Congress vs. Hegseth

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Back in February, when the United States and Israel first attacked Iran, President Trump said that it would be a “short-term excursion.” Now, eight months later, as the war with Iran remains without conclusion, the president and his party are dealing with its consequences. As Vice President Vance put it last Tuesday, when Republicans were ousted from their seats in the House and the Senate—not to mention governor’s mansions and statehouses—in a fierce rebuke to the administration’s policies: “The reason we lost is the war.”

If voters swung Congress to Democrats in response to the war and its effects, what comes next? Democrats have said that they will vote to end the war; they’ve said, with some Republican support, that they will begin impeachment hearings for Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. But after naming the hard-line adviser Stephen Miller, the architect and champion of some of the president’s most aggressive domestic and foreign policies, as his chief of staff, Trump may as well double-down on the agenda he’s chased for the past two years. This week on Radio Atlantic, our staff writers Nancy Youssef and Tom Nichols discuss where the administration goes from here, what options exist to get out of Iran, what to make of Hegseth’s potential impeachment, and how the Defense Secretary has changed the relationship between American democracy and the American military.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Nancy Youssef: The most enduring impact [Pete] Hegseth has had, in addition to the war, is on personnel. These are people with 20, 30 years experience, and then there’s all the impacts you don’t see—the captains and the majors who are looking at what’s happened to those ahead of them and saying, I’m not gonna stick around. That’s years and years of investment that has been lost, and will take years and years and years to replace.

Adam Harris: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Adam Harris, and today, we need to talk about the war in Iran.

Voters cared about the war in this election. An AP poll showed that seven in 10 registered voters wanted to see it end. After Democrats rode a blue wave back to power last Tuesday, Vice President J. D. Vance wrote on social media, “The reason we lost is the war.”

Now Democrats are exploring the legislative tools they have to act as a check on the administration: They have the War Powers Act, they could withhold military funds through appropriations. But as hard-line adviser Stephen Miller takes over as the new White House chief of staff and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth continues to enthusiastically defend his position and the war, the question remains: Where does the administration go from here in a war of their own making?

Joining me to discuss are my colleagues Nancy Youssef and Tom Nichols. Let’s get to questions.

Harris: Tom, welcome back to the show.

Tom Nichols: Thanks, Adam.

Harris: Nancy, great to see you.

Nancy Youssef: Great to be with you.

Harris: Nancy, right after the election, we saw Republicans across the spectrum jump to blaming Iran and the Iran war for their loss. Vice President J. D. Vance quickly tried to distance himself from the conflict, and then Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth released a video in support of the war, saying:

Pete Hegseth: Peace through strength is once again American military policy. Our commander in chief demands it, and so we deliver it.

Harris: What does his reaction tell us about the discord within the administration?

Youssef: Well, Pete Hegseth was the most vocal advocate of this war, not only internally within the administration, but publicly as well, arguing that this was a just fight, that the United States was stopping Iran from having a nuclear weapon—all without releasing key details about what precisely was happening on the ground or at what cost it was coming to the United States in terms of munitions.

And so I think the five-minute video was as much about Iran as it was about threats of an impeachment hearing that Tom Massie put forth before the last session, and Speaker [Mike] Johnson notably relieved Congress so that they wouldn’t have that hearing. There’s at least six charges, some of them related to the war as well as to the boat strikes and some of the other actions that the secretary’s taken.

Hegseth: A disgruntled, defeated congressman, along with all his Democrat allies has also dropped sham articles of impeachment against yours truly.

Youssef: And so in a weird way, the secretary’s sort of conceding that he faced impeachment by putting out this video and saying that the military needed to come to defense and fight the fight. He didn’t say exactly against whom, but there you go. But he launched a very forceful defense for an impeachment that hasn’t happened yet.

But I think more than anybody, he is personally tied to this war because of his advocacy for it. I think if you’re a legislator thinking about impeachment, that video also signaled what he will do if impeached, which is to try to use it as a form of leverage with the president and potentially for his future political career and say that he’s being targeted much in the same way that [Donald] Trump has felt that he got targeted with some of the previous impeachments against him.

And so the question becomes, I think, if you’re in Congress, is this the best way to do it, and is this the best time to do it, particularly if the impeachment itself might not lead to a conviction in the Senate?

Harris: Tom, we’re seeing this post-midterms shakeup. Stephen Miller is the new chief of staff. Pete Hegseth is under fire from Congress. What does the last week mean for what we can expect out of the White House after the midterms?

Nichols: Well, for one thing, the president’s already set the tone: It wasn’t my fault. Had I been on the ballot—which he was, in a way—we would’ve won these things. And so, there’s gonna be a lot of blame-storming going on.

Harris: I guess I should say too: What does it mean for the war in Iran? What does it mean for the White House strategy in the war with Iran?

Nichols: Well, for the war in Iran, that’s really hard to say because, in theory, Miller has told the president that they have to get out. But that requires Donald Trump admitting a mistake, giving a W to the regime in Tehran, because it will survive and just washing his hands of it.

So I suspect that, at least in the short term, it’s gonna be more of what we’re seeing now, that the president acts as if the war is pretty much over. In his interview with Ross Douthat, he said when Ross asked him, What about the strait being closed? And he said, But it’s open.

To which, you know, yes, it’s open because there are U.S. Navy ships right now staying there at great expense and a certain amount of risk.

And I suspect that you’ll have this kind of phony war going on, where it’s neither peace nor war but it’s to get it out of the public eye and somehow be able to claim what Trump has always wanted to claim. Since the first few weeks of the war, when regime change didn’t happen, what Trump’s really wanted is: Give me a way to say that I won so that I can get out of this thing. And of course that wasn’t helped—I mean, to bring it back to Pete Hegseth—it didn’t help that Pete Hegseth, at least until May, was going out there and saying: We’re killing it. We’re winning. We’re going gangbusters.

Important to note that it’s been now six months since the Defense Department has bothered to give a press briefing. And I think that’s what to expect from the war. That there will be stories about a strike here or there, kind of the way maybe—and it’s an imperfect analogy—but kind of the way that the second Iraq war kind of trailed off. You’d open the paper and say, Oh, we struck some targets in northern Iraq, or, Our planes were fired on as they flew over southern Iraq.

But I think that will suit the Iranians just fine. The president again was asked what is in the future, and he said, All those countries are gonna pay every penny that we’ve spent on this war. That’s not going to happen. So, who knows?

Harris: You mentioned the interview with Ross where he’s like, Well, the ships are passing through the strait. The strait is open. And he says it’s at great expense, and he’s like, Well, it’s not at great expense. Nancy, can you talk about the expense to this point of the war and what’s necessary in order to keep it over there, as it were?

Youssef: So the expense is that naval blockade, which is a very heavy military effort. It takes a number of ships. There are two aircraft-carrier groups in the region right now. There is talk of a third one joining in the coming weeks, the USS Theodore Roosevelt, which is currently near Singapore. When you have that many ships in the region, it means you cannot have naval assets in Europe, in Asia, in the area that Stephen Miller’s particularly interested in, the Western Hemisphere.

There just aren’t enough assets to have that kind of lift in the strait and do missions in other places. Moreover, it comes at great risk to not only the ships that are there because the Iranians are targeting them, but ground forces in the region as well, and we’ve seen that happen. And so we’ve seen an extra supplement of air defenses in the region and at the expense again of other parts in the region.

We see this, for example, in the inability of the United States to provide further munitions to Ukraine. The U.S. simply doesn’t have it. And remember, the Iranians are firing cheaply made drones and in some cases even ballistic missiles against the United States. It’s much more expensive, much more costly, much longer to resupply air defense capabilities like the THAAD and the Patriot.

So that’s sort of the immediate cost. But I think Tom’s point is an important one, in terms of where we are in the war.

I think right now we’re seeing sort of three options, in terms of what the president is trying to do. We heard him yesterday say that it was highly unlikely that the U.S. would go back to war, and I think he’s saying that for one of three reasons.

Either it’s a head fake and the United States is gonna resume strikes. Or he thinks it’s part of a negotiation tactic. Or he’s just saying it. But whatever it is, he has signaled he does not want to go back. The big change, though, for the Iranians, is twofold: One, Iran thinks that they have leverage in this conflict and don’t need to make any capitulations. And two, that midterm election has bolstered their confidence and their ability to negotiate.

And so while the president may try to kind of punt making this decision, at some point, both the cost of the blockade to the U.S. military and the Iranians’ unwillingness to hold this position or to stick to it will make that position untenable. There is a clock ticking in all this. And so while the president wants to keep it in the distance, at some point—I can’t tell you when or how—that will not be a sustainable position.

Harris: When we’re back, how the Democratic wins in the midterms might affect the path of the war.

[Break]

Harris: Nancy, Democrats now have an opportunity to do what they said they wanted to do: rein in the war. What are you all hearing now from Democrats, now that they’ve won the election, about possibilities for reining in the war?

Youssef: So I think a couple things. One is the impeachment hearing, because if you have an impeached secretary of defense, that certainly—even if he’s not convicted—that certainly puts a spotlight on the war itself. Because even if it’s not the only reason, it’s one of several reasons, and it requires a reexamination.

I think the second thing you’re hearing is questions about funding for the Pentagon. One of the problems that the Pentagon’s facing now is: It’s running out of funding. Hegseth is asking for $1.5 trillion, and we’ve heard bipartisan concern about that level of spending without getting any transparency, in terms of what’s happening in terms of the war.

Harris: How abnormal is that level of spending, $1.5 trillion?

Youssef: We’ve never had that. So usually, defense spending, if you were to make a chart, it kinda goes up and down. So World War II spikes, then it goes back down. Then it goes back up again for Korea, then goes back down. Then it goes up for Vietnam, then it goes back down.

And then after 9/11, it just steadily increased. And so what we’ve seen is a growing and growing defense budget. What’s interesting is that they’re talking about increasing defense spending while reducing the number of troops in Europe; while reducing the number of troops in the Middle East, potentially; while sort of focusing on this hemisphere, and yet asking for a larger defense budget.

So it’s not just the number, but it’s incongruent with what they’re saying they want to use the Pentagon for. And so they’re running low on funds as it is, and I think Hegseth might be a form of leverage that they try to use to say: If you want us to continue to approve funding, we need to see a change at the top.

The other thing I think you’re gonna see a push for is a lot more access to information that legislators and the public used to have about the conduct of war. We don’t know with any fidelity what the stockpile situation is in terms of munitions, what damage happened to the bases, how much it’ll cost to fix, which bases will be fixed, what that means for the future of U.S. military posture.

How do you continue to have naval forces in the Middle East when you’ve lost the basing access you need to restock those ships and have liberty visits for the troops? Very basic questions haven’t been answered. And I think one of the things you’ll see, if nothing else, is a push for more of that.

Now, whether they get it is something else because there’s been a real tension between the Hill and the secretary. But those answers, I think, are necessary to understand and really hold the department accountable for its conduct of the war. You can’t do it if you don’t have basic facts about what it’s done so far and at what cost.

Harris: Earlier this month, Military.com released a poll saying that 53 percent of active service members say they want to separate from the military sooner because the military is becoming more politicized.

This is a lot. Tom, how is the administration affecting this decline in morale among service members?

Nichols: From the first day of his first term, Donald Trump has attacked the traditions of American civil-military relations. All presidents have done—you know, when they show up at military academies or they go to a military base ostensibly for a nonpartisan event—all presidents skate that line every now and then because they like to have the military as kind of a backdrop to what they’re doing.

Donald Trump has left that line in the dirt miles behind him. He has tried actively to tell the military: You are a constituency of the Republican Party and of my support group personally. You are part of me, rather than America. And that hurts morale. I taught for 25 years at the Navy War College, and I taught hundreds of officers.

And they all have very—you know, these are men and women of strong political opinions. Have a drink at the O Club, the Officers’ Club, you’ll hear them. But in a way, they took great pride in what I always called the “miracle” of American civil-military relations, which is that we are the most powerful military in the world, and yet no threat to our democracy whatsoever.

I think people don’t realize how amazing that is: that a massively powerful military that is absolutely contained within the democratic structure of a large and vibrant and diverse country. And I think that, for many of them, the military is a refuge from politics; that when they go to work and they fly a helicopter or, they’re leading PT, whatever they’re doing, it’s not political.

They’re one organization, one mission. And Donald Trump has really divided them about that. And when you start introducing that suspicion—about promotions, about people kind of getting the side eye because of something you might have said—that turns us into a Soviet military, not an American military. That turns us into a Third World military. And that serves Donald Trump’s purposes just fine because, again, he wants the military to be actively engaged in politics.

I wrote a piece a while back where I was sort of desperately yelling for somebody to do something about Trump going to Fort Bragg and saying, Come on, let’s all talk about how much Joe Biden sucked.

And I said, “Where’s the Army chief of staff? Where’s Randy George?” And of course, Randy George probably—I never spoke to General George about it, but he was soon to be fired. And I think that’s the other problem with morale, is that all of these men and women are looking up the chain and saying, All the day that I do things—I was never in the military; this is something I learned from observing and talking with officers over a quarter of a century—that they look up the chain and they say, Whatever happens in politics, we have this very stable community, this very stable chain of command. People are promoted; they retire; they come up the ranks.

When Pete Hegseth inserts himself into those processes and says, All you people on this promotion list, you’re fine except for you, you, you, and you, and those four people are Black, female, disfavored groups in Hegseth’s eyes, because he thinks they were DEI hires, people start to wonder: How stable is that chain of command? What’s happening here?

And so it doesn’t surprise me at all that a lot of people would say, You know what? If I’m going to be living in a very politicized, messed-up situation where people are promoted because of politics or demoted because of how they look, I could do that and not have to wear uncomfortable boots every day.

And I think that’s really unfortunate. I think the damage to the civil-military relationship in America is a lot deeper than—we’ll realize in a few years just how much Pete Hegseth has damaged the institution of the United States military.

Youssef: You know, it’s funny: The question you were asking about the politicization of the military, it actually ties to the Iran war as well, because when you tell people that your promotion is contingent on your loyalty, politically, or your loyalty to the president or the perception [of] that, what it leads to is people less willing to give their best military advice, which they are supposed to do.

They’re not supposed to just salute and follow orders, whatever they are. They are supposed to bring forth their best military advice, and I think you saw that in the run-up to the decision to launch these strikes on Iran. So many people had been fired or demoted or pushed out—an unprecedented number—that the lesson people took was not to give their advice, but to salute even when they thought maybe the decision was less than ideal, because to do otherwise risked their jobs, and they’d seen their predecessors leave before them.

Moreover, the people who came in afterwards often had less experience than those before them because the system was not designed for this many people to be fired in this way. And so younger and younger people were coming up the chain.

The only thing I want to add—and I think it’s an important thing to note—U.S. service members do not take a personal pledge to a person or a president. They take an oath to defend the Constitution, and that is by design because we as a nation have decided we don’t want militaries loyal to any person. That has been a basic foundational principle of the United States military that begins all the way to the oath. And the more we’ve deviated from that—in many ways, the Iran war offers an example of the perils of that—that you get a military that offers different advice than it would, if it believed that it was protected.

And so back to your original question: what does Congress do? I’m curious if the Congress, both lame-duck and afterwards, starts to back some of these officers more. I think what’s been striking to me is we’ve seen so many people fired, demoted, pushed out, and, really, almost silenced from the Hill about it.

Even though these guys are signed off by the Hill, we haven’t heard anything. Are there going to be hearings in which some of these fired generals and admirals are called back? Is there going to be a public discussion about the impact of this? Because the most enduring impact Hegseth has had, in addition to the war, is on personnel. These are people with 20, 30 years experience. And then there’s all the impacts you don’t see—the captains and the majors who are looking at what’s happened to those ahead of them and saying, I’m not gonna stick around. That’s years and years of investment that has been lost, and will take years and years and years to replace.

Harris: How big of a deal would it be if Defense Secretary Hegseth were impeached?

Youssef: Well, it’d be a huge deal. We’ve only had two Cabinet secretaries in the history of the country impeached, neither one of them convicted. Certainly not the person in charge of the largest government organization, the one asking for more than a trillion dollars in government funding, the one responsible for 2 million troops and part of the chain of command.

It would be extraordinary, and an incredible condemnation of the top civilian at the Pentagon while the United States has forces deployed and a blockade happening in the Strait of Hormuz. And so it would be an unprecedented thing to happen, in many ways. But by itself, it doesn’t—I don’t think—lead to the sort of foundational questions that need to be asked and answered in terms of: What kind of Defense Department do we want, moving forward?

Nichols: It’s a huge deal because Pete Hegseth’s gonna make it a huge deal. A better secretary of defense—and by that I mean almost any secretary of defense—would say, All right, I’m impeached, but we get back to work. You know, life goes on. He would say to the troops: This is not about you. This is something happening in Washington. We’ve got this.

But two things will happen, I suspect. One is it will send a message—and I think this is necessary—from the Congress to a lot of people in the high command, the senior command of the United States, that says: Look, we haven’t forgotten that you’re doing things like extrajudicial murders of people in the Caribbean. Just because it’s off the newspapers doesn’t mean that we, the representatives and the people of the United States, have forgotten that you guys were doing this.

So that’s a salutary effect, because I think it’s been a tragedy that somehow that just went on and we said, Well, I guess that’s just the way it is.

The worst part is that Pete Hegseth will—he’s already done it. He’s going to try to drag the troops into this. These ads where he has himself posing with Stephen Miller and saying, “Stand and fight,” that’s not about the mission of the Defense Department. That’s Pete Hegseth doing an ad for himself that he’s putting out and hoping that the president sees it and doesn’t fire him, but also a message to the troops. It’s us against them. I’m your secretary of defense. These terrible civilian leaders—the ones in the Constitution that, as Nancy points out, that you’re sworn to protect—they’re the enemy now.

And so I think it’s necessary. I think it’s important that it happened. But I think that Pete Hegseth will use it to divide the troops even more than he has tried to in the past. And I think that, strangely enough, that’s a good reason to do it. Because that kind of secretary of defense should be impeached and removed.

Harris: Well, we’ll have to leave it there. Tom, Nancy, thank you so much for joining me and helping us understand this better and sharing your reporting.

Youssef: Thanks for the great conversation.

Nichols: Thank you.

Harris: That’s all for today’s show. This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Mike Pesoli and edited by Kevin Townsend. It was engineered by Miguel Carrascal and has original music by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of podcasts, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

If you like what you saw here, new episodes of Radio Atlantic drop every Monday and Thursday. You can subscribe on The Atlantic’s YouTube page, on Apple or Spotify, or wherever it is you get your podcasts. And if you want to support this work and the work of my colleagues at The Atlantic, you can subscribe to the publication at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.

Until next time, I’m Adam Harris.

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