During the post-war era, there has often been covert or open war between a hawkish Department of Defense and a dovish State Department. Sometimes it was worse, as in the Biden administration, when we had a dovish Defense Department, too. But tension between State and Defense has largely been the norm, and State Department dovishness has sometimes verged on anti-Americanism, as we saw in the USAID scandal.
One of the great features of Trump II is that there is no daylight between the Defense Department under Pete Hegseth and the State Department under Marco Rubio. On the contrary: Rubio is a fiery defender of President Trump’s America First foreign policy. On a near-weekly basis, he torches liberals on television news programs, as yesterday with the awful Margaret Brennan:
.@SecRubio nukes Margaret Brennan: “This is such a stupid media narrative that [European leaders] are coming here tomorrow because Trump is going to bully Zelensky into a bad deal. We’ve been working with these people for weeks… WE invited them to come.” 🔥 pic.twitter.com/YoiyyA3xsp
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) August 17, 2025
What is great about the current Defense/State alignment is that, while Hegseth and Rubio are strong defenders of American interests and are unafraid to use force if necessary, State and Defense are aligned around the basic concept of peace through strength: their ultimate goal, always, is maintaining the peace. This Reaganite strategy is simple, and yet has not always guided American foreign policy, especially in the State Department.
So President Trump and his key foreign policy advisers are, in a sense, peaceniks–hawks for peace. One of the first Trump administration’s great successes was the absence of significant foreign conflicts, and, while obviously this is not entirely under our control, I am hopeful that Trump’s second term will be characterized by a similar Pax Americana.
