Comments in books, speeches and videos shed new light on defense secretary’s personal commitment to war on Iran
The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has expressed a violent antipathy towards Iran for years in books, Fox News broadcasts, educational videos and a 2018 speech to an Israeli media conference in Jerusalem, a Guardian review has revealed.
In a 2020 book, for example, Hegseth wrote that Iran’s leaders were “actively seeking the military means – especially nuclear weapons – to bring the West to its knees”. And in a 2017 video for PragerU, the hard-right media platform, Hegseth described Iran as “America’s mortal enemy”.
And to an Israeli audience that included government ministers in 2018, Hegseth referred to Iran as “the octopus”, with “many tentacles that the Iranian regime has in the world today, nefariously both for Israel and for the United States”, engaged in building “a nuclear capacity which threatened the very existential existence of America”.
Hegseth’s rhetorical attacks on Iran often came in the context of expressions of unconditional and spiritual allegiance with Israel, the country with which the United States is currently jointly attacking Iran in an intense bombing campaign that has cost hundreds of lives and brought chaos to the world’s energy economy.
