Hegseth's holy war

Vox

0:00 Pete Hegseth’s “Holy War” It's a phrase I've been seeing around a lot

0:03 ever since the start of the war in Iran which really got my attention.

0:08 The secretary of defense is obsessed with the Crusades,

0:11 Medieval wars where Europeans fought to control the Holy Land.

0:14 Hegseth has two different tattoos that reference the Crusades,

0:17 something that actually came up in his confirmation hearing in 2025.

0:20 It's a tattoo I have right here, Senator.

0:23 It's called the Jerusalem cross.

0:25 It's a historic Christian symbol.

0:27 His book is called American Crusade, and the title of the last chapter is "Make

0:31 the Crusade Great Again." When I studied medieval history in college,

0:35 everyone always made fun of me, saying it was totally irrelevant.

0:38 But clearly for Pete Hegseth, it's very relevant.

0:40 And as the Secretary of Defense for the United States,

0:43 what he cares about has an impact on the fate of the world.

0:46 This most recent war in Iran has killed thousands of people since February 28th.

0:51 And this week, gas prices hit their highest level since the start of the war.

0:54 Even with a cease fire, this conflict doesn't seem any closer to ending.

0:58 So let's take a look at this holy war,

1:01 investigating the actual history of the Crusades

1:03 to see how Pete Hegseth’s obsession with medieval

1:05 history might actually affect US foreign policy

1:08 and the future of the war in Iran.

1:14 Our present moment is much like the 11th century.

1:17 We don't want to fight,

1:18 but like our fellow Christians one thousand years ago, we must.

1:22 We need an American Crusade.

1:24 We Christians, alongside our Jewish friends and their remarkable army in Israel,

1:28 need to pick up the sword of unapologetic Americanism and defend ourselves.

1:33 We must push Islamism back.

1:35 Pete Hegseth wrote that in 2020 when he was a Fox News host.

1:39 But now, in 2026, he's the Secretary of Defense and one

1:42 of the biggest supporters of going to war with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

1:46 Nearly all of Trump's senior cabinet

1:49 members has expressed serious reservations about

1:51 the war in Iran and whether it was an ill advised idea.

1:56 Except for Pete Hegseth,

1:57 who seems to have consistently been enthusiastic about this war to the point

2:01 that Trump has actually referred to it as "Pete's War" And if it's Pete's War,

2:05 then it's important to understand how he's thinking about the war.

2:08 Now, a bit of historical context.

2:10 The Crusades were a series of religious wars in the Middle Ages,

2:14 mainly fought by Christians against non-Christians.

2:16 They were often started by the Pope

2:19 and first aimed at taking Jerusalem from Muslim control.

2:21 But over time, these wars spread to other regions throughout Europe.

2:25 Here's Hegseth's version of that history from his book American Crusade.

2:29 By the 11th century, Christianity was so besieged by Islam that Christians

2:33 had a stark choice to wage defensive war

2:36 and his emphasis on defensive or continue to allow

2:39 Islam's expansion and face existential war at home in Europe.

2:42 I guess how does that sound to you?

2:45 Like nonsense.

2:46 The major claim that he's making here is

2:49 that Islam is the aggressor Absolutely not true.

2:52 100% not true.

2:53 Then he's just kind of very neatly kind of smoothing it over,

2:57 saying that Islam is ontologically, existentially,

3:01 always kind of an aggressive force that attacks other people.

3:05 Hegseth's interpretation of the Crusades as a defensive

3:07 war falls into a common misunderstanding of the Crusades.

3:10 He's trying to say that this these crusaders

3:13 are progenitors of us today on the American right,

3:16 that we need to do this once more.

3:20 It's an more an extreme oversimplification

3:21 of a series of conflicts that lasted centuries.

3:23 The other thing, too, is that, of course,

3:25 Hegseth served in Afghanistan And this matters

3:28 because he's cast himself as a crusader.

3:30 Let's take another look at his tattoos.

3:32 "Deus Vult" is on his bicep.

3:34 It means God wills it.

3:35 And it was a rallying cry of the Crusaders

3:37 in the First Crusade around the year 1100.

3:40 And the Jerusalem Cross on his chest is another medieval symbol.

3:43 These types of kind of evocative symbols,

3:45 both the Deus Vult and the Jerusalem Cross, kind of in combination,

3:50 were not uncommon among American military within that, that that had

3:54 a very specific kind of connotation of anti Islamic feeling,

3:58 Islamophobic feeling,

3:59 and kind of evocative of kind of neo-crusader ideology in that the US

4:04 was carrying out a great crusade against its eternal foe,

4:09 in their perspective, the eternal foe of Islam.

4:12 Here he is addressing Pentagon officials about

4:14 the war in Iran in March of this year.

4:16 Last month I meant to read a prayer which I'm going to read today,

4:20 which I think is fitting given given what's going on right now.

4:24 Let every round find its mark against

4:26 the enemies of righteousness and our great nation.

4:29 Give them wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead,

4:34 unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action

4:37 against those who deserve no mercy.

4:39 Preserve their lives, sharpen their resolve,

4:42 and let justice be executed swiftly and without remorse.

4:45 That evil may be driven back and wicked

4:47 souls delivered to the eternal damnation prepared for them.

4:50 He's casting Iran as enemies of righteousness

4:53 and an evil that must be driven back,

4:55 which is consistent with what he's written about the Crusades.

4:58 He continually refers to the US military having the divine providence

5:02 of God The providence of our Almighty God is there protecting those troops.

5:06 And we're we're we're committed to this mission.

5:09 The fact that there are at least people in the Trump administration's orbit,

5:12 even if not Trump himself,

5:14 were very comfortable with a Christianity versus Islam

5:17 framing of this, I think that's pretty telling.

5:20 if an important cabinet member like Pete Hegseth sees

5:23 the war as more than Iran versus the US,

5:26 but rather as Islam versus Christianity,

5:28 then that presents the stakes of the conflict in potentially dangerous ways.

5:32 I think when people in the 21st century

5:36 evoke Crusade and we're talking about warfare specifically,

5:39 they're talking about kind of a zero sum battle.

5:43 When you get into, military situations in which

5:46 there's only good guys and bad guys,

5:48 it excuses any type of restraints on conduct.

5:50 Because if your enemy is existential, it's irrelevant.

5:54 Like like your job is to kill them, to defeat them in any way possible.

5:57 And this rings true with the kind of thinking we've already seen from Hegseth.

6:00 A consistent theme that we've heard from Hegseth's rhetoric is sort

6:06 of getting the lawyers out of the way the US fights wars,

6:11 about cutting back on sort

6:12 of overly restrictive targeting guidelines, for instance.

6:18 And when you see things like the destruction of the school

6:20 on the first day of the war in Iran that killed almost 200 schoolchildren,

6:24 I think it's fair to ask questions about just how much they were sort

6:29 of pulling back on the amount

6:31 of scrutiny that these targeting decisions were getting.

6:34 And there are some other very real diplomatic

6:37 ramifications towards framing the war in this way.

6:39 And you don't want to be using words like "crusade." You don't want

6:44 to be casting this as a kind

6:47 of, apocalyptic battle between Christianity and Islam,

6:50 because that just feeds into the narrative

6:54 of groups like al-Qaeda and like ISIS.

6:57 And, it has to be said, you know,

6:59 the Islamic Republic of Iran today would love to have

7:03 this be portrayed as as sort of a Christian war against Islam.

7:08 And most importantly, if Hegseth thinks of this war as part of a crusade,

7:12 then violence seems inevitable.

7:14 The nation of Iran is not, you know, the caliphs of Baghdad who existed,

7:19 you know, in the 9th and 10th and 11th centuries.

7:21 Right.

7:21 But to Hegseth that's that's a distinction without a difference.

7:24 There are bad guys over there.

7:25 They are muslims.

7:26 We are Christians.

7:27 They are our enemy in this kind of cosmic war between God and the devil,

7:32 and that means there's going to be violence,

7:33 that people are going to kill other people because of it.

7:35 Thanks for watching.

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Hegseth's holy war

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