bring it into regular showdowns with Philippine vessels and forces in places like the Spratly Islands and Scarborough Shoal. It’s an area ripe for misunderstandings and one where an overly aggressive (or simply piqued) naval officer or fighter pilot could very well lead to a spiraling conflict.

As one of the people I spoke with told me, “Some Chinese captain becoming overzealous and sinking a Philippines naval vessel, or the opposite — the Philippines sinking a Chinese quote, unquote ‘fishing boat’ that’s basically there at the behest of the Chinese government, and a bunch of people being killed — and one side or the other feeling like they then need to escalate in some way, and you’re off to the races.” This could be particularly dangerous because the US has a defense treaty with the Philippines — although, at the same, it’s also a conflict where the US would have a lot of levers to work and considerable capacity to affect the escalation and trajectory of the fighting if and when it erupts.

Guyana and Venezuela — With little notice, the oil reserves of Guyana are on the path to transforming the small coastal South American country to be perhaps the highest per-capita GDP country in the world — albeit one with no military to speak of. It sits next to, though, highly unstable Venezuela and has a long-standing border dispute over a region known as Essequibo. The dispute, which now includes valuable offshore drilling licenses, escalated in 2023 and 2024 and Venezuela continues to saber-rattle.

Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda — This area is unfortunately no stranger to terrible wars over the last three decades, and while most recent violence has come to an end just in recent weeks with a new treaty, experts fear the peace might not hold. Among global hot spots, serious fighting in central Africa could quickly lead to some of the largest losses of life given the history and past conflicts and would almost surely draw in other regional players.

Syria — The surprisingly fast fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime last year garnered a flurry of headlines and seemed to write the end of the country’s dozen-plus-year-long civil war, but on the ground, the war is anything but settled. Despite efforts at unity, no one force meaningfully controls the landscape and violence surged again this spring. Any downward spiral could easily bring in regional players, like Turkey or Israel, and both further destabilize the already unsteady Middle East and also unleash another destabilizing refugee flow, like the one that had disrupted European politics over the last decade and fueled the rise of far-right anti-immigrant governments in many European countries.

Hope all of that is enough Doomsday Scenario-style nightmare fuel to keep you thinking through the weekend! More next week….

GMG

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