Does Pete Hegseth think “he’s in an action movie”? asked Casey Ryan Kelly in Salon. In his Pentagon news briefings on the war with Iran, the defense secretary has projected none of the solemnity you’d expect from a government official discussing the taking of human life. Instead, Hegseth seems giddy about the horrors of war, rhapsodizing about U.S. bombers and drones raining “death and destruction from the sky all day long.” He’s dismissed concerns about the rules of engagement, explaining “it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down.” And he’s shrugged at news reports on America’s war dead, saying, “Tragic things happen; the press only wants to make the president look bad.”
This is what President Trump thinks a real warrior looks and sounds like, said David Smith in The Guardian. A Christian nationalist with tattoos of the Crusades-era Jerusalem Cross and slogan “Deus Vult” (“God wills it”), Hegseth won Trump’s attention as a Fox News host advocating for U.S. troops accused of war crimes. He’s the perfect figurehead for a White House that “revels in carnage,” and which last week posted a video online that mixed clips from video games and war movies with “real kill-shot footage” of strikes in Iran. This bloodlust may play well in the manosphere, but it doesn’t inspire confidence in the judgment of those leading this “murky new Middle East conflict.”
The “bellicose messaging” of this administration is accompanied by open “hostility to battlefield restraint,” said Missy Ryan in The Atlantic. We still don’t know why a U.S. Tomahawk cruise missile struck an Iranian elementary school on the war’s first day, killing at least 175 people, most of them children. But we do know Trump and Hegseth have spent the past year dismantling the supposedly “woke” systems designed to prevent such tragedies, firing many military lawyers, or “JAGs,” and closing a policy shop focused on reducing civilian casualties. Hegseth says he won’t comment on the school strike, pending an internal investigation, but he was less reticent in savoring the “quiet death” of 87 Iranian sailors killed when a U.S. submarine torpedoed a possibly unarmed Iranian frigate off Sri Lanka. Distastefulness aside, said Charlotte Howard in The Economist, the deeper problem with Hegseth’s “machismo style” is that it’s now also the “substance” of U.S. military policy.
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Machismo is part of the story, said Tom Nichols in The Atlantic. But the fetishization of violence for its own sake is also helping fill a “strategic vacuum.” Previous U.S. presidents went to war with a clear goal in mind (however unrealistic), whereas Trump is still deciding if the Iran operation is an air campaign to degrade Iran’s nuclear and missile programs, a full-scale “regime change” war, or something else entirely. The lack of a goal, and a plan for achieving it, leaves the White House with nothing to celebrate except the “rapid destruction of buildings and machines, and the killing of some enemy leaders,” all while praying that the public is “enjoying the fireworks” as much as Hegseth.
The tragedy is that Trump had very good reasons for going to war with Iran, said Gerard Baker in The Wall Street Journal. The vicious Islamist regime in Tehran has waged war on the U.S., and the Iranian people, for almost half a century. “Given an opportunity to inflict massive damage on that enemy, the president boldly seized it.” But rather than make that persuasive case to the public, Trump and Hegseth have leaned on “intemperate, incontinent, infantilizing verbiage” that only weakens support for this just cause at home and overseas, and “corrupts our national culture.”
