To state the obvious: As a former weekend “Fox & Friends” anchor, Army National Guard officer and leader of two small nonprofits, Pete Hegseth is unqualified to run a nuclear-armed organization with a budget approaching a trillion dollars. That’s the point. Donald Trump doesn’t want someone to effectively manage the Pentagon; he wants to disrupt it.
His choice of Mr. Hegseth is borne out of right-wing grievances that have been building for a long time over the failures of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many of these frustrations are understandable, but the remedies Mr. Trump proposes are dangerous. His disdain for international rules could eviscerate the laws of war that emerged from the devastation of two world wars. His threats of territorial expansion could intensify a period of nationalist aggression. His tirades against enemies within the United States foreshadow MAGA social engineering and domestic intervention by the Pentagon. In Mr. Hegseth, he has found a loyal vessel for this project, someone who could channel his blend of jingoism and anger to fundamentally alter the character of the military.
Almost a decade ago, Mr. Trump announced his presidential campaign by warning that the United States was in trouble. “We don’t have victories anymore,” he said. “We used to have victories but we don’t have them.” He’d emerged out of a right-wing media ecosystem filled with belligerent nationalism and promises of great victories after the Sept. 11 attacks. George W. Bush committed the United States to “the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” Even as the wars started to go badly, Vice President Dick Cheney talked about an Iraqi insurgency in its “last throes.” The people most conditioned to believe these promises were consumers of right-wing media, which increased their sense of betrayal when it became clear they’d been misled.
Mr. Hegseth experienced the wars in person, serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. After initially defending post-Sept. 11 policies, he joined many on the right in pivoting to blame enemies within for America’s failures abroad — a common outcome when superpowers don’t win wars. Like Mr. Trump, he focused on liberals and Islam, as well as changing demographics and social mores that had crept into the military through the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, diversity initiatives and women in combat.
Meanwhile, many veterans who served tours in grinding wars with murky objectives returned to communities grappling with deindustrialization and the financial crisis and disoriented by social change. Social media mainlined resentment and conspiracy theories, unraveling the confidence of Bush-era triumphalism: We don’t have victories anymore.
Mr. Trump harnessed this negative energy. He dispensed with arguments about how the Iraq war could have been won by arguing, rightly, that it should never have been fought. If he had a critique of the conduct of the war, it was that we constrained our troops by following the laws of war and didn’t take the oil. He cast the United States as full of enemies contributing to decline. As he became the dominant figure on the political right, media personalities including Mr. Hegseth amplified these messages, simultaneously responding to Mr. Trump, sharpening his critiques and shifting the discourse in directions once viewed as extreme.
During Mr. Trump’s first term, this worldview put him at odds with generals he elevated to civilian roles, including Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis. Mr. Trump liked the idea of a hard-nosed four-star general nicknamed Mad Dog running the Pentagon, but as prominent retired military leaders issued increasingly unveiled warnings about Mr. Trump’s fitness, alongside support for America’s overseas commitments, he linked the conservative generals he’d hired to what he cast as a self-interested “deep state” captured by a “woke” liberalism endangering the country.
Clearly, Mr. Trump is determined not to repeat that mistake As reports emerged about Mr. Hegseth’s alleged heavy drinking, sexual assault and misuse of funds, Mr. Trump reinforced his support, and MAGA media mobilized. This demonstrated the extent to which Mr. Trump wants a loyalist at the Pentagon and fealty from Senate Republicans. The accusations of sexual assault and excessive drinking (which Mr. Hegseth has denied) also converged with other MAGA interests, including being unburdened by woke social mores.
Mr. Hegseth captured Mr. Trump’s attention during his first term by advocating the pardon of U.S. troops who had been charged or convicted of war crimes, including the murder of civilians. Mr. Hegseth condemned these prosecutions and castigated a corrosive mind-set pushed by “weak-kneed, America-hating A.C.L.U. types.”
This hostility to constraints on American behavior overlaps with Mr. Trump’s recent foreign policy pronouncements. His blustering at Greenland and Panama has the feel of a declining superpower looking for someone smaller to intimidate. It’s not hard to envision Pete Hegseth using a threat of military force to advance these ambitions. What message would that send to a Russia with designs on post-Soviet states, to a China with claims on Taiwan or to an Israel that may want to annex the West Bank? Impunity in the waging and conduct of war is attractive only until it becomes the norm, as it was before the world wars that led the United States and other governments to write international laws to prevent humanity’s darkest history from repeating itself.
Mr. Hegseth has also lamented the presence of gays in the military, women in combat and “diversity hires” in senior roles, including the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He has used apocalyptic imagery about Marxism while insisting upon the “categorical defeat of the left” within the United States. What kind of military emerges from this worldview? Presumably, one that seeks to roll back the social and cultural changes of recent decades within its ranks, disrupting cohesion and devaluing diversity as a source of strength. A MAGA military.
Loyalty to Donald Trump is central to this project. Mr. Trump has complained about a military that bucked his will the first time around. No one expects Mr. Hegseth to do that, nor would the kind of military he has talked about building. What happens if it is asked to support the political interests of the president? Or participate in mass deportations? Or suppress political protests? The United States would struggle to return to an apolitical military serving a constitutional citizenry rather than an individual or ideology.
To be clear, it will not be easy for Mr. Trump to achieve these aims within four years. There are laws, traditions and competing interests governing how large institutions like the Pentagon operate. Few people understand this better than Mr. Trump. It is perhaps no coincidence that he has chosen two extreme loyalists to run the institutions responsible for the most elemental powers of the state: law enforcement and military power. An easy confirmation for Mr. Hegseth would signal an endorsement from the Senate for the incoming president to remake the government, though the bigger test will be whether a Secretary Hegseth can remake the military in MAGA’s image.
In three successive elections against Mr. Trump, Democrats have struggled to find a counternarrative to his grievances over the post-Sept. 11 wars. Instead, they have reflexively defended institutions and deferred to hawkish foreign policies out of step with the electorate. Kamala Harris even welcomed the support of Dick Cheney.
Instead of seeking validation from hawkish elites, Democrats need a foreign policy that speaks to their own constituencies’ grievances over post-Sept. 11 policies: one that reduces the risks of war, highlights the dangers of go-it-alone adventurism, positions the United States to lead in sectors such as technology and clean energy, and earns the respect of the world. Instead of reflexively defending the Pentagon, they should focus on cutting a bloated budget — including scaling back a nuclear weapons modernization that could approach $2 trillion and fuel an arms race.
On personnel, rather than accepting a culture-war frame, they can argue that recruitment and the health of the force are ill served by downgrading the role of women, gays or minorities. Finally, they should strongly oppose the politicized use of the military within the United States as a dangerous Rubicon that the institution most Americans revere should not cross.
Of course, it’s possible Mr. Hegseth and Mr. Trump’s other attention-grabbing appointments are merely a distraction, and Mr. Trump will govern as a more conventional conservative (albeit one with a more corrupt agenda). But it would be wrong to discount the possibility of a transformation of our military, just as it’s wrong to understate the depth of resentment that led here.
“I am your retribution,” Mr. Trump declared early in his latest presidential campaign. Retribution for, among other things, the feeling of defeatism and devaluation on the American right after Sept. 11. Moving beyond that dynamic will require political leaders to find ways for America to win victories without defeating ourselves.
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