The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has expressed a violent antipathy towards Iran for years in books, Fox News broadcasts, educational videos and a 2018 speech to an Israeli media conference in Jerusalem, a Guardian review has revealed.
In a 2020 book, for example, Hegseth wrote that Iran’s leaders were “actively seeking the military means – especially nuclear weapons – to bring the West to its knees”. And in a 2017 video for PragerU, the hard-right media platform, Hegseth described Iran as “America’s mortal enemy”.
To an Israeli audience that included government ministers in 2018, Hegseth referred to Iran as “the octopus”, with “many tentacles that the Iranian regime has in the world today, nefariously both for Israel and for the United States”, engaged in building “a nuclear capacity which threatened the very existential existence of America”.
Hegseth’s rhetorical attacks on Iran often came in the context of expressions of unconditional and spiritual allegiance with Israel, the country with which the United States is now jointly attacking Iran in an intense bombing campaign that has cost hundreds of lives and brought chaos to the world’s energy economy.
In the 2020 book, Hegseth writes: “You can love America without loving Israel – but that tells me your knowledge of the Bible and Western civilization is woefully incomplete”; “If you love America, you should love Israel. We share history, we share faith, and we share freedom”; and folds Israel into domestic US culture wars, writing: “Israel is enemy number one for both Islamists and international leftists – which is reason alone to love it.”
The comments throw new light on Hegseth’s personal commitment to the current war on Iran, showing him positioning Iran as the pre-eminent enemy of the United States, consistently advocating maximal confrontation with the Islamic Republic, and framing the conflict in the apocalyptic terms of a religious crusade.
The rationale and strategic purpose of the war, meanwhile, have been questioned across the political spectrum in recent days, and Hegseth and Trump have offered mixed messages on the progress and likely conclusion of the war on Iran.
The Guardian contacted the Pentagon for comment but did not receive a response.
Trita Parsi, co-founder and executive director of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, said Hegseth’s history of public commentary on Iran reflects the fact that “in Republican political circles, this kind of anti-Islamic, anti-Muslim sentiments have been pervasive for a very long time.”
On Hegseth and Trump’s conduct of the war, Parsi said: “I think they lost control over this war after four days. They had a plan A. The plan was for the regime to implode after the assassination of the supreme leader. Either implode or surrender. When that didn’t work, they didn’t have a plan B.”
‘America’s mortal enemy’
In the book American Crusade, published in 2020, Hegseth places Iran alongside al-Qaida and Islamic State as an existential threat to the United States and its allies.
In a chapter titled “Islamism: the Most Dangerous ‘Ism’”, Hegseth lumps groups and states who adhere to different branches of Islam, and who have been at odds with one another, writing: “America is not at war with Islam, but we are always at war with Islamists. Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, the Taliban, Iran, and the likes are the latest manifestations of an Islamist movement that has no plans to ‘coexist.’ They seek land, they seek power, they seek demographic and political advantages, and they actively seek the military means – especially nuclear weapons – to bring the West to its knees.”
In the same passage, Hegseth sideswipes US ally Saudi Arabia, which has been struck by Iranian missiles during the current confrontation, writing that the Kingdom’s “oil money funds radical, anti-Western Islamic schools (madrassas) and mosques across the Muslim world, in Europe, and even here in the United States”.
Elsewhere in the book, Hegseth included a passage that casts Iran as a malevolent force occupying Iraq, attributed to an Iraqi contact whom he identifies only as “Texas Omar”.
“We also saw how Iran wanted to take advantage of the situation, and we needed to stand against their influence. We were willing to die to fight that evil. Die standing,” Hegseth quotes Omar as having said.
Hegseth employed similar rhetoric in appearances as an expert voice in conservative movement propaganda during the 2020s.
In the 2017 PragerU video he depicted the country as filling the vacuum created by the US withdrawal from Iraq, saying: “Iraq’s neighbor to the east, and America’s mortal enemy, Iran, filled the political vacuum, while ISIS brutally exploited the security vacuum.”
‘Iran should be worried today that maybe we will do something again’
During a decade as a Fox News guest, contributor and host, Hegseth exhibited a consistent pattern of advocating belligerence towards Iran.
On 14 January 2014, according to a Nexis transcript of the episode, Hegseth appeared on The Kelly File as a veterans’ advocate, and spoke about Iran’s then foreign minister Javad Zarif having laid a wreath on the grave of former Hezbollah number two Imad Mughniyeh, who was killed in a car bomb in 2008, reportedly in a joint operation by the CIA and the Mossad.
Hegseth used the incident to criticize the Obama administration’s then current interim nuclear deal with the regime, saying the wreath-laying told viewers “all we need to know about the true intentions of this regime”, and attacking the “willful blindness of this administration to believe that somehow now we’re dealing with moderates in Iran”.
He said Zarif and then president Hassan Rouhani, who was often characterized as a moderate, were “the same guys as the Quds force and Hezbollah”, and represented the “same people, same control, same ideology”.
In 2020, Hegseth stridently celebrated the Trump-ordered killing of Quds force commander Qassem Suleimani in a string of Fox News appearances.
On 3 January Hegseth appeared on Fox Business to celebrate the killing and issue what amounted to a threat against further members of the Iranian leadership. “Iran should be worried today that maybe we will do something again. Maybe your second general is next if you continue to try to kill Americans,” he reportedly said, adding: “We are the top dog. You respond to us, not the other way around.”
Days later, on 8 January 2020, after Iran’s retaliatory missile strikes on Iraqi bases housing US forces, Hegseth reportedly appeared on Fox & Friends to suggest that the moment might be right for military action against Iran’s nuclear programme: “Whether we leave Iraq or not should be done on our terms and based on how we stare down Iran and their ability to get a nuclear bomb … right now could be the time to cripple their ability to do it.”
He did not elaborate on what “cripple their ability” would entail before the segment ended.
The Jerusalem speech
In 2018, Hegseth addressed a conference in Jerusalem organised by Arutz Sheva, the Israeli media outlet also known as Israel National News. In his remarks, Hegseth acknowledged the presence of Naftali Bennett, then a government minister, a deputy defense minister, the deputy mayor of Jerusalem, and members of the Knesset. The video was republished by Sheva on 13 November 2024 after Hegseth’s nomination as defense secretary.
While his appearance at the conference and some of his remarks about Israel have been previously reported, the way in which he positioned Iran in relation to the US and Israel has not.
In the speech, Hegseth depicted the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration as treachery. “The Obama administration did everything they could to strike a horrific deal that creates an inevitable path to nuclear weapons, funding the attunes of billions of dollars, the hateful terrorist Iranian regime seeking death to America and death to Israel,” he said.
Hegseth then pivoted to a series of statements on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that went considerably further than mainstream US policy. Hegseth criticized the “so-called two-state solution that still drips off the lips of the intelligentsia in America today”, adding that “if you walk the ground today, you understand there is no such thing as the outcome of a two-state solution. There is one state here.”
He urged his audience to act on the annexation of “Judea and Samaria”, or the West Bank, using the language of the Israeli settler movement.
“Buy the ticket, take your action, do what needs to be done here in Israel, because I truly believe this is a moment where America will have your back,” he said.
Hegseth also advocated for the rebuilding of the Jewish temple on the Temple Mount. This is one of the most incendiary issues in Middle Eastern politics, as that site is home to the al-Aqsa mosque, the third holiest site in Islam.
Framing it as the next in a sequence of Zionist “miracles” following the Balfour Declaration in 1917, Israeli independence in 1948, the Six Day war in 1967, and Trump’s 2017 acknowledgment of Jerusalem as the country’s capital, he told the audience: “There is no reason why the miracle of the re-establishment of the Temple on the Temple Mount is not possible. I don’t know how it would happen. You don’t know how it would happen, but I know that it could happen.”
In the same speech, he dismissed Europe as “a museum soon to be drowned out by radical Islam”.
On Hegseth’s remarks in Israel, Parsi, the foreign policy analyst, said that “it seems to me that a lot of those speeches were made back when it was the politically cost-free or beneficial thing to do.”
He added: “Today, it’s a completely different atmosphere, particularly amongst young Republicans who have dramatically turned against Israel, including young American Republican evangelicals.”
He said that the Trump administration had been influenced by Israeli views, however. “They truly bought into the Israeli view that Iran is a paper tiger. ‘Don’t make a deal with them. Get rid of them. You will be the hero. You will be the president that got rid of the 47-year-old theocracy.’”
‘God also stands with the people of Israel’
Hegseth’s vision of the US-Israel relationship is frequently framed in theological terms that collapse any distinction between American foreign policy and biblical obligation.
In American Crusade, he writes: “God also stands with the people of Israel against their enemies and blesses those who bless Israel,” he writes, citing Genesis 12:1–3. “America should stand with Israel because we honor God and love freedom.”
In his 2018 speech in Israel, in his urging for the expansion of Israel’s borders, he told listeners to consider “the support you have amongst patriotic Americans, amongst evangelical Christians, amongst believers”.
Previous Guardian reporting revealed Hegseth’s advice to soldiers under his command to ignore rules of engagement; his view that the US military may need to “take sides” in a potential civil war; and endorsed the theocratic vision of “sphere sovereignty” in a podcast.
Another previous report revealed the anti-Muslim rhetoric in Hegseth’s published works, including conspiracy theories about Muslim immigration to Europe and false claims about Islamic history. The same book depicts the medieval crusades as a model for contemporary conflict and bears the slogan “Deus vult” – “God wills it” – which is tattooed on Hegseth’s arm.
