Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth’s Warped Vision of the Iran War
There is no good way to call off a war that you started but which hasn’t achieved what you’d hoped. On Wednesday night, Donald Trump, in his address to the nation on the Iran war, sought to counter reality with hyperbole. “We’ve beaten and completely decimated Iran,” the President said. “Never in the history of warfare has an enemy suffered such clear and devastating large-scale losses in a matter of weeks.” Of course, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard retains control not just of the country but of the Strait of Hormuz, and therefore of an alarmingly constricted global oil supply. A month of air strikes had killed many leaders but had not changed the regime. Even so, Trump suggested that the mission was “nearing completion,” and that the U.S. military would soon be pulling back. But if Tehran did not accept a deal, he added, “we are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We’re going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.”
Big talk. But the announcement also sounded like a concession, since two to three weeks probably isn’t enough time for Trump to follow through on some of his prior threats: an armed invasion of the oil ports of Kharg Island, or an even more ambitious raid to extract uranium likely stored in tunnels near nuclear facilities. The morning of Trump’s address, media reports had suggested that he was considering withdrawing the United States from NATO. Instead, the President taunted America’s allies, some of whom had been pleading for a settlement over Hormuz. “Build up some delayed courage,” he told them. If they want the oil to flow again, they should “go to the strait and just take it.”
It has been a central conviction of Trump’s second term that the nations of the world now operate on self-interest and brute force, rather than on principle or alliance, and the White House has been eager to spread the news. The mockery that the Administration directed at its own, less warlike allies this week (“Last time I checked, there was supposed to be a big, bad Royal Navy,” the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, said on Tuesday) recalled its jeering of Volodymyr Zelensky in February, 2025. “You’re buried there,” Trump told the Ukrainian President about his nation’s battlefield prospects.
This penchant for what Saul Bellow called reality instruction—the cynical delight taken in explaining to idealists how the rough-and-tumble world really works—extends from Trump throughout the Administration. But perhaps the most eager reality instructor has been Hegseth, one of the Administration’s more politically fragile figures, who, when he’d been picked to join Trump’s Cabinet, was a co-host of “Fox & Friends Weekend.” Hegseth is so committed to a vision of the world defined by winners and losers that he once wrote that Joan of Arc was a “loser” because her last battle “ended disastrously and eventually with her execution.”
Hegseth came out of his own service, in Iraq and Afghanistan, with the seeming conviction that what had stood in the way of a fuller victory in those wars had been the restraints supposedly placed on how soldiers could kill. (In 2019, he successfully lobbied Trump to pardon two soldiers charged with or convicted of alleged war crimes.) “We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy,” Hegseth told a large gathering of senior military officials, whom he had summoned to Quantico, in September. “We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement . . . just common sense, maximum lethality, and authority for warfighters,” he said. “You kill people and break things for a living.”
On Iran, Hegseth has led the Administration’s periodic press briefings, at which he has called on Americans to pray to Jesus Christ for the military’s success; his slogan has been “maximum lethality.” But even in the first hours of the war it was clear that this approach could backfire. The initial strikes, which began on February 28th, killed the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but were so indiscriminate that, as President Trump noted, they also killed many of the political figures who the White House had hoped would form a new, more amenable cadre of leaders. “Most of the people we had in mind are dead,” he said a few days later. The ones remaining, even if Trump didn’t want to acknowledge it, were generally described as more hard-line. One of the President’s stated aims has been to inspire a popular uprising among those Iranian citizens sick of the repression and the autocracy enforced by the Revolutionary Guard. Yet that requires taking care to distinguish between the regime and its civilians, and to avoid collateral damage. But, according to a preliminary investigation, on the same day that U.S. forces assassinated Khamenei, they also dropped a bomb in the wrong place, inadvertently killing nearly two hundred people in an elementary school.
Trump and Hegseth might wish that they lived in a world where whoever dropped the most bombs got whatever he wanted. But the Iran war has shown that this isn’t true. The old liberal institutions may be teetering, but that doesn’t mean that all that’s left is the law of the jungle. The fact that the President is now signalling a messy retreat has nothing to do with insufficient lethality and everything to do with politics—in particular, the alarm in the global oil markets and the American public’s widespread opposition to the war. One tragedy of Trump’s war is that, in January, the Iranian regime was under extreme pressure from protests, which it quelled by murdering thousands. The right kind of coördinated push might have toppled it. Instead, the White House offered frequently shifting rationales for its war and little outreach to the Iranian resistance. It treated the military operation as something to brag about to its political base—a way to show exactly how unrestrained it was willing to be.
The day before the President’s address, Hegseth gave a press conference in which he recounted a recent visit he’d made to bases in the region. “It was the American warrior, unleashed,” he said. He seemed to view the trip as a parable. “As the sun was going down and a chill was setting on the tarmac,” he encountered an airwoman and asked her what the troops needed: “She simply looked at me with a sly smile on her face and said, ‘More bombs, sir. And bigger bombs.’ ” That might have been what the airwoman asked for. But what Trump and Hegseth really owed her, the nation they lead, and the Iranians whose country they bombed was a plan—a real solution to the disaster that they have created. ♦