Americans across the political spectrum should be mortified.
Pete Hegseth is sworn in as Defense Secretary, January 25 (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Late last week, the Senate confirmed Pete Hegseth to the position of Secretary of Defense by a vote of 50-50, with Vice President J.D. Vance casting the tie-breaking vote. The vote makes Hegseth, an Army veteran and former Fox News host, the second youngest Secretary of Defense ever; beyond his age, Hegseth is widely regarded as the least experienced pick to head the Pentagon in American history.
While one can respect Hegseth’s military service, for which he earned the Bronze Star while deployed to Iraq in 2005, his lack of experience and deficient personal character renders him wholly unfit for the office. Even if one sets aside the numerous accusations of alcoholism, abuse, and sexual impropriety (including an allegation of sexual assault), Hegseth’s prior organizational mismanagement, remarkable personal infidelity, lack of knowledge about key issues, and propagandistic outlook on the role of government and military should instill substantial doubts within anyone about his ability to manage the U.S.’s largest government agency.
During his confirmation hearing, Democratic senators peppered Hegseth with questions surrounding the allegations that surfaced following his nomination, including a sexual assault allegation from 2017 (after a civil lawsuit was threatened, Hegseth paid his accuser $50,000 as part of a settlement). Hegseth was also accused of repeated drunkenness by at least a dozen former colleagues across three different organizations, sexually inappropriate behavior in the workplace (including bringing employees to a strip club), and abusing his second wife. Hegseth denied the allegations as “anonymous smears,” despite the third one emanating from a signed affidavit by his former sister-in-law; moreover, an email from Hegseth’s 2018 divorce proceedings reveals that Hegseth’s own mother called him “an abuser of women” that “belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego.” Although Hegseth’s mother later said she wrote the email out of anger, if any of the aforementioned allegations are true, Hegseth’s misconduct is not only unbecoming of a man tapped to lead our nation’s military—it ought to be disqualifying.
Nevertheless, even if one discards the allegations as part of some orchestrated smear campaign, the available facts surrounding Hegseth’s personal life and career paint an equally damning picture. A serial womanizer, Hegseth admitted to having five affairs in five years of marriage to his first wife. During those years, Hegseth’s irresponsibility and dishonesty extended to his professional pursuits as well. In 2007, Hegseth became the Executive Director of a veterans non-profit—Veterans for Freedom; between 2008 and 2011, under his leadership, the organization repeatedly ran annual deficits in the hundreds of thousands and annual donations declined from $8.7 million to $22,000 after creditors became concerned that Hegseth was mismanaging funds. His time leading another veterans nonprofit—Concerned Veterans for America—tells a similar story; one account details how Hegseth “treated the organization funds like they were a personal expense account.”
Beyond poor character and concerning experience, statements made by Hegseth demonstrate his profound misunderstanding of global affairs and the values of U.S. foreign policy. Despite touting the importance of the Indo-Pacific to national security, he failed to name a single member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (his three guesses were all wrong). Moreover, Hegseth has repeatedly disparaged U.S. allies and suggested that U.S. troops should ignore the Geneva Convention. Fittingly, Hegseth successfully lobbied President Trump to pardon a Navy SEAL who had been court martialed after several members of his platoon accused him of indiscriminately firing at civilian neighborhoods and stabbing a defenseless teenage captive to death.
Excerpts from Hegseth’s 2020 book—American Crusade—sound like a caricature of right-wing propaganda; in it, he argued that “[Trump] losing the 2020 election” means that “America will decline and die.” It is safe to say that his predictions—that “elitism will strangle us with political correctness until our thoughts are a crime,… leftism will enslave us all with big government until it’s enslaved by Islamism,… and the Second Amendment will be gone”—did not materialize during Biden’s presidency. Perhaps most concerning, Hegseth wrote: “The military and police… will be forced to make a choice. It will not be good. Yes, there will be some form of civil war.” Hegseth’s view of left-leaning citizens as subversives and the military as a domestic instrument of a civil war is more fitting of 1970’s Argentina than today’s America; and it certainly is not a view that a responsible Secretary of Defense should have.
As an International Relations major, I have had the privilege of taking a dozen courses relating to international politics, U.S. foreign policy, warfare, and international law, both at CMC and while studying abroad in Germany. It is clear to me, after four years of study, that Hegseth would not be able to secure a passing grade in a single one of those courses. For students of international relations, who are tasked each day with studying the dynamics of international security and the complex forces that draw U.S. troops into combat around the globe, Hegseth’s confirmation is nothing short of a disgrace—a repudiation of everything American foreign policy ought to stand for.
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