Charlotte Howard, our New York bureau chief, on why divisive machismo is at the core of the Trump administration’s military policy
Photograph: AP
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Pete Hegseth is not for everyone, and that’s fine with him. When Donald Trump tapped him to lead the Defence Department, he launched himself on Washington like a crowd-surfing frat brother. Yes, he was trailed by stories of sexual misconduct and excessive drinking. True, as a TV commentator and a former National Guard member he had scant qualifications to oversee the world’s most powerful armed forces, an $850bn budget and nearly 3m employees. But his résumé did include broad shoulders and a promise to shake things up. In January 2025 J.D. Vance cast the Senate’s tie-breaking vote to confirm him. Rarely has a man with more confidence and less experience held such power.
In the months since, Mr Hegseth has endeavoured to convey strength. He pushed to rename his new domain as the Department of War. At a press conference celebrating the change, he asserted that America would “go on offence, not just on defence”, prioritising “maximum lethality, not tepid legality”. At a gathering of top military leaders, he lectured generals on grooming standards and “fat troops”. He had his staff post videos of him pumping iron, becoming the only public figure whose “Saturday Night Live” caricature seems more sensible than the original.
The sight of Mr Hegseth doing a wiggly pull-up may cause some women to throw up ever so slightly in their mouths, and wonder how anyone can so precisely personify a red Solo cup. They are not Mr Hegseth’s target audience. More than half of Republican men describe themselves as “highly masculine”, according to a 2024 survey from the Pew Research Centre. Three in ten Republican men think that women’s economic and social gains have come at the expense of men, twice the share of Democratic men or Republican women. Three times as many Republicans as Democrats think that physical strength and confidence in men should be more highly valued. For them, Mr Hegseth is reinvigorating a manly ideal, less a symbol of toxic masculinity than a masculine tonic.
Mr Hegseth also represents—and has worked to advance—a new, troubling model of military power. The problem is not that he is a macho symbol prioritising style over substance. The problem is that his style is the substance: it is increasingly clear that a divisive machismo is at the core of the Trump administration’s military policy.
This has been evident in (relatively) smaller moves, such as the decision to limit press activity in the Pentagon and the firing of top Pentagon lawyers—Mr Hegseth has long argued that laws and codes of conduct unduly restrain soldiers. But the past month has proved just how broad the risks of macho policy can be.
Witness Mr Hegseth’s extraordinary treatment of Anthropic, an AI lab. Mr Hegseth objected to the firm’s contractual restrictions on the military’s use of its large-language model. He could have responded by cancelling work with Anthropic. Instead he has formally declared Anthropic to be a supply-chain risk. In an interview with The Economist this week, Dario Amodei, the firm’s boss, said he would challenge the designation in court. But Mr Hegseth has revealed a disturbing enthusiasm for using state power to bully one of America’s fastest-growing companies.
A more literal obliteration is being conducted with Operation Epic Fury, the assault America is waging with Israel on Iran. Messrs Hegseth and Trump are hardly the first Americans to view Iran as a serious risk. The regime has worked to develop a nuclear arsenal, funded dangerous militias across the Middle East and killed thousands of its own people.
But since attacks began on February 28th, neither Mr Hegseth nor his colleagues have provided a consistent rationale for the war, nor attempted to justify the war to allies. Indeed, Mr Hegseth took the opportunity to deride countries that “clutch their pearls, hemming and hawing about the use of force”, casting war deliberations as both weak and feminine. Burn.
In press conferences Mr Hegseth has provided smirking assertions of American strength, recently recounting how an American submarine destroyed an Iranian ship in international waters, killing more than 80 people. He says wars should not be “politically correct”.
To be clear, war is not inherently cool. Any conflict should be treated with the utmost gravity, to advance a clear goal, with recognition of deadly risks. The novelty of Mr Hegseth’s approach was laid bare on March 4th, after an Iranian drone killed six American soldiers in Kuwait. Mr Hegseth chided the media for focusing on the deaths, claiming the press “wants to make the president look bad”. General Dan Caine, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, presented a different model of male strength, announcing the soldiers’ names with “profound sadness and gratitude”.
The problem, again, is not simply that Mr Hegseth revels in machismo style. It is that machismo style seems to be the policy. The Trump administration has no plan to support a more stable Iran. Already, the war is sucking in other countries in the region, as well as European allies. Our cover leader this week lays out the perils of war without strategy. Mr Hegseth may relish American power, but obsessive machismo will surely erode it.
This week I spoke about the war with my colleagues James Bennet and Jon Fasman on Checks and Balance. I’d love to know what you think about the conflict, and Mr Hegseth himself. Email me at checksandbalance@economist.com.
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