Welcome to Power Players, The i Paper’s opinion series in which our writers and experts take an in-depth look at the key figures in American politics as the US reshapes itself and the world.
• The most powerful woman in the world you’ve never heard of
• The ‘swamp creature’ eclipsing JD Vance in the race to succeed Trump
• The white nationalist at the heart of the Trump machine
• The greatest hope of the Trump resistance is a 34-year-old immigrant
• The 28-year-old Trump attack dog ripping up the Washington playbook
• The ‘pro-white nationalist’ whose power over Trump grows every day
President Donald Trump has never made a secret of his all-purpose contempt for rules-based order, both at home in America and abroad. Rules, he believes, are for betas, pencil-pushers, and nerds – tools for the weak to try to neuter the strong. And in his second term, Trump has found the perfect dance partner to brand this philosophy into the US military: “War” Secretary Pete Hegseth.
And as the President has jettisoned campaign-trail commitments to avoid foreign entanglements in favour of more and more reckless and destabilising military actions, Hegseth’s implementation of that philosophy has become a growing danger to the entire world.
From the moment Trump tapped him for the top post at the Department of Defence – or, as his administration would soon take to calling it, the Department of War – Hegseth has been among the most controversial members of his retinue. A combat veteran, conservative activist, and former Fox News personality, Hegseth faced a bevy of serious accusations during his confirmation process: of sexual assault, of alcohol abuse, and of mismanaging funds at the veterans charities he once helmed. (Hegseth denied all these.) Less explosively, but just as importantly, Hegseth seemed to lack the sort of high-level managerial experience required to competently oversee America’s sprawling military bureaucracies.
But Trump was unconcerned. He liked what he’d seen in Hegseth, both as a TV personality and as an activist he’d worked with during his first term. He’d been gratified by Hegseth’s bulldog Fox News defences of his work as President—and just as importantly, by Hegseth’s seething critiques of Trump’s liberal foes. And Hegseth had impressed Trump with his arguments that America put too many “woke” restraints on its guys with guns; his lobbying helped convince Trump to pardon several American soldiers who had been credibly accused of war crimes.
This was what Hegseth was promising to bring to the military in Trump 2.0: a hard-charging, explicitly Maga-coded contempt for the Biden-era Pentagon status quo specifically and the liberal order in general. With Trump sticking with his controversial nominee and conservative media promising immediate political vengeances against any senator that stood in his way, the Republican Senate dutifully voted to confirm him.
Hegseth courted plenty of controversy in his opening months helming the Pentagon. His paranoia about supposed traitors and leakers in his department led to repeated purges . His hamfisted attempts to root “wokeness” out of the military, including anti-“DEI” scrubs of the curricula of military colleges and military-history databases. These bizarre erasures ranged from the contemptible – the deletion of web pages honouring black and women veterans – to the comical: The scrub also removed references to the aircraft Enola Gay, the worryingly LGBT-friendly plane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan. And Hegseth’s lackadaisical approach to classified information led to one particularly remarkable scandal after the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine was accidentally added to an extremely sensitive war-planning text chain on the unclassified messaging app Signal.
All the while, Hegseth was taking the war on the press to heights even his boss, the President, had stopped short of. After a series of preliminary press restrictions – evicting mainstream outlets from dedicated workspaces, declaring Pentagon hallways off-limits to media without a comms-shop escort – he dropped the hammer in September, demanding reporters sign a policy pledging not to solicit unauthorised information from military sources. When the vast majority of military reporters refused, Hegseth yanked their press badges; today, he gives briefings to a new-look Potemkin press corps made up largely of Maga influencers.
If Trump had stuck to his campaign-trail promises about retooling America away from foreign conflicts to focus on problems at home, this sort of thing might have remained the extent of Hegseth’s programme. But Trump spent 2025 getting more comfortable with throwing America’s military weight around – bombing nuclear facilities in Iran, blowing up alleged drug boats off the coast of Venezuela, then staging an operation to kidnap the country’s autocratic leader, Nicolás Maduro.
Through it all, Hegseth was his point man and chief cheerleader. Each operation in turn, he insisted, was the result of unleashing America’s military to flex its muscles without second-guessing, hand-wringing, or apology — the sort of thing other presidents had refrained from, not because they thought the country would be better off, but because they had simply been too lily-livered to chance it.
“We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy,” Hegseth said in an unusual speech to assembled military brass at the Pentagon last September. “We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralise, hunt and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement.”
Instead, however, the war secretary seems determined to take away a different lesson: that the real problem is America’s allies, who themselves proved too cowardly to put their shoulder to the problem of Iran alongside him. In Hegseth’s brain, the de-woked and mighty US military can never fail – it can only be failed.
At the same time, Hegseth always made sure to reassure the President’s more war-averse supporters that this administration would not repeat the forever-war mistakes of conflicts past, which he always characterised as the result of too much pompous liberal do-goodery. Trump and Hegseth represented a different kind of war, one that was overwhelming, unapologetic, and above all, limited: We went in, we killed whoever needed killing, and we got back out again.
Hegseth was certainly correct about one thing: Other White Houses would certainly have blanched at, for instance, his repeated bombardment of alleged Caribbean drug boats.
Still, the strikes on Iran’s nukes last summer and the operation to capture Maduro both went off without a hitch –which, along with Hegseth’s rhetoric about unleashing America’s warfighters, further buttressed Trump’s feeling that he could move with impunity to achieve his foreign policy aims.
Only recently did Trump and Hegseth’s shared faith in the unstoppable nature of de-wokified US hard power finally get a reality check. In February, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu travelled to the White House to pitch Trump on an audacious, risky plan: a sudden decapitation strike against Iran’s clerical regime. It was exactly the kind of thing that risked the sort of lengthy entanglement Trump had long railed against – but then again, hadn’t he been getting away with this sort of thing lately?
As he later told it, Trump turned to Hegseth, saying, “Pete, I think you were the first one to speak up”. “You said, ‘Let’s do it.’”
Ever since, Hegseth has been experiencing an object lesson in the limits of what can be done with hard power — woke or un-woke — alone. In the opening salvos of the two-month war in Iran, America quickly achieved many of its military aims, taking out many of the country’s top leaders and annihilating much of its military infrastructure. (Even here, Hegseth’s shoot first, apologise never approach has had its bitter costs: America’s accidental bombing of an Iranian girls school at the very outset of the Iran conflict, killing more than a 100 innocents, sparked international reproaches and may have helped Iran’s tottering regime shore up its domestic support.)
And yet many of the war’s other aims remain frustratingly out of reach. Iran’s clerical regime, though bloodied, has not toppled, and no amount of shock-and-awe bombardment has proven sufficient to shake them loose from their determination to retain their nuclear enrichment programme. Meanwhile, Iran has succeeded in placing an economic chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz that has threatened to bring the entire global economy to its knees.
How that crisis will be resolved – whether it will be resolved – remains an open question. In the meantime, one might hope Hegseth would take away some lessons. That sometimes there are other obstacles to American aims than American squeamishness, perhaps – or that hubris about the unstoppable power of American might was exactly what enmeshed America in so many lengthy conflicts over the years in the first place.