On October 2, the Wall Street Journal’s longtime contributor Peggy Noonan complained about “The Embarrassing Pete Hegseth.”
“The Pentagon needs sober, judicious leadership, not a drama queen who makes things jarring and fevered,” sniffed Noonan.
Peggy Noonan and other erudite journalists may not enjoy U.S. Secretary of Defense Hegseth’s personal speaking style, or even what he says.
But Pete Hegseth isn’t embarrassing.
The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan — now that was embarrassing. Iraq was embarrassing. 20+ years of failed nation-building foreign policy is embarrassing.
Ignoring the war in Ukraine post-2014 was embarrassing. Sleepwalking into a new Cold War with Russia is embarrassing. President Biden’s embargoes on Russian oil and gas were embarrassing(ly ineffective, as they didn’t punish Russia in the slightest, pushed the USA’s geopolitical adversaries closer together, and didn’t weaken Russian currency in the slightest.)
While we’re at it, dropping two atomic bombs on civilian populations in Japan at the close of World War II is quite embarrassing to some U.S. citizens. While there may have seemed to be plenty of good reasons to do so at the time, the U.S. remains the only nation in the world to use atomic weapons on enemies during wartime.
So far.
President Harry S. Truman, who ultimately made the final decision, did so arguably to avoid the greatest embarrassment our collective human psyche has been able to conjure up in 200,000-plus years of anatomical modernity.
Losing a war. Now, that is embarrassing.
Losing a fighting war is devastating, humiliating, catastrophic for any people or nation. Some populations lose wars they didn’t even know they were fighting; it happens all the time.
A peaceful, normal, everyday place inhabited by average people making a living, building families, enjoying the quiet everyday moments of faith, community, and leisure time is invaded by an armed force.
The village is torn apart, people are murdered, families decimated, lives are stolen away, children kidnapped.
Most of can’t even imagine it. We don’t want to.
But we don’t have to imagine it. We can read about it. We can listen to firsthand accounts of the few lucky enough to survive when their “side” loses a war.
Most times, those who suffer most in war are the ones who never wanted to be on a “side” in the first place. But by virtue of birthplace, or ethnicity, or religion, heritage, or some other reason, they find themselves in harm’s way — On the losing end of a fighting war.
Ten minutes of studying human history and current world events and you don’t need to be an advanced algorithmic language learning AI to read the writing on the wall.
Don’t go to war.
But if you must go to war, for God’s sake, don’t lose.
Unfortunately, for every single one of the world’s citizens, the entirety of human civilization to this point, people who haven’t even been born yet, and every living creature on the planet, we have come closer to World War III in recent years than at any time in the past since the Bay of Pigs.
This is not progress.
We now live in a world that makes the weapons wielded in the 1960s look like a bunch of kids’ bathtub toys. Nuclear weapons were just a jumping-off point. We now have bioweapons, energy weapons, advanced chemical weapons, and weapons of mass destruction so terrible, they can’t be contemplated.
There are undoubtedly weapons we don’t even know about yet.
The Israelis just tipped their military capability and war-fighting hand, if only slightly. And what a fearsome spectacle it has been. Who can forget the hair-raising effectiveness of exploding pagers?
Israel didn’t start its current war against Hamas, but it is winning.
Because if you find yourself drawn into a war you didn’t start, you’d better be ready to win. However terrible it is to win a war, and it is terrible, losing is unquestionably, undoubtedly, much worse.
The U.S. might soon find itself drawn into a war. Tensions between world powers have never been worse in modern history. Russia, China, North Korea, Iran.
Check a history book. Countries don’t march into war knowing what is going to happen next. Governments don’t enter armed conflicts with their eyes wide open, understanding and knowing how far things will go.
The conditions are right for war, and then something happens to push the would-be combatants into escalating the conflict. No one backs down and the shooting starts.
After that, heaven save us all. Anything can happen. Conflicts that were predicted to end in weeks take years.
Or a hundred years.
The best way, the only way, to really win a war is never to get into one in the first place. It’s like a fistfight.
But if the U.S. were to get drawn into a war against Russia, or China, or, God forbid, both, who do we want to go to war with?
The military establishment that just produced one of the single most embarrassing, costly, unnecessary, and humiliating losses of American and allied lives since before most of us were born, or the new guy?
We need to be so tough, no one wants to mess with us.
Not suffering from a recruitment crisis, a disturbing lack of war readiness, lowered standards, and lagging behind America’s geopolitical opponents year after year.
If Pete Hegseth offends you more than the Afghanistan withdrawal, consider these two points.
- The Afghanistan Papers, published by the Washington Post in 2019, laid out in painstaking detail the reality of 20 years of U.S. nation-building. Anyone who read the Pulitzer Prize-winning research knew that the Afghan military would not hold Kabul. U.S. officials should have known what would happen. Why didn’t they?
- Then-President Joe Biden’s military cabinet recently admitted that they had trouble getting a conversation with President Joe Biden in the run-up to the withdrawal deadline date.
The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is a stain on our nation’s history. It was the ultimate embarrassment.
Losing a bigger war would be even worse than “embarrassing.”
U.S. Defense Sec Pete Hegseth might be untried, even unrealistic, as a leader. But he isn’t embarrassing until he loses a war, abandons U.S. allies, and causes U.S. service members to lose their lives.
(Contributing writer, Brooke Bell)