Even before the Trump administration went to war with Iran, it was talking differently about its approach to combat.
President Donald Trump replaced the Department of Defense with something more in line with his values: War Department. His Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, promised to introduce a philosophy of “maximum lethality.” For years, Hegseth has wanted to unleash an American hero and fight the enemy, no holds barred. (In 2024, Hegseth wrote a book called War on Heroes: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free.)
After seeing success in Venezuela and in last year’s limited attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities, Hegseth and Trump entered the Iran war with unbridled confidence and an unstoppable will to wreak havoc. Trump’s post earlier this week threatening to wipe out an entire civilization may have prompted a temporary ceasefire, but it looks like the strategy is going nowhere.
Today, It’s Explained co-anchor Sean Rameswaram spoke to the New Yorker’s Benjamin Wallace-Wells about how that philosophy has been found in Hegseth’s first major battle with Trump. Wallace-Wells explains the need for Hegseth to unleash that warrior ethos at every opportunity and how it could guide America’s next move with Iran.
Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s a lot more in the full podcast, so take a listen Today, It’s Explained wherever you find podcasts, incl Apple Podcasts, Pandoraand Spotify.
(Hegseth) how does he implement this concept?
I would say a couple of things. The first is that, it is interesting to note, in all the reports that we have seen from many different outlets, that Hegseth is the only person who is in the presidential circle who seems to be as optimistic as Trump is about the progress of the war and the possibility of war.
You see (Vice President) JD Vance staying very far from the war. You see (Secretary of State) Marco Rubio taking an ambiguous position. Gen. (Dan) Kaine sees danger as well as possibility. But Hegseth has been gung-ho the whole way.
His view of the war, I think, has been that killing America will deliver whatever the president wants. In the very first hours of the war, you have this massive bombing that kills (Iranian Supreme Leader) Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and then President Trump comes out a few days later and says, in that raid, not only Khamenei was killed, but some other key people in the Iranian regime that we hoped might succeed Khamenei (were killed). Within a day of the start of the war we see 175 people killed in a school in southern Iran, possibly by mistargeting, although we are still not entirely sure what happened there.
In both of these cases, you see a plan for the murders given. And I think you can see in both of those cases that it undermines the goals of the United States and the stated war goals of the president, in removing some of the potential replacements in the case of a first-bomb attack, and also in making it a little more difficult for the Iranian public to imagine the kind of rebellion that President Trump said he wants to start.
How much of his attitude do we think is based on his own belief in this concept of high-level murder, and how much do many in his Cabinet want to please the president?
It’s interesting to think of Vance, Rubio, and Hegseth as each representing the same idea of a president. Vance represents the type of nationalism of the president. Rubio represents perhaps the most traditional approach to Republican activism. And Hegseth represents absolute military maximalism. And he has had more influence because he is the one who, I think, has managed to see what the president wants to do in Iran and he made himself a spokesperson and facilitated that.
I think there is a good chance that this does not go well with public opinion and the progress of the war. I’m not sure it’s been a very long-term drama for Hegseth, but I think we have to remember that Hegseth had no political base or role in the world before Trump touched him. He has never been a great military commander. He served in the army as a young man. He was the weekend co-host Fox and Friends.
His place in the world is owed to President Trump. He, according to public opinion, is now not very interested, like the war. If we think in purely personal terms, it is not crazy for him to shoot and try to position himself as the highest face of this war. But I think there may be a real cost to the rest of us.
Another thing that feels important to this conversation and feels like maybe a companion piece to this high risk idea is that Pete Hegseth ties this battle (with) his approach to God.
I would say the Christian God, more specifically. He is specifically asked during military press conferences for people to pray to Jesus Christ on behalf of the military.
Another thing that is important here is that, he refers to the Iranian government as apocalyptic, and in addition to offering prayers from the platform where he gives technical updates on the progress of the war, he gives an atmosphere of holy war to the whole operation.
The whole Ring thing is a bigger risk. The President seemed to go further from his post, the whole world was waiting, and then we got a cease-fire from him, to make it easy. Does that prove something about this notion of greater risk as a viable foreign policy?
If you threaten nuclear war, you can threaten other people. I think that’s intuitive, but I don’t know that that proves anything in terms of foreign policy. We focus on a situation where Iran appears likely to have full control of the Strait of Hormuz, where the regime still controls, where the US has alienated a number of its allies around the world in its desire to play the fringes.
In a narrow sense, Trump was able to get himself into a real trap and then by threatening mass murder, using Hegseth’s word, he was able to drive out – I think it worked, but it is very difficult for me to say that in any sense of this picture it was effective. I have to look back on this whole month and just say, what was all this for? It feels like a lot of anger and bombs and death, and it’s very hard for me to see much that has come of it.
