On Wednesday, Pete Hegseth convened hundreds of the U.S. military’s junior officers and enlisted service members in a cavernous auditorium on a military base in Virginia to hear what he called the first of a new annual tradition—a “State of the Force” report to the troops from their self-styled “Secretary of War.” The key moment came when Hegseth, strutting across an American flag-swathed stage in one of his trademark too-tight TV-man’s suits, announced victory over the enemies whose defeat has been the signature focus of his tenure. “We are no longer the ‘woke’ department, or the ‘weak’ department,” he declared. “Simple translation of that? No fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos. No wimps, no radicals. Just warriors.”
Listening to the address, you might be forgiven for thinking it was a live-action rerun of one of Hegseth’s old Fox News shows, complete with the vilification of bad guys you didn’t even really know were a problem. (Since when was the U.S. military ever the home of wimps and radicals?) But if the antagonists were a bit opaque, the message came through clearly: the only war that this secretary wants to prosecute is the one at home—against the forces of political correctness, against the military’s own generals, some ten per cent of whom Hegseth has already fired, with plans to dismiss ten per cent more, and, above all, against the “fake news,” which he accused of “treason” for accurately reporting the challenges imposed on U.S. forces by an actual war in the Middle East that went all but unmentioned in his nearly hourlong speech.
Hegseth’s main nod to the ongoing conflict with Iran, in fact, came when he asserted that the war, which the Trump Administration is currently asking Congress to provide tens of billions of emergency funding for, was both over and a roaring success “that every red-blooded American is proud of.”
His speech, it should also be noted, came on a day when the Pentagon announced that it had closed the last major U.S. military base in Iraq, thus ending the twenty-three-year, $1.7-trillion American presence there that began with George W. Bush’s ill-fated invasion in 2003—the last time a Republican President embarked on an unpopular war of choice in the region. This also was not mentioned. It wasn’t just the Middle East that Hegseth omitted, though. The entire rest of the world was also left out. As in, no China, no Russia, no Europe or Africa. In Donald Trump’s Pentagon, there are no geopolitics; only the divisive domestic politics of us versus them.
