By Nick Catoggio
Friday, March 13, 2026
When I think of the Iran war years from now, I’ll
remember Pete Hegseth as the face of it.
Not the president. Not Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu. Not Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan Caine, who could have played the same
reassuring role for Americans that Colin Powell did during the Gulf War if only
the White House had outsourced its daily briefings on the conflict entirely to
him.
The Iran war is Hegseth’s war despite the high
probability that our defense secretary wields no actual influence over
operations. That’s because, more so than even Donald Trump, he personifies the
postliberal lust to dominate one’s opponents. It’s why Hegseth, like all
right-wing populists, seems to have only two facial expressions anymore:
scowling and smirking.
Dominance is so urgent a priority in postliberal conflict
that it functions as an end in itself. The more dominant one is, the less
important it becomes to achieve anything strategically useful by it. Every time
we see the president torment some Republican lawmaker who’s crossed him, we’re
reminded of it.
We were reminded again this morning when Hegseth held
another of his unbearable
press conferences to discuss the state of the war. At one point he paused
to relish the thought of Iranian regime goons looking up to see the
stars and stripes and Star of David flying overhead; elsewhere he vowed “no
quarter, no mercy for our enemies” amid a made-for-Newsmax
whine about CNN’s bias. His message to the American people was that we’re
pounding the bad guys, we’ll continue to do so, and we’ll enjoy every second of
it.
As for why that pounding has failed to prevent an
economic catastrophe unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz, Hegseth assured
reporters that the Pentagon has a plan and downplayed the crisis. “The only
thing prohibiting transit in the straits right now is Iran shooting at
shipping,” he observed smartly. “It is open for transit should Iran not
do that.”
By the same logic, I suppose, the only thing preventing
regime change in Iran right now is that the regime insists on remaining in
power. It will fall should it decide not to do that.
I’m not surprised that Hegseth would treat the impasse in
the strait as a footnote in a story about America conducting a
turkey shoot of Iranian military targets. Tactically, we’re not just
winning this war, we’re dominating it. We’re imposing our will on every Iranian
plane, ship, and missile we detect. The enemy is helpless against our attacks,
completely at our mercy. To a postliberal, that’s the very picture of what
victory in conflict looks like.
It’s also why pointing out that Iran
is obviously winning the war strategically seems like churlish
nitpicking, something only the tendentious libs at CNN looking to score a point
on Trump would stoop to.
Pete Hegseth’s preference for dominance over strategy
explains his attitude about events in the Gulf. It also explains the West
Wing’s latest innovation in “mean tweets.”
Meme war, literally.
Posting hype videos about America’s military success at a
moment when Iran has the global oil supply in a chokehold is like doing an
end-zone dance after a first down when you’re two scores behind.
That hasn’t stopped the White House, though, which gave
new meaning to the term “sizzle reel” this week by posting clips to social
media of bombs going off in Iran intercut with footage from video games,
movies and TV shows, and sports. (“Pure American dominance,” reads the
caption on one.) Multiple former U.S. military commanders told NBC
News they’re mortified by the videos, with one calling the gimmick
“absolutely disrespectful to everyone involved, including the Iranians
themselves who are at war and disrespectful to the Americans who risked their
lives.”
I don’t think the White House comms team means to frame
the war as a joke. This seems to me like an earnest attempt by postliberal
chuds to process military conflict through the morally enfeebled heuristics
about politics that their movement has equipped them with.
In the first place, meme-ifying the war detaches the
president’s supporters from the consequences of his viciousness. That’s always
been a secret ingredient of Trump’s appeal: Because he treats politics like
pro wrestling, frequently sounds like an insult comic, and generally
behaves like an online troll, even his sinister impulses carry a disarming air
of performance that can make them seem
less threatening than they are. The phrase “mean tweets” has become
shorthand for the phenomenon, a way for his apologists to dismiss his menacing
insanity as harmless outbursts from an overgrown edgelord that aren’t worth
bothering about.
The Iran sizzle reels are a wartime version of that. The
conflict is a game and a spectacle, not quite real or worth freaking out about
even if we blow up a school occasionally.
They’re also a case of the president and his team
believing they can create their own reality by insisting upon it strenuously
enough, another Trump specialty. He convinced more than two-thirds of his party that the 2020
presidential election was illegitimate despite lacking a single solid piece of
evidence, and he’s still hard at work trying to win that argument six years
later. He’s spent the last few months preparing to run the same playbook in the
midterms by treating the SAVE Act that’s languishing in the Senate as the only
way to rescue American democracy from blatant election-rigging by blue states.
A country that’s overflowing with credulous hyperpartisan
dopes desperate to believe that their politics is infallible is an obvious
target for the White House’s Iran sizzle reels. If the president is confident
enough in victory to be putting out clips equating what’s happening in Iran to
brutal tackles in the NFL, America must be winning, right? Only CNN could think
otherwise.
More than anything, though, I think the clips are about
communicating the administration’s unapologetic belief in ruthlessness as a
moral ethic. Postliberalism reduces all political problems to failures of will:
From crime to trade to immigration to war, America would have far fewer
challenges if only its leaders were less timid about using force to neutralize
its enemies, foreign and domestic. Hegseth, the government’s foremost war-crimes aficionado, is the epitome of that attitude. If
you find yourself at an impasse in some policy matter, you aren’t hitting
hard enough.
That’s why his big answer to the standoff in Hormuz is to bomb Iran harder and why the White House’s answer to
public anxiety about the war and its economic fallout is to post what’s
essentially combat porn. When morale falters, when progress seems stalled, the
only sensible thing to do is to double down on ruthlessness by, say, mocking
the enemy with footage of an NBA defender getting posterized via a savage dunk.
Or vowing to kill more of them, of course, as the
president did when he also doubled down on ruthlessness in a Truth Social post
last night. “We have unparalleled firepower, unlimited ammunition, and plenty
of time - Watch what happens to these deranged scumbags today,” Trump warned. “They’ve been killing innocent people all over the
world for 47 years, and now I, as the 47th President of the United States of
America, am killing them. What a great honor it is to do so!”
We might not be able to stop our enemies from achieving
their goals but we can and will kill more of them and exult in their deaths.
Dominance without strategy: This war is getting more postliberal by the day.
Anti-strategy.
As anyone old enough to remember the Before Times knows,
this isn’t the first war America has fought in the Middle East that failed
strategically. And in fairness to the president, it’s a near-lock that his
misadventure in Iran will involve vastly fewer dead Americans than George W.
Bush’s misadventure in Iraq did.
Although, given the latest deployment news, maybe we should revisit that
prediction in six months.
What’s distinctive about Trump’s Iran campaign isn’t that
his strategy was flawed. It’s that, as far as I can tell, he had no strategy.
Bush thought the U.S. could depose Saddam Hussein,
dissolve Iraq’s security forces, seize and dismantle an Iraqi WMD arsenal that
didn’t actually exist, and stand up a democratically elected government in
Baghdad that would inspire other Arab states to liberalize—all without
triggering a sectarian Thunderdome or empowering a new Shiite regime that would
end up under Iran’s thumb. Not a good strategy, it turned out, but a strategy.
And it involved a display of American power commensurate with the task: Regime
change in Iraq would be carried out by an enormous occupying infantry force.
By contrast, and without exaggeration, Trump’s “strategy”
in Iran appears to have been a variation of a famous South Park joke. Phase one: Launch a decapitating
strike on Iran’s leadership. Phase two: ???? Phase three: Peace on America’s
terms.
Phase two seems to have consisted entirely of wishful
thinking. The president reportedly believed
that the regime would either crumble after Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was
killed or surrender immediately to the U.S., placing itself at America’s
service like Delcy Rodríguez in Venezuela. When that didn’t happen, the
administration began sniffing around for a regional proxy force that might be
willing to battle Iranian regime forces. When that didn’t happen,
Washington and its Israeli partners crossed their fingers and waited for an
uprising among Iranian civilians.
That’s not happening either. Despite having been one of the two
highest priorities of the war for American and Israeli officials, regime change
already seems off the table after two weeks of conflict. Once the initial
strike failed to collapse the government, there was no Plan B.
The other high priority for the two allies was to further
degrade Iran’s ability to build nuclear weapons, either by seizing the
country’s enriched uranium or rendering it useless. It occurred to me this
morning that that might have been a lot easier, ironically, if not for
the first U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran last year.
That attack successfully entombed the material under the
rubble left by American strikes on Iran’s enrichment facilities but didn’t
destroy it completely, as far as anyone can tell. Had those strikes never
happened, the uranium might still be stored today in some structure that would
be comparatively easy for U.S. special forces to breach. Instead, getting to it
will be an ordeal. “Nuclear-handling equipment, diggers to move earth and
rubble from tunnel entrances and other heavy machinery” will be needed, according
to The Economist. So will hundreds of American boots on
the ground and constant air cover to repel attempts by Iranian forces to
advance on the site as excavation takes place.
And even if the U.S. managed to secure the uranium, it
could explode in transit if it isn’t handled properly.
Regime change could have solved the uranium dilemma, as
the White House would be less anxious about leaving the buried material behind
once a government that’s better disposed toward America and Israel was in
place. As it is, we’re stuck. Either we risk a deadly fiasco by inserting U.S.
troops for a dangerous mission that might not succeed, or we withdraw and leave
the uranium under the soil of wounded fundamentalist lunatics who bear the
United States more of a grudge than ever. A strategic master stroke.
Still, the singular strategic debacle for which this war
will be remembered is the closing of the Strait of Hormuz.
Administration officials have reportedly admitted in
briefings to Congress that they didn’t plan for it even though a crisis in the strait
has factored into U.S. wargaming involving Iran for ages. “Planning
around preventing this exact scenario—impossible as it has long seemed—has been
a bedrock principle of U.S. national security policy for decades,” one former
U.S. official told CNN of the strait’s closure. “I’m dumbfounded.”
Holding the world’s oil supply hostage is the next best
thing to an actual nuclear weapon that Iran has, yet somehow the White House is
surprised that the regime would resort to it in a war that threatens its
survival. Bad enough that administration officials believed closing the strait
would “hurt Iran more than the U.S.,” according to CNN, but what’s the excuse for not having a
solution ready to go just in case the Iranians did execute their
economic doomsday plan?
Two weeks in, oil tankers are burning and America’s Arab Gulf allies are disgruntled
about Washington’s impotence in keeping the strait open and protecting their
airspace from Iranian attack. When the U.S. finally calls off the dogs and goes
home, those allies will be left with an Iranian neighbor that’s either still
intact and out for revenge or in full collapse and dissolving into anarchy.
“Analysts say the war has left Gulf states reassessing both their security
dependence on Washington and the prospect of eventually engaging Tehran on new
regional security arrangements,” Reuters reported.
There was no “Phase two” in the White House war strategy,
as hard as that is to believe. And to the extent that there was, I think it
wasn’t much more complicated than “dominate.”
A failure of will.
It would be quintessentially Trumpian for the president
and his aides to have assumed that any wrinkles during the war could and would
be ironed out by simply ramping up the firepower.
I repeat: Postliberalism reduces all political problems
to failures of will. And so if Iran closed the strait or defiantly fought on
after its leader was killed, solving those problems would logically seem to our
leaders to be a straightforward matter of breaking the regime’s will with more
explosives. That may explain why the administration stupidly declined Volodymyr Zelensky’s help with drone warfare last year
even though it was completely predictable that drones would figure
heavily into Iranian battle plans against the U.S. in any future conflict.
Team Trump probably expected that it didn’t need to worry
about repelling puny weapons when it commands the most awesome military arsenal
on Earth. In the event that Iran began harassing our ships and bases with
drones, we’d just bomb them harder until they stopped. If you can muster enough
dominance, you don’t need strategy. In theory.
That attitude does often work for postliberals.
Corporate America has repeatedly allowed itself to be
extorted by Trump since he returned to office last year; Delcy Rodríguez
and the Maduro remnant in Venezuela also opted to play ball when he positioned
the U.S. military off their coast. Many political standoffs really are a
contest of wills, and Trump’s taste for ruthlessness serves him well in those
cases. Intimidation is the One Neat Trick of postliberalism and it’s a pretty
neat one as fascist political tricks go.
It’s just not foolproof. In Iran, no doubt to his great
surprise, Trump finds himself facing an opponent that won’t be intimidated.
Fanaticism, existential panic, megalomania, national pride—take your pick of
motives that might explain why “bomb harder” hasn’t caused the regime’s will to
fail. Whatever the reason, the president has suddenly run up against the limits
of dominance as a strategy in a conflict with supremely high stakes.
“When past presidents balked at the possibility of war
with Iran, they weren’t just dodging a hard choice,” Franklin Foer alleged at The Atlantic a few days ago. “They were
deterred by all of the obvious reasons a conflict could perilously spiral.”
That’s the problem in a nutshell. An administration of postliberals will
inevitably understand the failure of Trump’s predecessors to confront Iran as due
to insufficient nerve when, really, it was due to insufficient hubris and
stupidity.
A politics that treats every problem as a failure of will
is destined to be recklessly willful when it should be cautious. Trump sold
himself to Republican voters in 2016 as an alternative to neoconservative
incaution. Ten years later, “bomb harder” is what’s left.
