What foundational philosophy and moral compass do we want our military to be led by?

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Two days after the February 28, 2026 launch of Operation Epic Fury in Iran, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth described the Trump/Vance administration’s version of what this philosophy and compass should look like (we're paraphrasing here, using his own words): The warrior ethos. Lethality. U.S. soldiers are not defenders, they are warriors… trained to kill the enemy and break their will. Regardless of what so-called international institutions and our traditional allies – who wring their hands and clutch their pearls, hemming and hawing about the use of force – say, we wage war on our terms with maximum authorities. No stupid rules of engagement, no nation building quagmire, no democracy building exercise, no politically correct wars.

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We could not disagree more with this grossly under-qualified, ridiculous man.

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His words bring to mind a prescient quote from President Ronald Reagan: “There are some who’ve forgotten why we have a military. It’s not to promote war. It’s to be prepared for peace.” But it was President Franklin Roosevelt who really hit the nail on the head: “A nation that cannot resist aggression is inviting it.”

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Less than 20 months into President Trump’s second term, he had authorized military operations in seven nations – Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Nigeria and Venezuela, where U.S. forces captured President Nicolás Maduro, removed him from power, and declared that the United States would now “run” the country. He threatened to use military force to take control of Greenland; threatened military action in Colombia; pressed Mexico to allow American forces to participate in operations against suspected fentanyl labs; and directed a campaign of lethal strikes against suspected “drug smugglers” at sea that, at the one year mark, had killed at least 227 people in 68 strikes in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific – while providing zero evidence substantiating the government’s claims about many of those targeted (leading to the strikes being heavily questioned by the UN and legal experts).

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Across his two terms, Trump had ordered military strikes in 10 countries – more countries than any other U.S. president in the post-9/11 era. In 2025 alone, the Trump/Vance administration carried out 658 air and drone strikes, nearly as many as the 694 conducted during President Biden’s entire four-year term.

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All this, even though Donald Trump explicitly ran as the anti-war candidate: “Globalists want to squander all of America’s strength, blood and treasure, chasing monsters and phantoms overseas while keeping us distracted from the havoc they’re creating here at home,” he said on the 2024 campaign trail.

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Even after moving back into the Oval Office, President Trump was still hawking that message around the world: “In the end, the so-called nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built,” then going on to ridicule the “Western interventionalists giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs” – – before, just nine months later, launching the largest U.S. military operation the Middle East has seen in two decades.

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One of the smartest things President Theodore Roosevelt ever said was that foreign policy should be an “exercise of intelligent forethought and of decisive action sufficiently far in advance of any likely crisis to make it improbable that we would run into serious trouble.” This approach won him the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating a peace treaty that ultimately ended the Russo-Japanese War.