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Opinion
Big Oil's Post-Trump About Face Proves Corporations Won't Regulate Themselves
The sooner we stop expecting companies like Exxon to be voluntary agents of social change, the sooner we can stop the flow of hypocrisy and greenwashing and start working on resolving the social and environmental crises that blight the lives of billions.
Mar 28, 2026
President Donald Trump has long called global warming a hoax, but his sweeping anti-climate agenda has stunned even many of his supporters. Since returning to the White House, he’s withdrawn the US from the Paris Treaty, rolled back critical greenhouse gas regulations, and opened up millions of acres of previously protected public land for oil and gas drilling.
In response, big oil and gas companies have abandoned, without the slightest resistance, the showy public commitments they had previously made to climate transition. For example, BP has slashed green energy expenditures by 70%, Equinor has cut back its renewable capacity targets by almost 40%, and Chevron has reduced its carbon-reduction capital expenditures to about 5% of its total capital expenditures. None of the world’s 12 largest oil and gas companies plan to decrease fossil fuel production, and all of them project that fossil fuels will continue to overwhelm other sources of energy for the foreseeable future, according to a recent evaluation.
Far from a change of heart, this is simply Big Oil returning to form. The petroleum industry has never been serious about curbing emissions, 90% of which globally come from fossil fuels. Indeed, after decades of investment, renewables still account for a minuscule amount—about 0.13%—of total energy produced by the world’s largest 250 oil and gas companies, according to a recent research paper. “I think the article resolves the debate on whether the fossil fuel industry is honestly engaging with the climate crisis or not,” said the paper’s lead researcher. “Their interest ends with their profits.”
Some oil companies, such as ExxonMobil, continue to promise to reduce emissions to net zero by 2050. This appears to align them with the consensus of climate science that this is necessary globally to limit warming to 1.5°C (2.7°F) above preindustrial levels. However, Exxon is typical in designating a narrow target of greenhouse gases to eliminate: only those from its own operations, mainly pumping and refining oil and gas, and from buying electricity generated by fossil fuels. This conveniently ignores greenhouse gases from the consumption of its gasoline and other petroleum products, as well as those of its suppliers—which exceed by four times the total covered by Exxon’s commitment.
We should have realized that companies, like Exxon, that knowingly act in pursuit of catastrophe cannot be trusted to stop of their own accord.
Exxon wants us to believe that running its pump jacks and refineries on solar and wind power puts it on the side of the climate transition. It’s cynical buffoonery. But it’s also a sign that America’s leaders and electorate have been willfully blind. We should have realized that companies, like Exxon, that knowingly act in pursuit of catastrophe cannot be trusted to stop of their own accord. As Shakespeare might have said, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in Big Oil but in ourselves.”
The past is prologue. Ever since the advent of industrial capitalism in America in the early 1800s, corporations have consistently served one master, shareholders, delivering them profits by open competition in free markets. From the start, elites have insisted that corporations must regard financial and social objectives as mutually exclusive, even as a single-minded quest for profitability has pushed the system to its breaking point.
We saw the injustice of this belief in the late 19th century, when “robber barons”—who had clawed their way to the top of an unregulated, chaotic economy—justified poverty wages and harsh working conditions by co-opting Charles Darwin’s new theory of evolution, popularized as “survival of the fittest.” Railroad magnate Charles Elliott Perkins—who embodied Social Darwinism by rising from office boy to president of one of the nation’s largest railroads—declared his creed: “That a man is entitled to a living wage is absurd… [If] you take from the strong to give to the weak, you encourage weakness; therefore, let men reap what they and their progenitors sow.”
Early capitalism was marred by periodic, destructive economic downturns. But over time, government acquired fiscal and monetary tools to smooth the boom-and-bust cycles and soften the hard edges of fierce profit seeking through welfare programs, especially during the Progressive Era (1890s-1920) and the New Deal (1933-1938).
However, the bedrock of the corporate mission stayed solid even as the government built new structures on top of it. During the New Deal, for example, leading industrialists joined the American Liberty League to oppose innovations like Social Security. A League leader, echoing his counterpart six decades earlier, proclaimed, “You can’t recover prosperity by seizing the accumulation of the thrifty and distributing it to the thriftless and unlucky.”
The permanent establishment of a taxpayer-funded social safety net in the postwar period only reaffirmed corporations’ unwavering fealty to shareholder value. The president of the mighty Dow Chemical Company, Leland Doan, wrote in 1957: “Any activity labeled ‘social responsibility’ must be judged in terms of whether it is somehow beneficial to the immediate or long-range welfare of the business... I hope we never kid ourselves that we are operating for the public interest per se.”
The corporate community resisted even when the tide of public opinion turned against the malign Jim Crow segregation system in the 1950s and ’60s. When US Steel was accused of workplace discrimination in 1963, prominent academic Andrew Hacker struck back forcefully: “If corporations ought to be doing things they are not now doing—such as hiring Negroes on an equal basis with whites—then it is up to government to tell them so. The only responsibility of corporations is to make profits, thus contributing to a prosperous economic system.”
Predictably, that same decade, the corporate establishment dismissed the emergence of the environmental movement. In 1962, when Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring shocked the nation by exposing the harm to human and animal life posed by the unrestricted use of pesticides, a chemical industry spokesman responded, “If man were to follow the teachings of Miss Carson, we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth.”
Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize-winning economist and chief economic adviser to Ronald Reagan, famously summed up the unchanging corporate consensus in words still widely quoted today: “There is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits.”
For the most part, investors have held their noses and counted their gains. But starting almost a century ago, in 1928, when the invention of mutual funds opened up the stock market to the middle class, “ethical” funds, as they came to be known, entered the arena. They were marketed to individuals and families who wanted their portfolios to reflect their values, and to asset managers who wanted their clients to consider them good citizens.
It is folly to ask business to do the work of government.
For a long time, these socially responsible funds were a negligible part of the industry because they typically underperformed the market. These funds used a strategy called negative screening—excluding certain “sin” industries, such as cigarettes, liquor, and weapons. Unfortunately, negative screening typically yields lower returns (sin often pays in the stock market!) and greater price volatility, due to limited diversification. In addition, there is no reason to believe that negative screening has any discernible effect on stock prices, so it has no power to compel corporations to reform.
The answer to this quandary finally came in the early 2000s, in the form of a new stock-picking tool called Environmental, Social, and Governance, or “ESG” for short. The seductive promise of ESG is “doing well by doing good”—or getting rich by investing in companies that make the world better. On the back of this dream, capital invested in accordance with ESG principles has grown monumentally, to as much as $30 trillion, about one-quarter of the global total of assets under management.
ESG claims that adroitly managing environmental and social risks will improve profitability and, therefore, stock prices. But ESG only counts risks that are financially material, ignoring all social or environmental harm for which a company faces no financial penalty. As you might expect, this often bears perverse results. For example, cigarette companies kill their customers—you can’t get more anti-social than that!—but smoking is legal, and Big Tobacco rarely faces liability for cancer from smoking. That is why tobacco companies are sometimes awarded good ESG scores and even appear in some ESG stock funds. Likewise, fossil fuel companies, which have historically made high returns and avoided significant regulatory penalties, appear in 80% of ESG funds.Whether it be alcoholism, gambling addiction, gun deaths, climate change, or other iniquities, the damage that companies inflict on society without literally paying for it—or the negative externalities, as they’re called in economics—entirely escapes ESG’s radar.
Worse, the key assumption of ESG—that adept social risk management translates into higher profitability—is fundamentally unprovable. Many studies have attempted to show a strong positive correlation between specific ESG policies, like emissions reductions or heightened employee benefits, and financial metrics, like cost of debt or return on assets. But, as I explain in my forthcoming book on socially responsible investment, very few succeed. In the end, the research only allows you to draw one conclusion with confidence: that it is simply not possible to precisely define ESG practices at a granular level, measure their direct effect on financial performance, and compare these results validly across different companies.
But that does not stop ESG rating agencies from trying. ESG ratings have grown into a big business, since fund managers pay dearly for them to guide their stock selection. The rating agency reports are typically long, detailed, and quantitative—but completely unreliable. These reports may look sober and professional, like credit rating reports from companies such as S&P Global or Moody’s. But credit rating agencies are analyzing real financial values to assess a tangible corporate quality: its ability to repay its debts. The numbers are verifiable and have a proven relevance to the projected outcome. That is why credit ratings have a 90% correlation; S&P and Moody’s seldom disagree substantially on a company’s rating.
ESG ratings, by contrast, are all over the map, with a correlation of only 40%. Analysts point to three key factors: the rating agencies choose different terms to measure; they measure them with incompatible methods; and they use contradictory methodologies to combine these idiosyncratic measurements into final ratings. These discrepancies build on each other to produce wildly variant final scores. A company denigrated as a dog in ESG terms by one rating agency may be lauded as a star by another.
If ESG is just an illusion, and negative screening a disappointment, how should investors direct their capital to make corporations more socially responsible? The answer is, they shouldn’t bother.
In the game of capitalism, the role of corporations is to make as much money as they can, while playing by the rules. The role of the state, as we learned in the Progressive Era and the New Deal, is to revise the rules periodically to ensure fair play and a socially positive outcome—without hobbling the players. We do want fierce competition, but we don’t want to destroy the playing field in the process.
Today, corporate profits are at their highest proportion of GDP in 50 years, while wages are at their lowest. Overall, income inequality has never been greater, not even in the Gilded Age, the period immediately preceding the Progressive Era, when many toiled in Dickensian poverty while a few, like the Vanderbilt dynasty, flaunted their extravagant and lavish lifestyles. Now, like then, the people, with justification, are losing faith in the system.
Like our Progressive forebears, we will have to revamp capitalism in order to rescue it. Key objectives must include rebuilding organized labor, since what benefits unions benefits the middle class. We’ll also need to break up de facto corporate cartels that stifle competition, squeeze wages, and lower productivity. To counter the existential threat of climate change, we need a cap-and-trade system that makes industry a partner in carbon reduction, not an opponent, and can serve as a model for other public-private partnerships.
It is folly to ask business to do the work of government. The sooner we stop expecting companies like Exxon to be voluntary agents of social change and acknowledge that they are amoral profit machines, the sooner we can stop the flow of hypocrisy and greenwashing and start working on resolving the social and environmental crises that blight the lives of billions. The path to greater corporate social responsibility leads through the voting booth and the statehouse, not through Wall Street and the C-suite.
This piece was originally published by The MIT Press Reader.
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What I Saw in Cuba? Resilience
What I witnessed over those days was not the Cuba of Western propaganda. It was a country enduring a 66-year siege, and a people who, against all odds, continue to build, create, and care for one another.
Mar 28, 2026
I traveled to Cuba this month. As a Cuban American, that sentence carries the weight of longing born of an estrangement from my roots. For much of my life, Cuba existed as a distant story, a place I knew only through descriptions from my father.
I was there as part of an international solidarity convoy; over 500 representatives from more than 30 countries, united by a simple conviction: No country has the right to strangle another simply because it chose a different path. I cannot stand by while the island of my family’s heritage is suffocated.
What I witnessed over those days was not the Cuba of Western propaganda. It was a country enduring a 66-year siege, and a people who, against all odds, continue to build, create, and care for one another.
A Public Health System Under Siege
One of the most profound visits was to a neighborhood polyclinic in Havana. These clinics are the backbone of Cuba’s public health system. Doctors live on the second floor, above where they work. They know every patient in their community by name. They treat physical and psychological health alike, and they embody a model of care that prioritizes people over profit.
I saw a people who are already free—free to define their own destiny, even under the weight of a siege designed to break them.
But the doctors I met face heartbreaking constraints. They are highly trained professionals who know exactly what their patients need, and they know those treatments exist. Due to the US embargo, they cannot access them. Imagine living every day with the skill to heal and being blocked by a political and economic siege.
We brought what we could: 6,300 pounds of medical supplies delivered by our delegation, including neonatal equipment, analgesics, catheters, and other critical materials, valued at $433,000 and more still in unquantifiable amounts stuffed into carry-on and personal bags, sacrificing space for our own clothing and toiletries. Cuban doctors told us about nights when the power goes out, and medical students rush to respirators, manually pumping air for hours until electricity is restored. They save lives with their bare hands.
Community and Creativity in the Face of Scarcity
Everywhere we went, I saw people organizing to survive. In a central Havana neighborhood, we helped refurbish a crumbling playground. We brought paint and new swings. A local man who maintains the park offered to take the swings down each night so they wouldn’t be taken, then put them back up each morning for the children. That kind of mutual care was everywhere.
We met an artist named Lázaro, who collects garbage and old newspapers to create recycled art. He teaches neighborhood kids to do the same. His studio walls are covered in vibrant works that double as expressions of resistance and creativity.
On another day, we set up a table outside Lázaro’s studio with construction paper, markers, and glue. Children from the neighborhood gathered to write letters to pen pals in Singapore. I translated letters from English to Spanish, helping each child respond in Spanish and illustrate their replies. Parents played drums and danced while the kids painted and wrote. It was a profound moment of cross-border connection—kids building relationships through art and translation, across continents, across the blockade.
For Cuban Americans, there is something like a spiritual cost that is paid for quietly going along with the status quo in the face of the many injustices we have grown up with for decades, which seem to us to have intensified in these recent years. But the children I saw in Havana had their spirit intact.
The Human Cost of the Embargo
The blockade is not an abstraction. Poverty is real. I gave what I could, but as individuals, we cannot meet that scale of need brought upon by a systemic crisis created by US policy.
I came back with a deeper sense of what solidarity looks like: showing up, listening, sharing what we can, and staying connected to the work.
Rolling blackouts on the island are the result of a strategy of siege warfare intensified in January. Cuba has gone months without fuel imports due to sanctions and naval pressure aimed at stopping oil shipments to the island. Power plants cannot run consistently. Hospitals cannot perform necessary surgeries. Water pumping infrastructure fails. This is not a natural disaster. It is man-made violence; it is a silent war.
And yet, the Cuban people do not wait for rescue. They organize. They adapt. They invent.
Solidarity and a Call to Action
As a Cuban American, I have heard all my life that Cuba is a country ruled by capricious autocrats. That the Cuban people are waiting to be liberated. That their strangulation is meant to help them. But standing on that island, talking to doctors and artists and children and families, I saw something else entirely. I saw a people who are already free—free to define their own destiny, even under the weight of a siege designed to break them.
Cuba is open to dialogue and investment with respect for its sovereignty. But the US continues to enforce a policy that even much of the world condemns. Year after year, the United Nations General Assembly votes overwhelmingly to end the embargo. Year after year, the US ignores it.
I came back with a deeper sense of what solidarity looks like: showing up, listening, sharing what we can, and staying connected to the work. But solidarity cannot end after a single delegation. We need to break the siege. We need to end this decades-long economic warfare.
Cubans have a right to self-governance. They have a right to medicine, to electricity, to water, to dignity. My father chose to leave Cuba in the face of poverty brought on by a cruel sanctions regime. I chose to return for the same reason.
Let Cuba live.
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With Tacit US Approval, Israel Pursues the 'Gaza Model' in Lebanon
All indications point to a new and brutal type of war in Lebanon—one that could drag on even if the war in Iran comes to a close.
Mar 28, 2026
Israel’s defense minister said in a statement this week that Israeli forces are working to implement the “Rafah and Beit Hanoun model” in southern Lebanon, sparking fears that Israel is planning to flatten entire towns in an attempt to defeat Hezbollah once and for all.
As Israel prepares its forces for a full-scale invasion, the intensity of this new approach is starting to come into focus, even as most of the world’s attention has stayed on the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran. Israel’s war in Lebanon has already killed more than 1,000 people in a country of just 6 million. All indications point to a new and brutal type of war in Lebanon—one that could drag on even if the war in Iran comes to a close.
Ahead of a broader ground campaign, Israel has mandated that civilians leave large swathes of territory in southern Lebanon and some neighborhoods of Beirut, which has faced waves of airstrikes. Many civilians have heeded these calls, leaving nearly 20% of the population displaced. But, now that Israeli forces have destroyed all bridges across the Litani River, which separates southern Lebanon from the rest of the country, remaining residents will have little choice but to bunker down.
As with Hamas in Gaza, Israel’s strategy is unlikely to succeed in completely destroying Hezbollah, according to Middle East analysts. An extended occupation, as Israel is now threatening to pursue, could instead provide a lifeline to Hezbollah just as public opinion in Lebanon had begun to turn decisively against it. Such a result would represent a significant setback to US and Israeli efforts to disarm the militant group.
The campaign comes as the Lebanese government has started to seriously crack down on Hezbollah, including by declaring the group’s armed wing to be illegal. But a long, brutal occupation could help the group rebuild its domestic legitimacy.
If history is any guide, a sustained occupation may even push Hezbollah’s skeptics in Lebanon to join the resistance, according to Thanassis Cambanis of the Century Foundation, who has written extensively about Hezbollah and Lebanese politics.
“Israel and some of its supporters have forgotten that they don't have free rein to do whatever they want by force,” Cambanis said. “Countries can and do fight back.”
‘Burn the Lawn’
Hezbollah was forged in the crucible of Israel’s first military campaigns in Lebanon. In 1982, as the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) invaded Lebanon for the second time in four years, Shiite leaders in the country’s south formed militias that would eventually coalesce into the militia-cum-political party that has in many ways defined the course of Lebanese politics ever since.
Hezbollah has never commanded the support of most Lebanese people, but it has earned a sort of begrudging respect through its military successes. Most notable among these was the insurgent campaign that drove Israeli forces out of Lebanon in 2000, ending Israel’s two-decade-long campaign in the country.
The pause in hostilities didn’t last long. In 2006, Hezbollah launched raids against Israeli soldiers along Lebanon’s southern border in an attempt to force Israel into a prisoner exchange. Israel, determined to restore deterrence with its northern neighbor, invaded the country and debuted a new military doctrine that would later become known as the Dahiya doctrine.
The Israeli campaign, meanwhile, has led to extensive civilian harm, including at least 15 attacks on paramedics and first responders.
The Dahiya doctrine relies on disproportionate force, including the destruction of civilian infrastructure, to deliver lasting setbacks to Hezbollah and incite Lebanese popular opinion against the group. In the 2006 war, this meant flattening large parts of the Dahiya neighborhood of Beirut, which is largely Shia. After Israel withdrew, both sides declared victory. Israeli deterrence held strong until after the October 7 attacks, when Hezbollah launched rockets into northern Israel.
Israel pursued the Dahiya doctrine again in its 2024 invasion of Lebanon, destroying buildings and infrastructure across the country. Hezbollah and Israel reached an agreement to stop hostilities after about two months of war, but Israeli forces have maintained a steady campaign of air strikes ever since.
Now, following Hezbollah’s decision to fire rockets at Israel after it killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Israeli leaders appear determined to move up the escalation ladder and pursue a Gaza-like campaign in Lebanon. These attacks are “unlike anything we’ve seen before” in the country, according to Cambanis. “Instead of ‘mowing the lawn,’ they want to ‘burn the lawn.’” So far, this has meant going after targets like gas stations, bridges and civilian homes.
This strategy has drawn skepticism even from pro-Israel commentators. “Israel will raze all the homes along the borders to flatten areas, apparently in order to prevent threats,” wrote Seth Frantzman of The Jerusalem Post. “[I]t’s hard not to see this as punitive and collective punishment.” Israeli Maj. Gen. Yair Golan, who still serves in the IDF reserves, argued last week that a “deep military maneuver inside Lebanon, without a clear political objective, will drag Israel back into the Lebanese mud” without bringing “real security.”
This higher level of intensity, combined with the long occupation that Israel is now threatening, could “succeed for a time” in degrading Hezbollah, Cambanis said. But “it's guaranteed to more deeply destabilize not just Lebanon, but also Syria.”
Further complicating matters for Israel is the news that Hezbollah has reconfigured its forces for a sustained insurgency. According to Reuters, Iranian military officers have since 2024 helped the militant group redesign its command structure from a centralized force into a decentralized one made up of “small units with limited knowledge of each other's operations, helping to preserve operational secrecy.”
Blowback
The campaign comes as the Lebanese government has started to seriously crack down on Hezbollah, including by declaring the group’s armed wing to be illegal. But a long, brutal occupation could help the group rebuild its domestic legitimacy.
“A prolonged Israeli military presence will likely deepen instability and further weaken Lebanese state institutions,” wrote Nicole El Khawaja and Renad Mansour of Chatham House. “It will also create the conditions for Hezbollah to reconstitute its military capabilities and rebuild popular support.”
Further inflaming the situation are comments from Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who called this week for the annexation of southern Lebanon in order to create a new “buffer line.” Rights groups have also raised allegations of Israeli war crimes, with Human Rights Watch accusing the IDF of using white phosphorus bombs, which cause severe burns and emit toxic fumes, in civilian areas.
In an ideal world, the US would withdraw “any support for Israel's campaign in Lebanon” and force Israel into negotiations.
Hezbollah, for its part, has launched more than 3,500 rockets and munitions into Israel, forcing some Israelis to live in bomb shelters full-time. These attacks have killed multiple Israeli civilians; on Thursday alone, the group fired more than 100 rockets into Israel, killing one civilian and injuring an additional 13.
The Israeli campaign, meanwhile, has led to extensive civilian harm, including at least 15 attacks on paramedics and first responders, according to Emily Tripp of Airwars, which monitors civilians in conflicts. “In the last three weeks we have identified more than 330 incidents of civilian harm,” Tripp told Responsible Statecraft. Prior to Israel’s 2024 campaign in Lebanon and its ongoing operations in Gaza, her organization had “never documented more than 250 civilian harm events in a single month,” she added.
The early days of this latest Lebanon campaign have drawn significant international blowback. Spanish President Pedro Sanchez slammed Israel for seeking to “inflict the same level of damage and destruction” in Lebanon as in Gaza, and United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres said the “Gaza model must not be replicated in Lebanon.”
The United States, for its part, has said little about the war. In an ideal world, the US would withdraw “any support for Israel's campaign in Lebanon” and force Israel into negotiations, Cambanis said. “In practice, we know that the US has greenlit what Israel is doing in Lebanon.”
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The US Under Trump Is Demonstrably the Most Dangerous Nation in the World
Trump's military aggression has displaced diplomacy and everyone on this planet is worse off for it.
Mar 28, 2026
Donald Trump's imperial ambitions and aggressive use of military power push the world toward a perilous future. At this moment in history, when the world actually needs cooperation among nations to confront existential environmental, technological and socioeconomic crises, diplomacy must promote international collaboration in achieving shared goals. Trump's administration, however, has completely abandoned diplomacy as a primary means of resolving international concerns and conflict. Military power is swiftly displacing it as the arbiter of competing interests. In a hostile and militarized international political environment “might makes right” is the operative principle. The consequence of policy based on this principle is international chaos and war.
The Trump administration's foreign policy sends multiple ominous signals to the world. Questions that would seem unthinkable little more than a year ago now are central concerns of the international community. Will the US retreat from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)? Will the US actually attempt to destabilize the economy of its neighbor Canada? Will the US favor Russia over Ukraine? Is Greenland in imminent danger of a US invasion? Is destroying dozens of boats and killing scores of people onboard—all without evidence and due process—justified under international law? Are invasion of another nation and abduction of a head of state an assault on territorial sovereignty and the United Nations Charter? Will billion-dollar seats on a Board of Peace chaired by Trump and displacing UN peacekeeping authority improve the lives of Palestinians in Gaza? Will the US employ tariffs as a universal political tool despite their destabilizing consequences for global economic growth and market predictability?
The hubris and ruthlessness of a leader who forces such questions to the surface, particularly when that leader is the commander-in-chief of the world's most powerful military force, are more than menacing. These leadership character flaws are nevertheless amplified by Trump and Secretary of Defense Hegseth's bellicose and callous use of language concerning war. In discussing the sinking of Iran's naval force, for example, Trump recalled with obvious satisfaction that a general told him that he preferred destroying ships to capturing them “because it's more fun to sink them.” In remarks about Kharg Island, Iran's oil export hub in the Persian Gulf, Trump warned “I'll knock the hell out of it,” and he, too, would do it “just for fun.” Referring without evidence to alleged drug smuggling into the US on boats, he characterized the extrajudicial murders of the boats' occupants as “an act of kindness." He mocked Greenland's military defense as “two dog sleds." Trump offered this justification for invading Venezuela: “They took our oil rights...and we want it back." And, regarding Cuba, Trump declared, “I think I can do anything I want with it."
Further, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth demands that he be called Secretary of War, chief of the Department of War. Hegseth obsessively refers to soldiers as warriors. He gushes over US exploits in the war with Iran. “What it takes to [wage war] with the precision that we do is world class. No one else can do it. And it's world class Americans... the engine of what makes our country great." His predatory instincts and disregard for human suffering are deeply alarming: “This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.”
Elsewhere he describes the American military operation in Venezuela as “spectacularly executed,” claiming it “reestablish[ed] the deterrent effect of the US armed forces." Equally frightening as brandishing missiles and proclaiming that the greatness of America is its use of military force is Hegseth's predilection for religious crusade. In his 2020 book American Crusade echoes of 'holy war' ring sharply: “Do you enjoy Western civilization? Freedom? Equal justice? Thank a crusader,” he exhorts Americans. “ If not for the Crusades, there would have been no Protestant Reformation or Renaissance. There would be no Europe and no America."
In Hegseth's apocalyptic vision those who resist American military dominance are less than human. He casts Iranian leaders as vermin, “desperate and hiding, they've gone underground, cowering. That's what rats do.” His Old Testament wrath and venomous attitude toward Iranians with whom the US was in diplomatic discussion just three weeks ago suggests that he may be at least as dangerous as those he purports to be America's enemies.
In retrospect, regarding the current war with Iran, diplomacy appears to have been “a ruse,” according to Brett Bruen, a former official of the Obama State Department and National Security Council. His view is supported by comments of the Omani foreign minister Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi who mediated the negotiations. Appearing on CBS “Face the Nation” just hours before the US-Israeli attack on Iran, he expressed confidence that “the peace deal is within our reach.” He further emphasized that an agreement could be achieved “if we just allow diplomacy the space it needs to get there. Because I don't think any alternative to diplomacy is going to solve this problem." Later in the interview Al Busaidi explained that there had been a breakthrough in the central issue of the negotiations: “the agreement that Iran will never, ever have nuclear material that will create a bomb.” He then clarified just what he meant. “I think that there is agreement now that this [the enriched uranium] will be down blended to the lowest level possible, to a neutral level, a natural level...and converted into fuel, and that fuel will be irreversible." Then, after the first attacks, the Omani foreign minister wrote on social media that “I am dismayed. Active and serious negotiations have yet again been undermined.”
The determined move away from diplomacy to war reflects the idea that weaker nations need to bend to the will of the United States if military invasion is to be avoided. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is influential in crafting this volatile and repressive brand of foreign policy. Edward Wong and Michael Crowley, veteran NY Times international news reporters who travel with Rubio, contend that a core aim of this is to create client states of authoritarian regimes. “It is regime compliance rather than regime change, a doctrine of destroy and deal." In addition to massive aerial invasion or introduction of ground troops, an overwhelming threat of imminent military invasion or limited military intervention may be enough to exact concessions. This doctrine forces nations into asymmetrical transactions, arrangements where the dominant party (US) dictates the terms. The military action against Venezuela, the abduction of its president and now the pressure to compel new leadership to facilitate favorable oil concessions illustrate how full-scale military invasion underway in Iran may not always be necessary to achieve Rubio's and Trump's desired results.
The Trump administration's campaign against immigrants in the US and international migration in general and its commitment to the defense and spread of Western values and civilization drive the ever-present specter of war. They are now both the national and international agenda of the United States. A militarized crusade, as discussed above, is an integral element of American foreign policy. These imperialist and autocratic designs are organic outgrowths of Trump's “America first” political objectives. Trump administration officials and right-wing ideologues court ultra-conservative, illiberal and fascist counterparts in Europe. These hyper-nationalistic, anti-immigrant forces are challenging and destabilizing liberal institutions throughout the continent. In this climate no one, not non-European nations nor traditional allies, can trust a US led by Trump.
The pronouncements and policies of his administration are ever poised for military conflict to advance distorted and politically deranged ideas. The US now is demonstrably the most dangerous nation in the world. Its destruction of Iran, its armed intervention in Venezuela, its threatening of neighbors and allies and its military backing of Israel in Gaza, Iraq, Lebanon and beyond are just the beginning of a future that will haunt the world and Americans for generations. To mitigate the horrendous suffering Trump's administration is inflicting abroad as well as at home, to turn back his pursuit of authoritarian power and to salvage the humanity of this nation, US voters must overwhelmingly reject Trump's political supporters seeking office in the 2026 elections.
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