Pete Hegseth, a "recovering neocon"?

Pete Hegseth a the US Capitol — December 3, 2024. Photo via GettyImages

Politicians frequently “change their minds.” In principle, willingness to change one’s mind is a laudable trait, whether you’re a politician or any other type of person. To absorb new information, and then adjust one’s outlook in accordance with that information, is a prudent habit to cultivate for anyone who wants to engage constructively with the world. However, the propensity of political figures to “change their minds” usually requires an extra layer of critical examination, unless you’re inclined to just credulously accept their self-serving bullshit.

When a political figure resolutely declares that they have an unflinching ethical or policy conviction, and then go on to abandon that conviction, at minimum this should obligate some explanation for the shift. If the explanation reflects a sincere and transparent reevaluation of certain facts or premises, that’s one thing to consider. If the explanation reflects naked expediency and opportunism, that’s another thing. If no real explanation is provided at all, that’s something else entirely. “Mind-changing,” thus, is not a virtue unto itself — nor is it necessarily a defect. The crucial factor is the accompanying explanation (or lack thereof), and how much soundness one ascribes to it.

For instance, if Bernie Sanders suddenly announced tomorrow that he was no longer in favor of imposing higher taxes on billionaires, that would certainly raise doubts as to the veracity and coherence of his life-long political project. If Thomas Massie declared he was suddenly in favor of the state controlling key economic sectors, that too would make one wonder about the fundamental reliability and consistency of his long-articulated worldview. So, while political figures are certainly free to “change their mind” about things, the rest of us are also free to make judgments about whether those “mind-changes” are credible.

How, then, to evaluate the claimed “mind-change” of Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense? In the recent past, Hegseth wasn’t just a casual supporter of the Iraq War — he was a full-blown professional pro-war activist and lobbyist, whose entire career was conjoined with his strident pro-war advocacy. Hegseth ran a group called “Veterans for Freedom,” whose explicit purpose was to pressure Congress to support the Iraq War and galvanize public opinion behind George W. Bush’s foreign policy, including by appearing in the media to make robust pro-war arguments — a role which Hegseth eventually marshaled into a gig on Fox News. As Hegseth fondly recounted in his 2020 book, American Crusade, one of the group’s primary tasks was to tour around the United States exhorting fellow citizens to join their pro-war cause. “We gave speeches aimed at building support for the war,” Hegseth recalled. “I believed in the mission we had in Iraq.”

But nowadays, Hegseth appears to be singing a different tune. In a podcast appearance last month, host Shawn Ryan asked: “Should we have been in Iraq?” To which Hesgeth replied: “I was a huge proponent of it at the time, but in retrospect, absolutely not,” adding, “I’ve been a recovering neocon for six years now.”

It’s not clear when exactly Hegseth claims to have transformed into a “recovering neocon,” thereby repudiating so much of his past life’s work. But if we subtract six years from 2024, that would place the epiphany sometime in 2018. How does this “mind-changing” timeline compare with that of other notable public figures? Jeb Bush, for example, was compelled by 2015 to say that he would not have invaded Iraq. If this coerced admission conferred Jeb with some grand and commendable wisdom, that would certainly be an odd plaudit for someone who waited well over a decade to officially revise their pro-war position — and only did so when changing political circumstances seemed to require it. Still, this would make Jeb prescient in his “mind-changing” compared to Pete Hegseth, who wrote an entire book the next year, 2016, adamantly defending and reiterating his pro-Iraq War views. In that book, pompously titled In the Arena, Hegseth says: “Conventional wisdom holds that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were a fiasco; no doubt mistakes were made and outcomes murky. However, especially in Iraq, great triumphs were also achieved and hard-won lessons learned — if not in the White House or on Capitol Hill. I will argue, forcefully, that in light of the world we live in today, the Iraq War teaches us more about what to do than what not to do.”

So there’s Hegseth presenting himself as a bold dissenter against the “conventional wisdom” that was lamentably forming against the Iraq War, by affirming the war’s “great triumphs” — a year after even Jeb Bush had been cajoled into renouncing his own brother’s invasion. Hegseth goes on to conclude: “We did not lose the war in Iraq, as some have suggested; we chose not to win, by handcuffing — and defeating — our warfighters and our country.” Note that in 2016, Hegseth was still promoting a version of the “stabbed-in-the-back” myth once popularized by Vietnam War dead-enders, which held that some combination of sabotaging Congressmembers, dirty protesters, and the lying media snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. If only the war had been waged with adequate ruthlessness, Vietnam dead-enders argued, the US could have rightly “won.” Hegseth reprises this theme for the 21st century, with the main villains in his grievance narrative being what he calls the “blame America first” crowd, who cravenly advocate “restraint” in international affairs and take the unpatriotic position that “American intervention is unnecessary and unhelpful” in many military circumstances. He slams Barack Obama for “precipitously removing” troops from Iraq, where Hegseth apparently believes they should’ve stayed in full occupying force for a thousand more years to subdue Shiite militias. (He also accuses Obama of shamefully “appeasing” Vladimir Putin.)

Thus, in the ancient backwater days of 2016, Hegseth was passionately arguing that the Iraq War should be chiefly understood not as a failure, but as a lesson in how to best conduct US foreign policy. Does someone who not only expressed this view in 2016, but wrote an entire book bombastically defending it, render themselves worthy of “credit” because by 2024, they went on some dopey podcast and professed to have “changed their mind”? To put it a slightly starker way: is someone who was even more recalcitrant of an Iraq War dead-ender than Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton (who came to her war-repudiating epiphany in 2014) deserving of commendation for their long-belated “mind-change” — or deserving of scorn for their admitted catastrophic lack of discernment? Should this recalcitrance serve as a point in their favor to be elevated to high public office, just because they now claim to have experienced a half-baked retrospective revelation?

If we take Hegseth at his word — that he renounced his support for the Iraq War sometime in 2018 — it’s strange that no sign of this alleged renunciation appears in his 2020 book, American Crusade, where, as the title implies, he tells of how his warfighting experience impelled him to embark on a wider political-religious “crusade” in other facets of life. He doesn’t sound remotely remorseful about the Iraq War; rather, he speaks about it glowingly and reverentially. In 2020, his criticisms are still directed not at George W. Bush, or former “neocons” such as himself for supporting a misbegotten war policy, but at the usual GOP hate-objects like “radical Islam,” communism, and secularism.

It’s one thing to vaguely claim to have shed the label of “neocon,” and another to actually jettison the ideological underpinnings that drove the adoption of that label in the first place. Part of the confusion here likely stems from the continued frivolous use of “neocon,” a term which, as I explained in a previous article, mostly functions now as a cheap diversion tactic. Almost no one of any political stature in 2024, especially among elected officials, would voluntarily describe themselves as a “neocon.” I doubt if you could even get Lindsey Graham to embrace the label. If you wish to use “neocon” or “neoconservative” as a historical reference for past movements and individuals, that’s certainly defensible. But when Hegseth repudiates the label, he’s just engaging in a trite, self-absolving political deflection.

One of the fallacies that now seems operative is that in order to establish your credentials as a “recovering neocon,” as Hegseth puts it, all you have to do is grudgingly acknowledge two decades later that the Iraq War turned out to have been an unfortunate error. As if that’s a really impressive, cutting-edge insight to have acquired by 2024. Using such criteria, another “recovering neocon” must have been none other than John McCain, whose presidential campaign Hegseth joined in 2008 on the ground that they shared the same views on the necessity of escalating the war in Iraq and maintaining an indefinite occupation. In a book published shortly before his 2018 death, McCain said of Iraq: “The war, with its cost in lives and treasure and security, can’t be judged as anything other than a mistake, a very serious one, and I have to accept my share of the blame for it.” It would be strange to therefore credit McCain with disavowing “neoconservatism,” or to have valiantly shed the label of “neocon.” Because despite his death-bed confession, McCain never gave any credible indication that he was fundamentally modifying the interventionist premises that underpinned his prior pro-war advocacy. The same, basically, can be said for Hegseth.

If Hegseth really spent the past six years rehabilitating himself from his bygone days as a “neocon,” we might expect this to be evinced at some point in his opinionating on Fox News, the activity which Trump apparently decided qualified him for Defense Secretary. He was an aggressive backer of US interventionist policy in Ukraine, often criticizing the Biden Administration for what he considered its failure to arm Ukraine quickly and aggressively enough, and demanded that the Pentagon, which he now wants to lead, secretly ship high-grade weapons to Ukraine without informing Congress or American taxpayers. In the early stages of the Ukraine war, Hegseth dismissed any possibility of a cessation of hostilities, saying of Putin: “Ceasefires? You know what ceasefires are for him? An opportunity to reload.” He hosted a Fox Nation special in which he gravely intoned that “the future of America and the Western world” were on the line in Ukraine, declaring Putin a “war criminal” who wanted to reconstitute the Soviet Union. He called on Trump to bomb Iran, including mosques and schools if deemed necessary. He said a “preemptive strike” on North Korea would be “merited.” His bombast in favor of the Israeli pulverization of Gaza and Lebanon has few rivals. To quote Morton Klein, head of the Zionist Organization of America, at a November 2024 celebratory gala:

‘We must establish a Temple, a Jewish Temple, and Temple Mount,’ said Peter Hegseth! So don’t tell me about, ‘He’s a problem,’ in any way, shape or form. We Jews love Peter Hegseth. We want him to be defense secretary.

In his 2016 book, one of the great lessons Hegseth says he learned from the Iraq War, and wishes to vigorously impart to readers, is that “America must continue to support freedom and democracy promotion around the world.” He argues that “only American power, reinvigorated with good citizens and economic vitality, has the realistic ability to defend a free world besieged by threats from within and without.” Hegseth does not appear to have ever appreciably wavered from this messianic interventionist conviction, whether or not he now deems it politically advisable to recant the label of “neocon.”

If someone expresses beliefs that they later acknowledge were flagrantly wrong, despite having devoted their entire careers to furtherance of those beliefs, that raises the question of whether we should reward said person for furthering beliefs that even they now acknowledge were flagrantly wrong. You would think, if the Iraq War was really as catastrophic as so many people now seem to agree it was, that the people who were responsible for perpetuating the catastrophe might eventually have to pay some price for their actions, even if the price is as trifling as “not being named Secretary of Defense.” But in reality, very few Iraq War proponents have ever been penalized for their conduct, and very few people who displayed foresight at the time to oppose the war have been accorded any benefits. It apparently never occurred to Donald Trump that it might be worthwhile to find someone to run the Department of Defense who exhibited the discernment to question the Iraq War from its early stages, or at the very least hadn’t led a media “crusade” to advocate for escalation and endless occupation. But for Trump, that’s all clearly superseded by Hegeth’s sterling performance as the host of the Fox News weekend morning program.

Hegseth’s nomination appears to be floundering at the moment, with reports that Trump has already contacted potential replacements, including Ron DeSantis. The main reasons for Hegseth’s troubles seemingly have to do with his personal foibles: serial adultery, accusations of sexual impropriety, a denunciatory email written by his own mother, and financial mismanagement of the pro-war advocacy groups he once ran. Notably, none of these controversies have anything much to do with his history as a strident pro-war activist, or whether he has satisfactorily accounted for the “change of mind” he claims to have undergone while jockeying to run the Pentagon. That’s not something any of the main parties involved — Trump, most of the media, or the Senators weighing whether to confirm him — evidently care enough about to find “disqualifying.”

Just as I was finishing this article, a new interview with Pete Hegseth was released, in which Megyn Kelly gently guides him through an explanation of all his current PR problems. In one segment, Hegseth recounts how proud he still is of the work he did at his pro-Iraq War lobbying outfit, and how dedicated he was to supporting John McCain, because they both supported the same pro-war policy. Megyn Kelly did not ask how he squares this with his claim to be a “recovering neocon.”

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