By Nick Catoggio
Thursday, March 05, 2026
I’ve never felt more vindicated about something I’ve
written than I have this week, watching Pete Hegseth try to perform leadership
at briefings on war with Iran.
The secretary of defense is a poseur, knows he’s a
poseur, and knows that the people he commands know he’s a poseur. He tries to
compensate with cringey
feats of strength, corny
patriotic apparel, and endless babbling about how lethal our military is,
as if enough raw bravado might make up for his lack of qualifications.
He means to project toughness in all things. But what he
actually projects is fragility, a callow insecurity about his fitness for the
job so palpable and oppressive that it seems to surround him like a fog. I find
it excruciating to watch him, more so than even the president. He’s LARPing in
one of the most influential government positions on Earth.
Which is to say, since the war began last Friday, he’s
behaved precisely as I described in this
newsletter from October.
Hegseth was in fine form on Wednesday when he addressed a
crowd of reporters handpicked by the Pentagon because of how eager their
outlets are to propagandize for Donald Trump. “Death and destruction
from the sky—all day long,” Hegseth said at one point of the U.S. campaign in Iran, pausing with
dramatic relish between each of the last three words. ”We’re playing for keeps.
Our warfighters have maximum authorities granted personally by the president
and yours truly. Our rules of engagement are bold, precise, and designed to
unleash American power, not shackle it.”
Zero substance, lascivious ruthlessness: That’s Hegseth
all over. That he felt obliged to congratulate his department for “playing for
keeps” during a major war embarrassed me so much that I had to turn his press
conference off.
A good thing, too, as it spared me from having to see him
analogize the conflict to a
football game.
One comment he made was significant, though. When the
subject of the six U.S. service members killed in action came up, Hegseth
didn’t offer the usual boilerplate about mourning every loss. He treated the
topic as a matter of … media bias.
“This is what the fake news misses,” he seethed.
“We’ve taken control of Iran’s airspace and waterways without boots on the
ground. We control their fate. But when a few drones get through or tragic
things happen, it’s front-page news. I get it, the press only wants to make the
president look bad. But try for once to report the reality.”
Let me stress again that most of “the press” in the room
with him was credentialed by the Pentagon only because their employers don’t
want to make the president look bad. That’s what I mean when I say that Hegseth
is fragile: Even before a crowd of otherwise friendly reporters, he couldn’t
refrain from collapsing into “Fox News weekend host” mode, reflexively whining
about the liberal media and demagoguing inconvenient facts that undermine a
right-wing political priority as part of a deliberate conspiracy to destroy
morale.
What made his remark significant, however, was how
effortlessly it dismissed the moral stakes of the war. It’s one thing to argue
that the benefits to the United States in disarming Iran’s regime exceed the
cost of American casualties, a calculus that’s intrinsic to any military
conflict. It’s quite another to treat concern about that cost as illegitimate,
something only a journalist with an axe to grind against Trump would dwell on,
amid the glorious death and destruction being rained on Iran from the sky.
America’s government doesn’t do morality anymore.
Certainly not at home, and now no longer abroad.
The ‘Pottery Barn’ rule.
It was Colin Powell, then America’s secretary of state,
who warned George W. Bush before the invasion of Iraq that the United States
would be responsible for that country’s fate if it decapitated the ruling
regime. You break it, you own it, he told the president, borrowing a
familiar concept from retail.
That became known as the Pottery Barn rule of foreign
policy. If you choose to smash some other nation, you assume an obligation to
rebuild it.
There were practical and moral components to the Pottery
Barn rule. Practical: Destabilizing a country by demolishing its law
enforcement institutions risks all sorts of horrendous outcomes—civil war, a
refugee crisis, famine, the collapse of the health system, hyperinflation,
economic calamity, etc. A cataclysm of that magnitude will spread beyond the
country’s borders in ways that are hard to predict. American interests might
suffer.
Moral: The sky’s the limit when trying to guess how much
human misery might result. People will die, potentially in great numbers.
Starvation, disease, and wanton factional bloodletting are all in the offing
when an intact nation dissolves into a failed state. Depending on how bad
things get, its neighbors could be destabilized by the economic shocks next
door or be sucked into the conflict themselves, multiplying the misery.
So before we do something silly like breaking someone
else’s pottery, we had better have a plan to put it back together quickly.
The Pottery Barn rule is obviously derived from America’s
Marshall Plan, nation-building’s greatest success, which converted fascist
Germany and Japan into durable liberal democracies after World War II. Powell’s
formulation was an adaptation for the war on terror: We “bought” and
rehabilitated the Axis powers after we broke them, and we could do the same for
Afghanistan and Iraq.
Except we couldn’t. Despite our best efforts, Iraq became
a hell-on-Earth failed state before emerging as a shaky democracy. Afghanistan
never turned the corner and is back under Taliban control. We broke them and we
bought them, at a stupendous cost in lives and money, and cataclysm ensued
anyway.
Donald Trump’s “America First” ethos in 2016 was
essentially a response to the Pottery Barn rule. If “you broke it, you bought
it” is an inviolable rule of U.S. foreign policy, then, for the love of God, let’s
stop breaking things.
It was a shrewd message for a candidate who was facing a
Bush in the presidential primary and a Clinton in the general election. It was
also well-timed, coming less than a decade after the 2008 financial crisis
reoriented voters’ priorities toward the economy and domestic concerns. The
disappointments of Afghanistan and Iraq were certain to cause an electoral
reckoning eventually; Ron Paul tried to trigger one as a presidential candidate
in two different cycles, but it was Trump, probably for reasons of celebrity
and charisma, who succeeded.
By 2024, the Pottery Barn rule was a zombie, alive and
dead at the same time. The practical and moral cases for it remained intact,
but nation-building had become a sufficiently dirty word in both parties that
the rule was no longer necessary. America had quit its habit of breaking
pottery, making the consequences of breaking it irrelevant.
Until now.
The Donald Trump of 2016 treated most norms of American
government as a given, and so he accepted the Pottery Barn rule on its own
terms: If breaking a country meant buying it, then we wouldn’t break it. But
the Donald Trump of 2026 believes that norms of American government exist only
insofar as he’s willing to tolerate them, and he’s no longer willing to
tolerate the Pottery Barn rule.
“You break it, you bought it”? Says who?
What we’re seeing in the war he just started is an
attitude we’d expect from a guy with a history of bankrupting casinos: The
United States may have broken Iran, but we’re not going to “buy” it by trying
to preserve order there. Why should we? Who’s going to stick us with the bill
if we refuse?
Trump will do what he likes and leave someone else
holding the bag, the same amoral worldview that’s served him well his whole
life. That view is now U.S. policy.
How will Americans react?
Someone else’s forever.
Maybe better than we think.
With voters exasperated by the cost of living and America
trillions of dollars deeper in debt than it was in 2003, Trump’s Jacksonian
approach to flattening Iran and walking away makes more sense politically than
Marshall Plan 3.0. It makes more sense logistically, too: The Pentagon is having trouble intercepting Iran’s
Shahed drones and is reportedly burning through its most sophisticated missile defenses in a war of attrition with the Iranian regime to see which side
runs out of ammunition first. This conflict won’t go on forever because it
can’t.
We’re simply not in a position to buy the pottery we
break anymore. Now that Iran’s is broken, Americans will need to get
comfortable with the idea of Uncle Sam running away from the “store” as the
shopkeeper yells at him to come back and pay his debt.
The White House’s approach to Venezuela might make it
easier. In that case, Trump did observe the Pottery Barn rule: He could
have destabilized the country by ordering an all-out attack on the Maduro
regime, but instead kept much of its leadership in place to maintain order.
Iran is different, he might say, because the danger it poses to the United
States was so great that he had no choice but to act. In other words, he
accepts the principle of “you break it, you bought it” per his handling of
Caracas. But if an enemy threatens America’s security, he’s not going to
refrain from breaking it just because we can’t afford to buy it.
I suspect many voters will find that logic
defensible—appealing, even. If Bush had taken the same approach to Saddam
Hussein, how many U.S. soldiers—and Iraqis—would be alive today? Having tried
nation-building and failed multiple times, Americans are primed for an
experiment in lighting something on fire and seeing what happens when we let it
burn.
I am very curious to see how they react if, having
now dispensed with the Pottery Barn rule, a moral catastrophe unfolds in Iran.
Which it might.
“Tehran an ‘apocalypse’ of hospitals in flames and
children buried beneath rubble,” screamed a headline in Britain’s Daily Telegraph this week. The Telegraph
isn’t a far-left rag, and its sources for the piece weren’t exclusively Iranian
officials with an incentive to propagandize against the war. “They are striking
buildings where families live,” one Tehran resident told the paper. “After each
explosion, people rush to help—and then another bomb hits the same area.”
Hospitals are allegedly overwhelmed, families are rationing food, and the
elderly are hunting for medication, all predictable consequences of
pottery-breaking.
The administration’s strongest moral justification for
the war has also quietly been backburnered. On Saturday, Trump told the Washington Post that freedom
for the Iranian people is all he wants, but that wasn’t on the
list of war objectives that the White House released
on Tuesday. The president did say in an interview today with Axios that the country’s next
leader must be “someone that will bring harmony and peace to Iran,” but he also
said that “I have to be involved in the appointment, like with Delcy
[Rodríguez] in Venezuela.”
Rodríguez hasn’t brought freedom to Venezuela. Trump likes her
because she’s a compliant puppet for the United States. It’s plausible that
Iran’s new head of state will be some revolutionary regime remnant who’s
similarly morally compromised, willing to do Washington’s bidding on matters
like oil production and keeping the Strait of Hormuz open for shipping, but
otherwise gung-ho to keep Iranians under his boot. The president can live with
that. Can Americans?
Or things might go the opposite way, with Iran crumbling
into civil war—with encouragement from the U.S. government. The latest
cockamamie regime-change idea from the White House is to arm Iranian Kurdish
paramilitary groups, some of which are based in Iraq, in hopes that they’ll
wage war on Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and clear the way for a wider popular
uprising. The New York Times’ sources foresee
a new Bay of Pigs, though, warning that those Kurdish groups are no match for
Iran’s forces, have received only small arms from the United States, and are
unlikely to be greeted as liberators by the country’s Persian majority.
The ploy also has enormous potential to draw
other regional powers into the war. Any uprising by local Kurds is destined
to enrage Turkey, which is forever worried about armed insurrection from its
own Kurdish population. Turkey, a NATO member, could end up aligning with
Iran’s government to crush the threat—potentially pitting it against Israel.
Shiite militias based in Iraq might cross the border to
defend the regime against a Kurdish offensive or even attack Kurdish forces in
their own country to try to squelch the threat there, widening the conflict.
“Any attempt to arm Iranian Kurdish groups would need support from the Iraqi
Kurds to let the weapons transit and use Iraqi Kurdistan as launching ground,” CNN explained. “[It’s] very dangerous,
but what can we do? We cannot stand against America,” an anxious Iraqi Kurdish
official told the outlet of the White House’s plan. “We are very frightened.”
Killing, turmoil, and deprivation, quite possibly across
multiple countries: The United States will have broken Iran, but we won’t have
bought it, as our military assets are likely to be long gone from the region as
all of this plays out. A Dispatch colleague summarized the president’s
de facto position as “No more forever wars … unless it’s someone else’s
forever.”
How much will Americans care if this turns out to be
someone else’s, i.e. Iranians’, forever war but not ours?
Post-moral.
I’d usually have some half-clever answer to that
question, but in this case I don’t.
My instinct is to say “they won’t care much, if at all,”
as that’s been my read on the American people since Election Night 2024. (Even
before that, honestly.) Reelecting a figure as sinister as Trump after he
proved on January 6 what he was capable of amounted to a quasi-formal
renunciation of moral responsibility by the electorate. Going forward, our
politics would be post-moral. And there’s no room for the Pottery Barn rule in
a politics that’s post-moral.
If I’m wrong about that, then I’ll probably be wrong
because of the rule’s practical component, not its moral one. It won’t be
Iranians dying by the truckload in a Trump-started war that Americans find too
costly; it’ll be the hit they’re about to take on gas prices. They elected
the president to fix inflation, yet here he is, bombing his way into a new
inflation crisis. They’re fine with him refusing to buy a country after
breaking it, but they won’t be fine with him sticking them with a new bill.
Still, I concede the possibility that I’m underestimating
the people’s capacity for moral outrage. Trump’s Iran adventure is so far
removed from his “America First” isolationist posturing that many voters are
bound to feel conned by him; the anger they have about that could plausibly
mushroom if his con job leads to atrocities committed against Iranians, for
whom virtually everyone feels sympathy. And the right-wing toadies charged with
spinning this campaign in the media will do him no favors as they veer from
stupid assertions that a massive air attack doesn’t
amount to “war” to smug pronouncements that oppressed
Iranian women might be better off dead.
The White House itself is posting sizzle reels of the
conflict on social media that meld
the bombing of Iran with a literal video game. Americans have developed a
nearly sociopathic tolerance for callousness in politics, but perhaps not a
limitless one.
And so, while it feels strange to say it, Pete Hegseth
might actually be the right man for the job. His snide attack on media
coverage of U.S. casualties reportedly so shocked the friendly
press at yesterday’s briefing that a hush came over the room until one person
muttered, “That was one of the most insulting things I have ever heard.” He’s
amoral, he’s unqualified, and he practically glows with spiteful pride on both
counts: Who better to represent the Trump White House at a moment as fraught as
this?
