The Daily Populous Wednesday March 11st, 2026 evening edition
Authored by inews.co.uk and submitted by theipaper

This is a salutary lesson for other nations: thuggishness and machismo will not make you stronger

cancel email WhatsApp link share Share bookmark Save

share cancel email WhatsApp link bookmark

The best way to understand the US position on Iran is machismo. There’s no point looking for a strategic calculation – you won’t find it. Donald Trump and his officials have tried several explanations: regime change, nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles and an upcoming attack on Israel. None of them last more than a couple of days. None of them are real.

Machismo offers the only compelling explanation for what is happening here. The Trump administration, like all hard-right governments throughout history, operates on an old idea of masculinity as power. The things it likes – from executive authority to fossil fuel – are male-coded. It demands that men and women adopt traditional gender roles. It has eroded the rights of transgender people, gay men and lesbians. It worships strength and despises weakness.

No one encapsulates this vision better than “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth, the pituitary moron who has unfathomably been put in charge of the armed forces. He has no qualities to speak of. He is perhaps the least complex individual ever given high office. And he therefore provides the best example of the administration’s gender anxiety. He represents the male personality when it is extracted from anything meaningful or decent and reduced to its crudest, most insecure form.

During his time in government, he has translated his personal flaws into the operating manual for the US armed forces. Last May, he said: “Everything starts and ends with warriors, from training to the battlefield. We are leaving wokeness and weakness behind. No more pronouns. No more climate change obsession. No more emergency vaccine mandates. No more dudes in dresses, we’re done with that shit.”

Last September, in what might genuinely be one of the weirdest single moments in American military history, he gathered the nation’s senior defence leaders together and told them facial hair was no longer permitted. “You kill people and break things for a living,” he told the gathered generals, as they sat in baffled silence.

Once the US and Israel attacked Iran, this rhetoric was put on a war footing. “No stupid rules of engagement,” he said, “no nation-building quagmire, no democracy building exercise, no politically correct wars. We fight to win and we don’t waste time or lives. War is hell and always will be.”

Asked about whether Russia was sharing intelligence with Iran, Hegseth replied: “The only ones that need to be worried right now are Iranians that think they’re gonna live.” Speaking about the UK’s reluctance to allow US use of its bases, he attacked allies who “wring their hands and clutch their pearls, hemming and hawing about the use of force”.

We’ve all met this kind of guy before. He’s a man whose sense of self is so fragile that he has to compensate for it through base demonstrations of theatrical virility, like a child rampaging through the living room at bedtime pretending to be a gorilla. We all learned to avoid him long ago. Only in Trump-land would he be considered a sensible candidate for anything.

The problem this type of figure faces is not ultimately moral, but functional. This guy never wins. He always loses. And he loses because his personality is a hindrance to his goals.

This personality type does not plan. In fact, planning is considered distinctly effeminate. Evidence-seeking, briefings, assessments of vulnerabilities, scrutinising your expectations, critically assessing your strategic objectives, using deep domain knowledge to establish geopolitical reality, understanding the motivation of your opponent: these are the qualities which win conflicts. They are what effective militaries do. They are vastly more complicated than thinking they simply “kill people and break things”, as if war were a first-person shooter or a straight-to-DVD Chuck Norris movie.

Now the Trump administration is discovering how limited this idea truly is.

The initial assault on Iran corresponded to Hegseth’s military vision: an assault of overwhelming strength which destroyed Iran’s defences and decapitated its leadership. But now, 11 days later, the Iranian regime is defiant. Reports overnight state that it has turned down two requests from US special envoy Steve Witkoff seeking a ceasefire.

Why the sudden turnaround? Because Iran has deployed an effective retaliatory strategy. It has managed to close the Strait of Hormuz, a key choke-point for global energy transport. It has targeted Israeli and US bases and commercial infrastructure across the Gulf – particularly in Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. These attacks have used handfuls of drones rather than great waves, meaning the Iranians seem to have retained their weapons stock.

They have weaponised the concept of patience and preparation. They are betting that they can bear the pain longer than Trump’s paper-thin machismo. None of this was predicted, because – going by Marco Rubio’s explanation, quickly walked back last week, that Israel essentially bounced the US into joining its own attack on Iran to protect American forces from retribution – there was no planning. And there was no planning because it contradicted Hegseth’s man-of-action instincts.

The pain Iran is inflicting is two-fold. Firstly, it is economic: surging oil prices, plunging stock markets, fears of a return to inflation with consequent interest rate rises, which will dampen future economic activity ahead of the US midterms.

The second is political. After just 11 days, the US is burning through its allies. It has alienated its Gulf partners, who now realise that hosting a US base guarantees an attack but cannot guarantee an effective defence. It has torn up the special relationship with the UK. And it has strengthened China and Russia, who can use its unilateral approach to conflict to justify their own actions in future.

This is what happens when you don’t plan or think; when you act entirely on primitive instincts and the urge to dominate. Hegseth and Trump have reduced the US to the status of a drunk man outside of a pub, starting fights with random strangers, seemingly unaware that the substance which has given him such confidence is also the one which will make him physically ineffective.

It is an embarrassment for a great nation like the US to have given a small man like Hegseth such a prominent role. But it at least provides a salutary lesson for other nations around the world: thuggishness and machismo will not make you stronger. They’ll make you weaker.

And the truth of that proposition is currently being demonstrated, in a particularly painful way, across the Middle East.

IJourden on March 11st, 2026 at 13:59 UTC »

All I know is I spent an entire year in high school learning about the checks and balances of government and I have a lot of questions.

barneyrubbble on March 11st, 2026 at 13:38 UTC »

“You kill people and break things for a living,” he told the gathered generals, as they sat in baffled silence.

Real men and soldiers strive to keep those two things from happening. Hegseth is a child.

debugprint on March 11st, 2026 at 13:33 UTC »

I grew up in a military family and both of my parents were decorated WW2 veterans (Europe). Pete's boasting and overall eSports league mentality is despicable. That's not how leaders talk.