IT’S said that hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue. In that light, Donald Trump renaming the US Department of Defence the Department of War is a very bad sign.

“Defence” in the mouths of US — and indeed British — leaders has long been a euphemism. The Pentagon’s staggering military budget, larger than those of the next 10 countries put together, pays for a worldwide web of over 800 military bases.

They are launch pads for relentless aggression which even US presidents have referred to as “forever wars.” Since the end of the cold war, the “defence” ministries of Britain and the United States have attacked Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, leaving a bloody trail of failed states and long-running sectarian conflicts. They have armed and funded jihadists who now rule a rump state in a fragmented Syria. They provided weapons and logistical support for the murderous Saudi Arabian assault on Yemen.

They are now nearly two years into active support for the genocidal war being waged against the Palestinian people, a war involving the systematic destruction of basic infrastructure, the deliberate massacre of civilians, the calculated starvation of the population and the murder of desperate people trying to obtain food aid from distribution sites run by US mercenaries.

These are not the actions of defensive countries, but of aggressors. Trump’s blunt acknowledgement of the predatory interests usually sugar-coated in humanitarian rhetoric has embarrassed US allies before: in his first term he famously admitted that US troops were in Syria “only for the oil.” This is a similar “mask off” moment, as US Defence (for now) Secretary Pete Hegseth makes clear: “We’re going to go on offence, not just on defence. Maximum lethality, not tepid legality. Violent effect, not politically correct.”

We could welcome the honesty. But the shift in terminology from war to defence ministries — Trump is restoring the original name — reflected Western ruling classes’ inability to sell the old lies about glory and heroism in the wake of the mutual slaughter of World War I and the discrediting of nationalism through its horrific culmination in Nazi Germany.

Offence had to be disguised as defence because wars of conquest were no longer respectable. And that shift in public opinion was in great part the achievement of the labour movement — an internationalist movement, championing working-class solidarity across borders.

Trump is turning the clock back. “Maximum lethality, not tepid legality” is expressed in the illegal strike on a boat in Venezuelan waters in the name of killing drug-traffickers — increasingly termed “terrorists” by Washington, terminology the Mexican government has warned is designed to justify sending troops across borders. More seriously still it is expressed in the US endorsement of ethnic cleansing in Gaza and a “greater Israel” resting on the permanent erasure of the Palestinians.

That should make us reflect on the “special relationship” with Washington and the rearmament drive which our government — like every Nato government with the courageous exception of Spain — is committing to at Trump’s insistence.

For decades our alliance with the US has involved us in unjustifiable wars. The brutal narcissist in the White House now pours scorn even on the pretence that these wars will heed international law, and demands we channel more and more resources into building up armies subordinated in Nato’s command structure to the US, whatever the costs to our public services or social security system.

It is time to say no. The University and College Union’s motion calling for welfare not warfare would correct years in which the TUC has come to endorse increased military spending on the grounds the world is becoming more dangerous. Yet it is governments like Britain’s, tied to a hyper-aggressive US, which are making it more dangerous.

Congress delegates should support the UCU motion. In a world lurching towards war let the labour movement stand for peace.