Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to be Secretary of Defense, appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday for his confirmation hearing where Democrats questioned him about his qualifications for the job, sexual assault allegations against him from 2017, his views on women in the military and other matters having little to do with policy.
Regarding his qualifications, Hegseth told the committee that Trump’s primary charge to him was “to bring the warrior culture back to the Department of Defense” and that “he wants a Pentagon laser focused on warfighting, lethality, meritocracy, standards, and readiness. That’s it. That is my job.”
The committee is likely to vote on Hegseth’s nomination on a straight party line vote and full Senate confirmation appears likely after Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA), who had been on the fence, announced after the hearing that she would support him.
On policy, Hegseth’s replies to Advance Policy Questions indicate no break with the geopolitical orientation set in Trump’s first term and continued by the Biden Administration. Hegseth’s reference point is the first Trump Administration’s 2018 determination that the US had entered “an era of strategic competition” with Russia and China.
“The 2018 NDS (National Defense Strategy) and 2022 NDS have each identified China as the Department of Defense’s pacing threat,” Hegseth said. “I share this assessment and further believe that a Chinese Communist Party fait accompli invasion of Taiwan is the Department’s pacing risk scenario.”
“As expressed in the 2018 NDS and 2022 NDS, Russia presents a significant conventional, gray zone, and strategic threat to the United States and Europe, and acts as a destabilizing force in several other regions globally,” he said further.
Most dangerous of all is that Hegseth is a self-declared fervent Christian Zionist, who advocates the rebuilding of the Temple Mount on the site of today’s Al Aqsa Mosque, the long-standing British strategy for blowing all of Southwest Asia sky high. As for “Christian Zionism,” this has nothing to do with Christianity or Judaism, but is a geopolitical sect set up by British imperialists to ensure an unending, global religious war, as EIR documented in great detail in its Dec. 2000 groundbreaking Special Report, “Who Is Sparking a Religious War in the Middle East?.”
