Something is wrong with the cameras in the White House press pool. They’re top-of-the range devices operated by trained professionals, and the man they have been photographing – the US secretary of war, Pete Hegseth – spent seven years as a TV anchor on Fox News. And yet there’s a glitch: weirdly, every time a shutter clicks, it captures Hegseth looking like a sweaty, pig-eyed psychopath.
The Department of War (which was until last September the US Department of Defense, and which, presumably, the Trump administration renamed in a long-overdue recognition of the American inability to spell “defence”) is making this photographic mystery problem a top priority. It’s probably an Islamist psy-op, and until Hegseth and his fellow geniuses figure it out, the “unflattering” cameras have been banned. Reporters who ask the wrong questions were already banned. But then, what questions can be asked of someone so openly malevolent as the US’s secretary of war? Hegseth has the look – the hair lacquered flat to the scalp, the restless gaze, the waxy pallor – of an investment banker emerging from the toilet of an expensive restaurant in Las Vegas at 2am. You don’t need a professional reporter to put up her hand and ask him if he inhabits a moral void. It would be like asking Mike Tyson if he enjoys hitting people.
In any case, the man leading Operation Epic Fury, as the Trump administration has named its war on Iran, uses the podium as a place of confession. During a briefing on Iran on 13 March, he declared the US would offer “no quarter, no mercy” to its enemies. This was not an accident or a misunderstanding about what “no quarter” means (it means not allowing enemies to surrender, killing the defenceless, and it has been recognised as a war crime in international law since 1899). It is a principle of battle that any US secretary of war would understand, not least because the maximum penalty for ordering US soldiers to leave no survivors is the death sentence, and Hegseth is a Princeton graduate who has written three books about the US military. But he’s also of the opinion that the world’s most lethal military should not follow “stupid rules of engagement” – a category that, for him, includes the Geneva Convention. The stated aim of his department is “maximum lethality, not tepid legality; violent effect, not politically correct”. His view is that soldiers should “intimidate, demoralise, hunt and kill”. Or in other words: we’re gonna commit war crimes.
This is World War Three as brought to you by American men who came closest to happiness in their college fraternity houses. It’s the abrocalypse. The official White House TikTok account posts videos of missile strikes – videos of human beings being violently killed – intercut with graphics from video games. For the Trump administration, Operation Big Tough Men In Hot Places is not a serious and regrettable conflict – it is entertainment. It happens on their phones, in WhatsApp groups to which friends and wives are reportedly added. After the strikes on Iran’s main oil export terminal, Kharg Island, Trump said: “We may hit it a few more times, just for fun.”
This approach to war – as a joke, as a source of content for social media – is not just the world getting more stupid; it fits into a much longer project of dissociation. During the Second World War, the military analyst SLA Marshall interviewed soldiers after combat, gathering data and accounts of the battles they had just survived. Marshall’s most famous and startling finding was that fewer than 25 per cent of soldiers in a mass mobilisation actually shot to kill the enemy in a battle. Most people just can’t make themselves kill someone. The US military saw this not as a confirmation of human decency but as an engineering problem, which they gradually solved. It is, for example, the reason soldiers today shoot at man-shaped targets in training.
Soldiers are more lethal when morally disengaged from what they are doing. Previous Gulf wars relied heavily on euphemism, which reduces people and weapons to units and ordnance. A missile falling on a school is collateral damage; a drone attack is a surgical strike. At Guantánamo Bay, the military prison (detention facility) where Hegseth once worked during his military career, prisoners (detainees) were subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques (torture).
Today, moral distance from a war (a special military operation) is still created by euphemism, but also by presenting it as unreal – a joke, a meme. And the oldest excuse, the sacred cause, still works. Earlier this month, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation reported that hundreds of American troops have complained they are being told they are fighting a holy war. Not the oops-wrong-word “crusade” promised by George W Bush, but a genuinely swivel-eyed evangelical battle at the end of the world. One non-commissioned officer reported being told by a commander that “President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth”.
Somewhere in the long, long list of things Hegseth and Trump didn’t think about before launching Operation Masculine Heterosexual Explosion is the possibility that Iran’s forces might find it grimly motivating to face an enemy led by zealots who are even more demented, even more committed to a war of annihilation, than they are. In promising the Iranians “no quarter”, Hegseth has told them they can justify any course of action, because they have nothing to lose.
Not that Hegseth seems to care. On 4 March, in a briefing to address the killing of American soldiers by an Iranian weapon, he sought instead to attack the real enemy, the “fake news”, which had failed to report what a great job he was doing with Operation Holy Shit Have You Seen the Price of Petrol. He dismissed the attack that had killed six compatriots as what happens “when a few drones get through”, and complained that “it’s front-page news”. White House aides reportedly flinched with revulsion as Hegseth insisted the real reason the attack was reported at all was that: “The press only wants to make the president look bad.”
What is truly bizarre about Hegseth is that while he is a former US soldier that served in Iraq, his longer and more recent experience is as a daytime TV presenter. The reason he is now secretary of war is that he spent seven years presenting Fox & Friends at weekends. Say what you like about Phillip Schofield, we’re yet to see him advocate for war crimes. Hegseth has the words “Deus vult” (“God wills it”) – a battle cry from the Crusades that has been adopted by neo-Nazis – tattooed in Gothic script on his arm. Even Eamonn Holmes wouldn’t get inked like that.
Trump recently reiterated his demand that other countries from Nato – and, incredibly, China – send warships to the Strait of Hormuz to help out with Operation Who Knew They Had Mines, I Didn’t Know That, They Got Mines, Huh, How About That, and said he was “not happy” the UK had not done so already. But despite the initial carping from Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage about joining Trump’s war (carping that has ceased now they’ve been told about its inflationary impact), Starmer’s decision to keep the politest possible distance from the Americans looks wiser by the day.
[Further reading: Big Tech is buttering you up]
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This article appears in the 18 Mar 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The new world war
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