The Morning: Pete Hegseth’s rhetoric of violence

March 12, 2026

	By Sam Sifton

Good morning. The price of oil is up again this morning, in part because of uncertainty about the goals of the war with Iran and when it will end. Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, has been fairly clear on those subjects, though. I’ll start with him.

Pete Hegseth Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times

Retribution and rage

Pete Hegseth wasn’t always like this. In 2005, a moral calling led him to volunteer for the Iraq war. He had read about a suicide bomber who killed 18 Iraqi children and wanted to ensure that ideology would not win. He sought justice, reports my colleague Greg Jaffe, who covers the Pentagon. He wanted democracy and freedom for the people of Iraq. He was moved to join Operation Iraqi Freedom by a kind of altruism.

Hegseth describes the war in Iran very differently. At a news conference last week, he said it would have “no stupid rules of engagement.” In another, he said that the U.S. military would shower “death and destruction from the sky all day long.”

He no longer talks about moral purpose or democratic ideals. “His bellicose, at times vengeful, rhetoric,” Greg writes, “reflects his belief that the United States’ lofty goals in Iraq and Afghanistan caused the military to lose focus on its main task, killing the enemy, and led to costly defeats in both wars.”

He won’t let President Trump make that mistake. Today’s campaign isn’t about enduring freedom. It’s called Operation Epic Fury. “Maximum lethality, not tepid legality,” Hegseth said earlier this year. “Violent effect, not politically correct.” Anything that distracts from that mission is weakness. “This is not 2003. This is not endless nation-building,” he said on Tuesday. “It’s not even close. Our generation of soldiers will not let that happen again.”

Of course, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were disasters for the United States. Greg spoke about that with Phil Klay, a writer who is a Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq campaign. “There’s always someone who thinks that if only we were crueler, if only we’d killed another million Vietnamese, then we would have won this war,” Klay told him. “If you reduce war to the satisfied feeling you get when you kill the enemy, it makes it a lot simpler.”

By any memes necessary

A grid of four images shows Mel Gibson in “Braveheart,” what appears to be military targeting footage, Bob Odenkirk as the character Saul Goodman, and a robot with a glowing helmet.

A social media video released by the Trump administration mixed pop culture clips with bombing footage. A video released by the White House

You can see Hegseth’s antagonistic rhetoric playing out in the meme videos that the White House has released on social media since the start of the war, writes James Poniewozik, our television critic.

The clips show explosions accompanied by SpongeBob SquarePants saying, “You want to see me do it again?” Or Hegseth at a briefing, with Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” as the soundtrack. Bombs explode to the tune of Nelly’s “Here Comes the Boom.” There’s Maximus from “Gladiator.” Here’s the antagonist-protagonist warrior Kylo Ren from “Star Wars.”

“The aim is a kind of brazen, joking-not-joking anti-meaning,” Jim writes, “a vibe of dominance unbounded by narrative, reason or moral argument.”

It’s a largely male vibe, at that. Christopher Reeve’s Superman pledges to fight for “truth, justice and the American way.” A menacing Walter White of “Breaking Bad” says, “I am the danger.” There is no good and evil in these clips, Jim writes, “only strength and weakness, winning and losing.”

That’s what drives Hegseth now.

More on the war

In Washington

Pentagon officials told lawmakers in a closed-door briefing that the estimated cost of the war exceeded $11.3 billion in its first week.
Some Trump administration officials are growing pessimistic about the lack of a strategy to finish the war. But they haven’t said this directly to Trump.
The Pentagon has barred news photographers from Iran war briefings.

In the Middle East

People stand in front of a smoldering building. Debris is on the ground around them.

The remains of a school in Iran at the start of the war. IRIB TV, via Agence France-Presse

The U.S. was responsible for a missile strike on an Iranian elementary school, according to preliminary findings in a military investigation. Outdated targeting information may be to blame.
Iran’s counterattacks have slowed down. Either its arsenal is depleted or it is holding weapons in reserve, experts say.

At least seven people died in Israeli strikes on Beirut this morning. Lebanese officials say Israel’s bombing campaign against Hezbollah has killed more than 600 people and driven 800,000 from their homes.
Oil tankers continue to be targeted across the Persian Gulf region. Iraq suspended all oil terminal operations this morning after two tankers were attacked off its coast.
Iran has fired indiscriminate cluster-munition warheads at Israel several times during this war. More than 100 countries have signed a pact to ban the weapons — though Iran, Israel and the U.S. are not among them.
The U.S. plans to release 172 million barrels of oil from its strategic reserves, the Energy Department said, to help with rising costs. Dozens of other countries also plan to release oil.
The war has rerouted flights around the Middle East. Click the graphic below to see more.

Two maps centered on Iran showing how many airline flights go around Iran now.

Note: Flight paths represent the position of flights every 30 minutes. Source: Flightradar24. Zach Levitt and Jacqueline Gu/The New York Times

THE LATEST NEWS

Politics

President Trump pointing from a stage at someone in the audience.

In Kentucky yesterday. Doug Mills/The New York Times

Trump set out on a multistate tour designed to show voters that he is focused on the economy and their pocketbooks — and that he still has control over the Republican Party.
Trump has yet to endorse either John Cornyn or Ken Paxton in the Texas Senate contest. He’s using that as leverage for a bill that would impose strict voter ID requirements.
MAGA has embraced animal rights and pushed researchers to reduce their experiments on dogs, cats and primates.
The administration is starting an effort to allow Veterans Affairs to put some homeless veterans into legal guardianship.

Tariffs

The Trump administration said more than 4.4 million hours might be needed to manually process refunds requested by companies after the Supreme Court struck down many of Trump’s tariffs last month.
The government also announced an investigation into unfair trading practices by 16 of America’s largest trading partners as it works to resurrect tariffs.

Around the World

Britain: Prime Minister Keir Starmer was warned about Peter Mandelson’s close ties to Jeffrey Epstein before appointing Mandelson ambassador to the U.S.
Ukraine: Defense companies figured out how to build drones without any Chinese components.
Canada: Two patients died after donating plasma at clinics in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Health officials are investigating their deaths from the procedure, which is generally considered extremely safe.
China: The government approved an expansive new law to promote “ethnic unity.”

CAT CURIOSITY

A short video of someone dropping a cat, which twists in the air and lands on its feet.

The New York Times

Cats, we know, always land on their feet. But how?

To find out, scientists in Japan scrutinized the spines in feline cadavers and dropped a pair of live cats from about three feet up. (“To prevent injury,” the study’s author noted, “we placed a thick, soft cushion at the landing site.”)

They learned that the upper part of a cat’s spine can twist an astounding 360 degrees, which allows a cat to orient its front legs and head toward the ground in an instant. And they made another interesting finding: Cats, like many other animals, appear to favor their right-paw side.

OPINIONS

How might the war in Iran end? Stephen Stromberg, an editor in Opinion, brought together the columnists Nicholas Kristof and Bret Stephens and the contributing writer Megan K. Stack to discuss.

Here is a column by Michelle Goldberg on a 31-year-old Floridian’s appeal for conservative young men.

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MORNING READS

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In London. Joshua Atkins for The New York Times

Priced out of Broadway: It has become so expensive to stage theater in New York that producers are testing new shows in London.

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Your pick: The most-clicked link in The Morning yesterday was an A.I. writing quiz.

TODAY’S NUMBER

$170 million

— That is how much Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan spent on an unfinished waterfront compound on an island north of Miami that locals call the “Billionaires’ Bunker.” It is the most expensive sale in the history of Miami-Dade County.

SPORTS

N.F.L.: Steve Tisch plans to transfer his stake in the New York Giants to his children after emails released by the Justice Department showed that Jeffrey Epstein connected him with multiple women.

Soccer: