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Tuesday, 6 October 2026dailybeirut.com
World
US War Secretary Pete Hegseth's rhetoric and policies are sparking debate over their alignment with traditional American conservatism, which historically viewed war as a threat to civilization rather than an end in itself.
The positions of US War Secretary Pete Hegseth and his rhetoric on war have raised questions about the extent to which his approach aligns with American conservative traditions, given a long intellectual legacy that viewed war as a threat to civilization and liberty, not as an end in itself, according to "The American Conservative."
Hegseth announced this week the creation of a new Office of Religious Affairs within the Department of Defense, stating that the department is "wearing, if you will, the full armor of God," adding that while the United States is fighting a "material war," the "real battle is spiritual," in his words.
Hegseth added: "God is good. Evil is not," emphasizing that the US military must understand the difference between them.
Experts believe this religious rhetoric is not problematic in itself; invoking God or faith in military and civil affairs has a long presence in American history, but Hegseth's positions coincided with other stances regarding war.
A previous statement he made in March, saying: "No quarter, no mercy for our enemies," raised concerns among legal experts about the possibility that it was a hint at war crimes.
Hegseth's foreign policy positions have also been linked to a version of Christianity with a "Crusader" character, and to the theology adopted by his very conservative evangelical Reformed church, which sometimes conflicts with the positions of other Christian churches.
Critics rely on the ideas of the late conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet, who said in a speech delivered in 1979 that "war represents, above any other force in history, the basis for the centralization and aggregation of social and economic systems."
Nisbet added that a conservative cannot "enjoy war, let alone seek it out" due to the militarization of social and civic spheres that accompanies it.
Russell Kirk, who was a contemporary and friend of Nisbet, believes that the traditional conservative view of war and peace rests on considering war a factor that undermines civilization, not its primary mission or main cause.
Kirk said that "civilizations do not hold together by force of arms, but by fine threads of moral and intellectual principles."
The conservative aversion to war extends across centuries. Edmund Burke, whom Kirk described as the "father of conservatism," was quoted as saying that war "does not leave the nation where it found it."
In the context of the French Revolution, Burke considered the American Revolution conservative, while James Madison, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, said that war is among the most feared enemies of true liberty; because it involves and develops the seeds of all other forms of threat, and no nation can preserve its freedom amidst continuous war.
About two centuries later, Robert Taft, a figure of the Old Right, said that history shows that peoples, when given the opportunity to express themselves, usually choose peace, and that arbitrary rulers are more inclined to prefer war than peoples.
American writer H.L. Mencken also wrote in the first half of the twentieth century that wars rarely arise from spontaneous hatred between peoples; because peoples are generally ignorant of each other and uninterested in what happens outside their borders to the point of planning invasions. He concluded that politicians drive people to kill by stirring up their fears.
