Pete Hegseth is the face of the US-Israeli war against Iran. He has overseen the decimation of thousands of non-military sites, including hundreds of schools and medical facilities as well as apartment buildings, universities, factories, a synagogue, and other civilian architecture in densely populated urban neighborhoods. The campaign has killed more than 3,400 Iranians so far. In the Americas, Hegseth is responsible for ordering attacks on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific that he says belong to “narco-terrorists.” Despite condemnation by legal experts who have categorized these actions as the extrajudicial killing of civilians, US pilots have carried out some 52 strikes, killing at least 182 people since September 2025.

Recent journalistic profiles focus on Hegseth’s career as a Fox News celebrity and cover his stint leading veterans’ organizations (positions that he was forced to vacate), his scandals involving alcohol and finances, his treatment of women (his own mother called him “an abuser of women”), and his alleged mishandling of classified information.

They track his tumultuous time as head of the US armed forces and probe his role as one of the primary architects of the war with Iran. Hegseth’s insistence that “God’s almighty providence” is guiding American “warriors” to victory, among other statements depicting the war as a religious conflict, has received particular attention.

Yet Donald Trump’s “Secretary of War” (a title Hegseth invented for himself) is still elusive, even though he has written five books, mostly about himself, and spent almost a quarter of his life on cable TV.

On its surface, Hegseth’s bombastic persona is unambiguous. He projects the image of a hypermasculine “alpha male.” He does not conceal his vanity or self-assurance. His public pronouncements tell the world that he is a “Christian” and “a warrior.”

Hegseth holds to idiosyncratic, non-canonical, and Hollywood-inflected understandings of Christianity, assembling disparate elements together to form a cult of violence that revels in killing, vengeance, and human suffering.

But that does not stop him from putting his fringe beliefs on display—and seeking to impose them on the US military. He sports tattoos that celebrate medieval crusaders who waged war against Muslims and Jews in the name of Christianity; one depicts the Jerusalem cross, while another proclaims “Deus vult” (God wills it), which he has called a “rallying cry of Christian knights as they marched to Jerusalem.” Announcing his antipathy toward Muslims, yet another tattoo announces in Arabic that he is an “infidel.”

His forearm features the opening line of the US Constitution, “We the People,” while a New Testament verse reads, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” Completing the confused statement made by his body art, his right bicep displays a US flag whose bottom stripe is represented by an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle—the favored weapon of mass shooters in the United States.

His description of a US Air Force pilot apparently downed by Iranian fire cast the airman as a Jesus-like figure who was shot down on a Friday and then “flown out of Iran as the sun was rising on Easter Sunday.” The pilot, he gushed, was “reborn” while the nation was “rejoicing.”

Declaring “a historic battlefield victory” following the April 8 ceasefire with Iran, Hegseth explained that God had sided with the Americans bombing Iran: “Our troops, our American warriors, deserve the credit for this day, but God deserves all the glory. Tens of thousands of sorties, refuelings, and strikes carried out under the protection of divine providence, a massive effort with miraculous protection. Dude 44 Bravo [the unnamed pilot that the Pentagon says it rescued in Iran] spoke for all of us, God is good.”

His speeches and writings reveal that he is a stern family patriarch, white supremacist, and Christian Zionist.  As an enthusiastic pronatalist and unabashed opponent of women in the military and in other positions of authority, he positions himself at the vanguard of MAGA’s “anti-woke” culture war. He has posted a video on social media of leaders of his Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches arguing that women should not have the right to vote. He also posts “fit not fat”-themed exercise videos. His media team curates videos of him in constant motion, working out with American troops. Each shot places the secretary at the center of the frame. Photographers who do not take flattering photos of Hegseth are banished from the Pentagon.

Yet beneath his obsessively controlled appearance—typically with slicked-back hair, a skintight suit and flag-themed pocket square, he is much more than a militant Christian nationalist and Trump sycophant. What is lightly concealed below the surface is that he is a man stamped by loss. Hegseth is best understood as an imperial figure, a product of the twenty-first century American empire.

More to the point, he is a creature of the failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hegseth’s views reflect the incapacity of a substantial portion of the US elite to reconcile their vision of American supremacy with the messy outcomes of those wars.

Hegseth’s inability to process military defeat and the dramatic diminution of American power in the Middle East and South Asia deserves greater scrutiny because it offers a way to understand fascist politics in the United States. Though separated by many decades and important political differences, the structural similarities with the rise of fascist movements in Europe after the First World War are instructive.

Of special importance is the conviction, shared by many champions of fascism, that defeat in the “Great War’ came about not because of the failings of the troops at the front, but because nefarious actors at home had betrayed the military—and the nation. This myth of the “stab in the back” (Dolchstoßlegende) took root in Germany already in 1919. Its proponents cast about to identify the traitors responsible for humiliating the nation, primarily blaming communist revolutionaries, wayward politicians, and Jews. In the hands of the Nazis, the myth became a powerful narrative that framed Hitler and his antisemitic, imperialist, and nationalist movement as the only forces capable of punishing the guilty and restoring German greatness.

In the contemporary American case, many on the right, including numerous veterans, have blamed Barack Obama for lacking the political will to achieve a different outcome in Iraq and Afghanistan. Evoking memories of US helicopters limping from the rooftop of the embassy in Saigon in 1975, Joe Biden’s oversight of the desperate (and very bloody) American flight from the Kabul airport convinced many critics that the president dealt an unforgivable blow to American prestige. Directing their ire at Obama and Biden, few in Washington have given Iraqi insurgents or the Taliban their due for inflicting serious damage on the military tasked with maintaining the authority of the world’s remaining superpower. Nor have they questioned the essentially colonial logic of these wars.

This dissonance lies at the heart of Hegseth’s version of the American “stab in the back” legend. Like the German fascists before him, he faults domestic enemies for American military failures. And, like them, Hegseth sees the violence of war as an instrument of vengeance and a path to redemption—to wipe away the shame of losses in Iraq and Afghanistan and to usher in a new era in which an American fascist movement crushes its foes.

“No stupid rules of engagement”

It is noteworthy that Hegseth began his military career at the American prison at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba soon after graduating in 2003 from Princeton. As an editor of the conservative Princeton Tory, he had embraced the aggressive nationalism and Islamophobia of the 9/11 era and enthusiastically endorsed expanding the “war on terror” to Iraq and beyond. Hegseth did his part as an army lieutenant attached to the National Guard at Guantánamo.

Although he has offered few details about his time at the base overseeing men and boys swept up in the American dragnet across at least three continents, Hegseth has been an outspoken defender of conditions at the prison. In the face of allegations of torture, homicide, and the denial of legal protections, in 2005 Hegseth told the Star Tribune (from his home state of Minnesota) that, “We bend over backwards to conform ourselves to the detainees’ way of life, especially when it comes to religion.” He went on to assert that the detainees lived such comfortable lives there (“To be honest with you, I think their food is better than what my guys got”) that some even refused to leave the camp because conditions were worse in their home countries.

In a 2010 letter to the Wall Street Journal, he complained that Guantánamo had become “a legal maze of graduate-level proportions.” Looking back on his time at the camp, he told a Fox News audience in 2021 that it was essentially a missed opportunity—“a prison without a mission”—where there was too much law: “It got mucked up very, very early when left-wing lawyers and other protections came in … It could have been a great place to expeditiously interrogate, try and, you know, execute, because we are in a war.”

Over the course of his career, Hegseth has repeatedly expressed disdain for lawyers and anyone who thinks law should place a check on what he calls “lethality.” Central to his “stab in the back” narrative is the idea that excessive regard for the Geneva Conventions and other standards of international law hobbled American war efforts. One of his first acts in office was to shut down Pentagon offices and positions meant to reduce civilian casualties.

Under the second Trump administration, he has announced that there would be “no stupid rules of engagement” and “no politically correct wars,” calling on the military to “sharpen our legal edge to sharpen our warfighting edge.”

By Hegseth’s own account, he instructed his troops to ignore the official rules of engagement when he served as an officer in Iraq. Although his version of events cannot be verified, it is instructive that in his 2024 book War on Warriors Hegseth describes ridiculing and undermining JAG (Judge Advocate General) officers responsible for offering legal guidance during combat operations. Hegseth and his men appear as the rough and ready heroes spoiling for a fight, “[A]imlessly spitting tobacco juice and sunflower seeds into Halliburton Hesco barriers at the front gate playing ‘Fuck, Marry, Kill’ with the cast of Friends.” Hegseth boasts of telling his subordinates to ignore the legal advice of the “jagoffs.”

Following one briefing that Hegseth objected to, he recalls, “I pulled my platoon together, huddling amid their confusion to tell them, ‘I will not allow that nonsense to filter into your brains. Men, if you see an enemy who you believe is a threat, you engage and destroy the threat. That’s a bullshit rule that’s going to get people killed. And I will have your back—just like our commander. We are coming home, the enemy will not. That’s our view. We’re not going to kick down doors and just start shooting people, but we’re going to be aggressive.”

Hegseth cites as his inspiration his commander, Michael D. Steele, whom he calls a “certified badass” who “would have been a horrible gender studies professor at the University of California.” Steele was later accused of giving orders to kill “all military-age males” and executing blindfolded prisoners, among other alleged crimes. Hegseth mentions only the “kill coins” he distributed to his soldiers. Steele was never charged.

In a 2009 New Yorker article about Steele, Hegseth is more circumspect about his approach to the rules of engagement. He is even quoted as expressing reservations about instructions directing soldiers how to enter houses that might include noncombatants: “Sir, I don’t feel comfortable telling my guys to go into that door hot … if we go in hot we are going to kill civilians,” Hegseth recalled telling a superior.

Returning to civilian life and work at Fox News (following a failed bid in 2012 for a Senate seat from Minnesota), Hegseth sought publicity as an advocate of US military personnel and contractors who were prosecuted for the murder of civilians and other war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. His defense of Edward Gallagher, Mathew Golsteyn and Clint Lorance placed him at odds with the leadership of the Pentagon but caught the attention of Trump, who pardoned all three in 2019. On social media, the president acknowledged Hegseth’s advocacy and endorsed his defense of war crimes, writing, “We train our boys to be killing machines, then prosecute them when they kill! @PeteHegseth.”

An American Crusade

His 2020 book American Crusade positioned him as a staunch backer of Trump’s re-election—and introduced his uncompromising vilification of “the Left” and his enthusiasm for a “crusade” against Islam to a wider audience. Hegseth frames the book as an exposé of “every enemy that threatens our nation,” promising “basic training in the fight for freedom: the American Crusade.” In language that would be familiar to audiences subjected to fascist propaganda in interwar Europe, Hegseth writes that reasonable Americans need to recognize that leftists are an implacable foe: “We are the ones standing in their way—and have been targeted for annihilation. … We are foes. Either we win, or they win—we agree on nothing else.”

For Hegseth, America’s “domestic enemies” are “the radical left.” A key feature of his thinking is that nothing separates foes in foreign theaters from those at home. In The War on Warriors, he writes:

While the post-9/11 generation of patriots spent two decades fighting enemies abroad, we allowed America’s domestic enemies at home to gobble up cultural, political, and spiritual territory. … What we eventually discovered is that just like an enemy at war, the radical left never stops moving and planning. They do not respect cease-fires, do not abide by the rules of warfare, and do not respect anything except total defeat of their enemy—and then total control.

His book is a political manifesto that asserts the prerogative of the “camouflaged class” to right what’s wrong with America. The program it lays out includes not only rescuing the military from going “woke,” but a plan to “either save, or surrender, our Republic.” Hegseth’s strawman enemy is “the Left:”

Busy killing Islamists in shithole countries—and then betrayed by our leaders—our warriors have every reason to let America’s dynasty fade away. Leftists stole a lot from us, but we won’t let them take this. Time for round two—we won’t miss this war.

It is no exaggeration to note that The War on Warriors shares many elements in common with Hitler’s Mein Kampf. As the historian Richard J. Evans has observed, Hitler’s book contributed to “the militarization of politics,” in part by turning “negative concepts like ‘brutal’, ‘fanatical’, ‘ruthless’ and ‘barbaric’ into positives.” His frequent use of the phrase “to be or not to be” (Sein oder Nichtsein), borrowed from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, reflected his absolutist worldview.

Hegseth employs a similarly totalizing language. The republic is to be “saved or surrendered.” “It is easy for the Left to worship false gods,” he writes, “when they do not accept the existence of any real God.” Pushing for a military with unfettered license to kill, he offers the simple formula: “trained, steady, and violent equals more lethal.”

In retelling stories of his contributions to the American occupation of Iraq, Hegseth frequently focuses on his time in the city of Samarra, Iraq, a place that Hegseth boasts of knowing exhaustively, and where, he says, he vanquished many insurgents. Hegseth claims that the American left is responsible for creating many “little Samarras” at home: “in the center of cities like Portland, Chicago, Minneapolis, Seattle, New York, and San Francisco.” He doesn’t elaborate on how the left managed this feat, only that “it happened fast, while America’s best warriors were wearing camouflage and fighting halfway across the world. The Left didn’t fight the wars. They stayed home and wrecked our house. America-wreckers, all of them.”

The danger of the left is amplified, Hegseth contends, by a “Red-Green alliance” of leftists and Muslims. For Hegseth, this is only a temporary arrangement, because “[S]ince the seventh century—and up to today—Islam has been on offense”: “Leftism will enslave us all with big government until it’s enslaved by Islamism.”

Warning his readers that “Islam will never stop being at war,” he calls on Americans to see themselves “[J]ust like the Christian crusaders who pushed back the Muslim hordes in the twelfth century”:

We don’t want to fight, but, like our fellow Christians one thousand years ago, we must. We need an American crusade. We Christians—alongside our Jewish friends and their remarkable army in Israel—need to pick up the sword of unapologetic Americanism and defend ourselves.”

In sounding the alarm about a religion that will, he insists, “grow and grow until it’s powerful enough to grab everything,” he follows in a long ideological tradition that sees Muslims as an undifferentiated, hostile mass: “hordes” to be repelled in the name of saving “Western civilization.”

Exorcising the demons of America’s lost wars

Hegseth’s obsession with reviving medieval military campaigns against Muslims in the name of Christianity and claiming that “divine providence” is on the side of American pilots dropping bombs on Iranian schools and hospitals is an alarmingly delusional preoccupation for someone who oversees the US military.

Yet the war is far more than Hegseth’s personal religious campaign. Hegseth sees the war against Iran as an opportunity to erase decades of imperial malaise and defeat—and to restore the authority of a manly warrior class of militant Christians who demonstrate their power through violence. On March 2, he addressed US troops at a Pentagon press conference, “let me speak straight to you, the Joint Force, our warriors on the front lines. This is your moment. This is the generational turning point America has waited for since 1979 and since the rudderless wars of hubris, my generation, our generation endured, don’t listen to the noise, just stay focused.”

Hegseth views the current war as an opportunity to remake the US military, not just by purging more than a dozen senior officers, but by destroying any constraints that impede what Hegseth calls “lethality.” “Just because the rest of our culture has gone soft, and effeminate, and apologetic,” he argues in The War on Warriors, “doesn’t mean our military can afford to. Staying tough, manly, and unapologetically lethal is the lifeblood of the fighting man.” In The Guardian, Jan-Werner Müller has likened Hegseth’s views to a “nihilistic cult of death.”

While Hegseth’s cultish bloodlust is unmistakable, it can also be understood as an effort to exorcise the demons of America’s lost wars abroad and to solidify a Christian fascist politics at home. His political project makes sense as an attempt to provide a political vocabulary and an ethos that might allow Americans to make sense of the country’s nearly constant war-time footing since the Second World War. In this sense, Hegseth’s worldview is a mirror of American empire.

In trying to make sense of the Hegseth phenomenon, we can’t discount Trump’s eye for a theatrically masculine, Fox News-vetted MAGA loyalist who has simultaneously branded himself a righteous Christian and culture war partisan. Trump spent many hours admiring Hegseth on his television set during his roughly ten-year career on Fox. When Hegseth’s confirmation appeared to be in doubt in December 2024, Trump countered, “He will be a fantastic, high energy, Secretary of Defense, one who leads with charisma and skill. Pete is a WINNER, and there is nothing that can be done to change that!!!”

Yet is no accident that even his opponents in Washington cannot fully break from Hegseth’s vision: Democratic critics have focused their ire more on his language describing the conflict with Iran than his conduct of the war itself. Opposition to the war against Iran has been tepid in mainstream Democratic circles, not only out of deference to Israel’s aspirations of regional hegemony, but because of the lingering humiliation of the Iranian revolution of 1979. The revolutionary government has survived Washington’s bipartisan efforts to undermine it ever since—and now has withstood 2 brutal US-Israeli bombing campaigns, emerging more powerful than ever, its rocket and drone programs the envy of militaries across the globe.