Reality doesn’t always line up with our wishes. For Pete Hegseth, this lesson has been learned the hard way. Six months into his war with Iran, top military officials are warning the Secretary of Defense that prolonged fighting would be “unsustainable,” according to new reporting from The Washington Post.
These officials are echoing sentiments that have been repeated for months within the administration. Gen. Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had advised the White House before the conflict that a large-scale military confrontation with Iran posed serious risks, particularly because of the U.S.’ depleted munitions stockpiles and a lack of support from regional partners.
Rather than heed these warnings, Washington foreign policy elites chose to proceed with a reckless disregard for the facts, guided by an ideological drive to reshape the world in our image – or, perhaps more accurately, Israel’s. Pete Hegseth is one such ideologue, as demonstrated by his rhetorical record throughout the conflict.
The administration’s entire approach to this war has been stylistically Hegsethian. The tirades against the press, the administration’s unceasing – and undue – confidence, and the rigorous enforcement of a strict narrative are all hallmarks of Pete Hegseth’s brutish approach, rather than the calculated strategy one may expect to see from Marco Rubio or JD Vance.
Hegseth’s style plays to the instincts of an older generation of Republican voters, one which believes that to even question the military is to commit a grave offense. Older cohorts of conservatives – which tend to be the Republican Party’s most consistent base – are fervently supportive of the war.
As soon as the first bombs were dropped, the narrative was enforced. The case for war was not an intellectually rigorous one, but this is a common feature of government propaganda. It primarily exists not to convince the American public to support a policy, but to emotionally manipulate them. To this end, the war’s initiators must act with a level of bravado and confidence capable of convincing the average person that “this person knows what he’s doing.” It doesn’t mean he does, however. This distortion has been perfectly embodied by the rocky past six months at Hegseth’s Pentagon.
Hegseth has built a reputation for his aggressive style. During press conferences in the Iran war’s early stage, he made a habit out of using emotionally charged language to evoke an “us vs. them” mentality within Americans. On March 2, Hegseth called this war “our retribution,” saying “the regime who chanted ‘death to America’ and ‘death to Israel’ was gifted death from America, and death from Israel.” In a press conference a few days later, Hegseth seemed to fetishize violence, describing the U.S. operation as “death and destruction from the sky, all day long.”
In a display of his grotesque lust for power, Hegseth also said “we are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.”
There has been a severe shortage of seriousness from this administration in its messaging on this conflict. In a 60 Minutes appearance just days after the war was launched, Hegseth shrugged off concerns about the risks of this engagement, saying “nobody’s putting us in danger.” He followed this dismissive statement with an even more unsettling one, threatening that “the only ones that need to be worried right now are Iranians that think they’re going to live.”
Hellbound and Down 