Hegseth Is Dangerous but Not for the Reasons You Think

Opinion|Hegseth Is Dangerous but Not for the Reasons You Think

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.