The President has been trying to justify his actions and his new $1.5 trillion DOD budget by saying he plans for peace through strength. Of course what that means is implied rather than spelled out. What the President wants Americans to believe that, for him, it means that for him, as the Commander and Chief, that he is defending our nation from aggression. That our nation must be militarily strong enough so that no nation would dare to attack us. But such an understanding assumes that 'peace through strength' can only have one meaning. My suspicion is that that saying has more than one meaning.
To decipher what 'peace through strength' can mean requires that we define what the words 'peace' and 'strength' could mean. And the problem with that is that each of those words can have at least 2 meanings.
For example, how could peace come through strength? We should note that how strength results in peace is that strength acts as a form of intimidation. That if we are strong enough, others would be too afraid to attack us. But such a use of strength is a passive form of intimidation. Passive intimidation means that the mere existence of our state of strength can make others to afraid to attack us.
Active intimidation is when a group or nation exercises force to show its strength and what could happen if attacked. In other words, a nation or group will exercise that force again unless a given nation or group complies with the stronger one's demands. And so when we look our President's policies, he seems to be employing both forms of intimidation.
As for peace, we can see from America's culture wars, that peace can mean being coerced into complying or to peacefully coexist as equals. Note that with the first form of peace comes hierarchy. That is the peace being sought is when one nation or group is dominating, in varying degrees, over another nation or group.
The latter is what we see how. some Christians approach their role in society. That these Christians want to have a certain measure of control over a society that consists of non-Christians and Christians. An alternative to fighting culture wars is for us Christians to decide to coexist as equals with unbelievers in society. That is, we will disagree with the cultural values of many unbelievers, but we will defend their equality in society by defending their right to live out those values. That we will not try to coerce unbelievers to at least behave in ways that follow our own cultural values.
If we look at Trump's attempts to rewrite trade deals, we find that Trump used both forms of intimidation to coerce complieance with his demands. Trump used the economic dependence that other nations have with the U.S. as leverage, which would be passive intimidation. He then employed active intimidation by issuing new tariffs to further his advantage over America's trading partners. It isn't that his tactics always worked; it is that that was his approach.
Trump has used his military capture of Maduro from Venezuela and his attacks on Iran as active intimidation over other nations so that they could see what could happen if they either don't comply with his demands or thought about attacking us. His new $1.5 trillion DOD budget is to provide a passive form of intimidation.
What is most dangerous here is the form of peace that Trump is pursuing. Though he is always marketing his actions and those of his opponents in ways to make it appear that he is seeking the kind of peace that most people want in the world, in reality, as the National Security Strategy of 2025 (click here for the document) reveals, Trump's peace through strength means coercing other nations, especially in the Western Hemispher, into some level of compliance. Such a peace is, more often than not, a peace without justice. And that kind of peace often begets future conflicts.
Peace through coercion is what we see in Trump's attempts to get a deal with Iran to end the war. Trump is not in a hurry to end the war, because, IMO, both the Stock Market and major businesses are benefiting from the war and ceasefire. Those businesses include those that belong to the oil industry and the Military Industrial Complex. That means that he doesn't appear to care about the economic hardships that most American citizens,as well as those around the world, are suffering from. Nor does he appear to care about the war victims. And so what kind of peace can we expect if Trump has his way with Iran?
The kind of peace we pursue says much about what 'peace through strength' actually means.
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