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The American eagle has always been depicted with both the arrows of war and the olive branch of peace. (US Mint)

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When Charles Thomson was directed by the Continental Congress in 1782 to finalize the design for the Great Seal of the United States, he approached the task with the seriousness it deserved. Each element of the seal was intended to express America's national character, values, and place in history. The most famous of those elements is the bald eagle, which hovers with upraised wings, grasping 13 arrows in one set of talons and an olive branch in the other, its head turned toward the leaves of peace.

Thomson transmitted his design to Congress on June 20, 1782, noting that "the Olive Branch and arrows denote the power of peace and war." The United States would always be ready for war if necessary, but would always prefer peace.

There was an immediate practical need for a Great Seal. The Americans had just fought and won their long war for independence, and peace negotiations with Britain were underway in Paris. An official seal would soon be required to ratify the treaty. From the outset, in other words, America's most important emblem was bound up with the pursuit of peace.

For nearly 2.5 centuries, that dual imagery has been the standard for American statecraft. You can see it today on the front of every US passport and the back of every $1 bill. But as the nation prepares to celebrate its 250th anniversary, the US Mint has announced a jarring departure from that tradition.

The new "Emerging Liberty" dime issued for the Semiquincentennial will depict a bald eagle in flight, arrows clutched in its left talons. However, the symbol of peace that always balances those arrows is missing. The claws that should be holding the olive branch are open, and the eagle is peering at the empty space, as if wondering how it managed to drop something so important.

The change is being cheered by some as a welcome assertion of American might. The US Mint's design commentary celebrates the arrows-only eagle as representing "the Colonists' fight for independence," with "Liberty over Tyranny" as its motto. It's "a symbol of strength and the high cost of freedom," exulted The Coin Show, a podcast and blog for numismatists.

Is it, though?

I have often argued that American power is indispensable to keeping the world safe and that terrible evils result when the United States is unwilling to fight. So my objection to stripping the olive branch from the dime is not a pacifist's complaint — it's a hawk's.

In October 1945, two months after the end of World War II, President Harry Truman issued an executive order to standardize the presidential seal. For decades, the eagle had been shown facing the 13 arrows in its left talons. Truman, who had just brought the most catastrophic war in human history to an end and who was beginning to grasp the magnitude of the coming Cold War with the Soviet Union, directed that the eagle's gaze revert toward the olive branch.

While hosting Winston Churchill at the White House shortly thereafter, Truman pointed out the change. The British statesman replied that he liked the change — but added a caveat: "Why not put the eagle's neck on a swivel so that it could turn to the right or left as the occasion presented itself?"

Churchill wasn't being frivolous. He understood, like the author of Ecclesiastes, that there is "a time for war, and a time for peace." The credible threat of the arrows is what gives the olive branch its value; the promise of the olive branch is what gives the arrows their legitimacy. The symbolism of an eagle that could "swivel" wasn't that it invariably preferred the arrows or the olive branch, but that it retained its capacity for strategic choice. By deleting the olive branch from the new dime, the Mint has not symbolically made the eagle stronger. It has made it one-dimensional.

And if there is one thing serious statesmanship is not, it is one-dimensional.

The Churchillian approach to international relations, like Ronald Reagan's later "peace through strength," doesn't celebrate brute strength for its own sake. But it does understand the capacity of military deterrence to intimidate tyrants and hearten dissidents aching for freedom. By contrast, political leaders who think it better to appease murderous dictators and "lead from behind" rather than to risk confrontation invariably learn the hard lesson that weakness is provocative and makes the world more dangerous.

The olive branch and the arrows were meant from the outset to be mutually reinforcing principles of statecraft. But an eagle clutching only arrows is not projecting resolve; it is advertising a lack of strategic depth. A great power defines itself not by its capacity to fight but by the principles that justify that capacity.

This symbolic "dropping" of the olive branch is of a piece with an administration that has consistently treated foreign policy not as a matter of grand strategy, but as a series of transactional whims. Today, that choice is often treated like a branding exercise.

The result has been a global posture that is as erratic as it is aggressive. We see a White House that careens from raging over not receiving the Nobel Peace Prize to ominous rumblings of going "as far as we have to go" to possess Greenland; from expressing open contempt for the courageous Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky to demanding Iran's "unconditional surrender" as the price of ending the war. It is a record that manages to be simultaneously isolationist and bellicose — declaring that George W. Bush should have been impeached for the war against Saddam Hussein, while celebrating a military strategy built on "maximum lethality, not tepid legality" — as if the measure of American power were its appetite for violence rather than the purposes that violence serves.

Whatever else might be said of such a record, it does not reflect seriousness of purpose. It is entirely fitting that an administration that can't seem to decide if it wants to be the world's policeman or its most unpredictable wild card would produce an eagle that has quite literally lost its grip on the symbol of peace.

As Americans approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, they should strive to emulate the enduring wisdom of the Founding. Charles Thomson and the Continental Congress understood that America's strength derived legitimacy from its purposes. That insight — that the arrows and the olive branch belong together — has guided American statecraft at its best ever since.

It may seem a small thing to fret over a tiny design change on a ten-cent coin. But a nation's moral vocabulary is often carried in small things. I never forget that I owe my existence to the American eagle's arrows. Nor do I forget that those arrows had their legitimacy because they were always, ultimately, in the service of the olive branch. That is what the redesigned dime erases — not just a symbol, but the principle the symbol encodes.

The olive branch belongs in the eagle's grip. It should be put back.

Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe, from which this is reprinted with permission.

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