Perhaps it should come as no surprise that Pete Hegseth, formerly the cohost of Fox & Friends Weekend, has struggled to find his footing as secretary of defense. Still, the extent of the damage he has inflicted on the U.S. military in the past two years is alarming. Hegseth’s fantasies of Christian-nationalist crusades, his juvenile obsession with pull-ups and testosterone levels in troops, his reckless and discriminatory purges of high-level military leaders, and above all his sheer incompetence have left our military not only incapable of winning its current war of choice in Iran, but also increasingly vulnerable in case of future wars of necessity.

Morale and material conditions among rank-and-file service members have worsened precipitously since Trump ordered strikes on Iran in February. Despite the Trump administration’s efforts to hide the truth, this has been clear for months. First, there are the U.S. casualties: eighteen deaths and almost nine hundred injuries, according to some estimates. (The Pentagon has routinely fudged the figures.) Then there is the damage to military assets and infrastructure. Since the beginning of the war, the United States has spent—and lost—far more than the Pentagon’s official estimates report: besides destroying forty-two aircraft and 228 military structures, Iranian strikes have severely damaged the vast network of U.S. bases in the Gulf region, including the Navy’s regional headquarters in Bahrain. The high cost of rebuilding the bases—possibly between $5 and $9 billion, according to the American Enterprise Institute—has led the Pentagon to signal that it might abandon them once the war with Iran is over. That would effectively mean abandoning our allies in the Gulf.

But those allies aren’t the only ones Hegseth and the Trump administration have hung out to dry. As Hegseth lies to congressional committees about the war’s costs and panders to friendly crowds at campaign rallies, he seems unwilling to spare a thought for the men and women who actually defend the United States. The names of two young women killed during an Iranian strike on a U.S. airbase in Jordan on July 17—twenty-eight-year-old Angel Rampersad, an army staff sergeant from Queens, and nineteen-year-old private Isabella Gonzales of Carrollton, Texas—have been removed from the official list of the war’s casualties, and their families have yet to be informed about why. In response to reports that nearly five thousand sailors and marines aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln—deployed for nearly nine months, the longest in recent military history—endured shortages of food and basic supplies like toothpaste and soap, Hegseth blamed Democrats and the media for “misrepresentations.” He also fired the publisher, editor, and a reporter at the government-funded Stars and Stripes for daring to break the story. Military families have long relied on Stars and Stripes for editorially independent coverage and news of their loved ones, but Hegseth judged the publication too “woke,” and so its leadership had to go.

However much the Trump administration attempts to distract the country from its humiliating failures in Iran, the rest of the world is not fooled; both our allies and enemies know that the Iranians have us over an oil barrel and are adapting accordingly. China and Russia, aware that our stockpile of defensive missiles is depleted by about half and will take more than five years to replenish, continue to do business with Iran, bolstering the Iranian regime’s power by acknowledging its de facto control of the Strait of Hormuz. China now has less reason to fear American reprisals should it attempt to retake Taiwan, while Russia may reasonably conclude that the United States can no longer afford to supply Ukraine’s military so generously now that its own is underequipped.

Meanwhile, our allies in Europe and North America have had enough of the Trump administration’s erratic behavior. They have been burned again and again by reckless trade policies, threats of annexation, and tantrums about NATO cost-sharing. Trump’s latest threat of an “Economic D-Day” for Iran is rightly regarded by other world leaders as the rhetoric of a man who has run out of good options. They are no more likely to help him make good on that threat than they were to come to his aid in gaining control of the Strait of Hormuz at the war’s outset.

Hegseth is now busy shifting the blame for this mess to his subordinates and “traitors” in the press, but his days may be numbered. “When President Trump chose me for this position, the primary charge he gave me was to bring the warrior culture back to the Department of Defense,” Hegseth said in his January 2025 opening statement before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Admitting his own inexperience, he asked the senators to take a chance on “someone with dust on his boots,” a “change agent,” a leader who “knows what he doesn’t know”: “[Trump], like me, wants a Pentagon laser focused on warfighting, lethality, meritocracy, standards, and readiness. That’s it. That is my job.” It was a questionable job description, but there can be little doubt that Hegseth has failed even by his own simplistic standards. The blame belongs not just to him but also to the man who appointed him in the first place and to the senators who confirmed him despite his manifest unfitness.

Americans all share in the disgrace of this administration’s disastrous foreign policy, whether we voted for Trump or not. He and his band of truculent lackeys won’t be around forever, but unless change comes soon, we’ll be paying for their mistakes for years to come.