Hey, at a moment when Donald Trump has gone to war with Iran, this country has a secretary of defense -- oops, my mistake! -- of war who, in the past, has called for nothing less than an American -- yes! -- "crusade" against both leftists in the United States and Islam globally. And in the war that he and his president have launched, he's made it clear that the military he leads is backed by nothing less than God Himself. As he put it, "The providence of our almighty God is there protecting those troops, and we're committed to this mission."
So, no problem winning this war -- or, more accurately, according to Hegseth, this "crusade" -- right? After all, he didn't call his 2020 book American Crusade for nothing, did he? Now, admittedly, as the New Yorker has reported, we're talking about the same man who "was forced to step down by both of the two nonprofit advocacy groups that he ran -- Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America -- in the face of serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct."
Still, Iran should be worried indeed, since, to quote him again, "Our capabilities are better. Our will is better. Our troops are better. The providence of our almighty God is there protecting those troops, and we're committed to this mission."
The only problem, it seems, is that no one bothered to inform the Iranians about any of this. And that country has all too rudely refused to recognize the absolute dominance of Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump, even having the nerve to close the Strait of Hormuz, the very body of water that, in Senate testimony, Hegseth claimed the U.S. "ultimately" controls. And with all of that in mind, let Jasper Craven, author of the new book God Forgives, Brothers Don't: The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood, consider the Hegsethian mindset in this ever stranger moment of ours. Tom
Pete Hegseth's Desperate Crusade for Masculine Validation
Failed Wars and the Secretary of War's Flailing Identity
Earlier this year, President Donald Trump surveyed his top military brass on the prospect of making war in Iran. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine urged caution, presciently predicting that a ramped-up campaign against Iran could lead its leaders to close the Strait of Hormuz. However, Pete Hegseth, Trump's self-styled "Secretary of War," jumped at the prospect of such a conflict.
"Pete, I think you were the first one to speak up," Trump recently recalled at a press event. "And you said, 'Let's do it, because you can't let them have a nuclear weapon.'"
Americans join the military for any number of reasons: to serve their country, gain economic stability, or simply join a community. For Hegseth, a thirst for martial victory and a desire for a masculine metamorphosis seemed to surpass all else.
Much to Hegseth's chagrin, however, his career as an Army officer corresponded to a series of distinctly failed military campaigns. After graduating from Princeton in 2003, he deployed to two doomed military locales -- Afghanistan and Iraq -- and then relentlessly defended the Pentagon's occupation of parts of those places in essays, speeches, and, ultimately, as a weekend host on Fox News. While Hegseth's rhetoric on those wars long reflected mainstream Republican talking points -- papering over chaos and death in the Middle East and beyond with pledges that stable democracies were close at hand -- his zeal indicated something deeper: a desperation, it seemed, to wring some sort of personal validation from his time in uniform.
"The rank and file, and even some of the officers, have accepted the gravity of the war's failures," Adam Weinstein, a Marine Corps veteran and deputy director for Middle East policy at the Quincy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank focused on peace and diplomacy, told me, speaking of Iraq and Afghanistan. "There's a deep sense of sacrifice and loss for nothing. And that can lead to fatalistic beliefs, it can lead to Islamophobia. In its healthier form, it can lead to questioning the principles of interventionism and the U.S. foreign policy establishment."
Hegseth, for his part, chose to totally avoid any personal or geopolitical reckoning. Once the Global War on Terror became politically untenable to defend, he cast about for excuses that wouldn't implicate his own career in the military. Rather than zero in on tactical or intelligence failures, his rhetoric took a dark turn, increasingly inflected by Islamophobia, misogyny, and a distinctly toxic version of masculinity.
As his profile rose, Hegseth argued ever more forcefully that the Pentagon was weak-willed, insufficiently lethal, and overrun by incompetent and cowardly leaders, many of them women or minorities who (in his eyes) had been unfairly promoted. His proposed remedy was as blunt and dense as his diagnosis: America simply needed to fight harder in the Middle East until the mission was accomplished and "Islamic extremism" was eliminated. As one of his former co-workers told me, "I never got the feeling that he wanted to abandon the Middle East."
I asked Weinstein if, during his own 2012 deployment to Afghanistan, he saw Islamophobia bubbling below the surface. "It was right on the surface," he responded. "But what do you think the World War II generation was saying about the Japanese? Dehumanization is a natural outgrowth of war."
"If You Want Something, You Go After It"
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