Hegseth has open contempt for limits on what our military can inflict on foes. He has called for “no quarter” and “no mercy for our enemies.” That means killing enemies who have surrendered—a war crime. His executions of suspected Caribbean drug-runners violate international law—and possibly U.S. law and American military codes as well.
But grasping the roots of this in his particular far-right Christianity makes all this bloodlust more intelligible—and much worse. If Hegseth truly believes his war on Iran is unfolding in accordance with his conception of Biblical law—the highest authority of all—then that explains why he treats all those niggling secular constraints as unbinding on him. Maximum violence and killing of the enemy—who cry out to God, but unlike Hegseth, don’t get an answer back from Him—are affirmatively good.
“It’s not the way somebody who claims to be a person of God—a religious person—should think,” Senator Kelly, who has flown many combat missions himself, told me. War, he added, “is a morally and ethically complicated thing for any person. Any serious warfighter struggles with it.” If we don’t wrestle with this, Kelly said, we’ll “start to lose ourselves.”
