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Pete Hegseth, like many of President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet picks so far, may seem unworthy of the role he has been tapped to fill. But the instinct to choose someone like him is not.
Mr. Hegseth, the former Fox News host and veteran Mr. Trump plans to nominate to lead the Department of Defense, lacks the necessary leadership experience. His antediluvian views on women in the armed forces, his advocacy for soldiers accused of war crimes and his past remarks on racial issues alone should be disqualifying in a confirmation process. (The news last week that he was investigated in 2017 after being accused of sexual assault won’t help his cause.) But his apparent disenchantment with American military engagement abroad and his skepticism of nation-building by armed forces and endless wars should not.
Mr. Hegseth, despite his heavy baggage, represents something that needs to be acknowledged: the deep bipartisan dissatisfaction with a military leadership that has presided over 20 years of failed wars and incalculable costs to America’s veterans and their families. If Mr. Trump could find a nominee for secretary of defense who holds similar views, but without his obvious shortcomings, his choice would be justified.
Mr. Hegseth has become an influential adopter of the isolationist views that have flourished among veterans who bore the greatest toll for the global war on terror. That toll — including combat injuries, diseases from exposure to burn pits, brain damage and a suicide crisis that the Pentagon has entirely failed to stem — has deepened their frustrations with the political status quo. All this has left many of the nation’s veterans, regardless of their politics, with views on war that align with those of Mr. Trump and his Pentagon pick. No number of ovations for their service, early-boarding privileges at the airport or taxpayer-funded trips to V.A. hospitals can make up for what they lost.
Mr. Trump seems to have selected many of his other choices, such as Representative Matt Gaetz for attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for health and human services secretary and former Representative Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence, for their loyalty. Mr. Hegseth has been loyal, too, but his selection also signals a point of view on military conflict that many Americans appear to agree with.
Over the past two decades, the mainstream foreign policy establishment — sometimes cynically referred to as the Blob — has had enduring influence over American war and peace. As a result, the antiwar views once relegated to the left have now spread throughout American political culture, and certainly the Republican Party; indeed, Vice President-elect JD Vance, a veteran, holds similar views.
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