Fox News personality Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, may be regretting his decision to attend a 2017 conference held by the California Federation of Republican Women. His sexual encounter with one of those Republican women (which happened, as the Wall Street Journal notes, while he was “in the midst of getting a divorce from his second wife after fathering a child with a producer at the network”) led to a sexual assault allegation, and a subsequent hush-money payment, that have together complicated his path to the Pentagon.

But maybe Hegseth should consider this scandal a blessing. If it weren’t for the questions being raised about past sexual transgressions, more attention might be paid to questions that bear more directly on his qualifications to head the Defense Department. There’s the lack of managerial experience in a man who aspires to run the world’s largest military. There’s the fact that he has repeatedly spoken up in defense of US servicemen who had committed vicious war crimes. And then there’s the thing that has gotten the least attention of all but may be the most important of all: Hegseth’s warped views about Islam—views that, if he becomes secretary of defense, could exacerbate conflicts and even create new ones.

In his 2020 book American Crusade, Hegseth argues that Islam “has been at war with its enemies—meaning all ‘infidels’—since it was founded, and it will never stop.” In truth, the Islamic empires of the past—from the seventh century through the early twentieth century—typically included large populations of non-Muslims who practiced their religions in peace, in keeping with Islamic doctrine, so long as they paid a special tax called a jizya. This may not sound progressive by modern standards, but if you compare, say, the treatment of Spanish Jews under Islamic rule to their treatment under subsequent Christian rule, you’ll see that things could have been much worse.

And as for Hegseth’s claim that “all modern Muslim countries are either formal or de facto no-go zones for practicing Christians and Jews”—well, somehow NZN managing editor Connor Echols, a practicing Christian, managed to live in Jordan for a year recently without issue. He even attended church there!

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Hegseth seems to see much of the world’s turmoil as a single great struggle between Islam and the West—a struggle, indeed, that extends into the West. He laments high birth rates in western Muslim communities and argues that Islamists, who he says dominate Islam, hope to “seed the West with as many Muslims as possible” in order to gradually conquer more territory.

If Hegseth becomes secretary of defense, his day-to-day work will be colored by his ideas about Islam. Roughly 40,000 US soldiers are stationed in the Middle East, and the vast majority of them are in Muslim-majority countries. Hegseth’s job would involve important meetings with foreign military leaders, and many of them would be Muslim. (And NATO member Turkey is led by Islamist Recep Tayyip Erdogan.) If Hegseth’s expressed views about Islam are sincere, he’ll have trouble viewing the people he’s meeting with as rational actors. And even if they’re not sincere, they’ll be known to, and not welcomed by, those people. 

There’s a deeper clash between Hegseth’s worldview and his ability to serve American interests. Wisely advising a president on the deployment of force requires a sound understanding of conflict and its causes. If you trace all conflicts involving Muslim nations and non-state groups to some imagined eternal essence of Islam, you’ll miss a lot of important causal factors. Like, for example: grievances over past dispossession and enduring oppression (as with Palestinian Muslims and Christians, whose shared views on Israel, and America’s military support of Israel, must baffle Hegseth); or nationalist reactions against foreign military occupation (as with some attacks on US troops in Iraq); or national security calculations (as with Iran’s support of some attacks on US troops in Iraq).

And as for the home front: Most “Jihadist” terrorism on US soil has been motivated not by the fact that American is a Christian-majority nation but by the perception that the American military has spent much of the past two decades conducting a war on Islam—a perception articulated explicitly and repeatedly by the terrorists themselves in justifying their crimes. It would be bad enough to have a secretary of defense who doesn’t understand this perception. With Hegseth we’d have a secretary of defense whose stated views on Islam feed the perception.

It’s possible that when George W. Bush, in the days after 9/11, called America’s coming war on terrorism a “crusade,” he wasn’t fully aware of the unfortunate historical resonance of that word. But when Hegseth chose to call his book “American Crusade,” he was quite aware of the reference to Medieval wars between Christendom and Islamic empires. He writes, “Our present moment is much like the 11th Century. We don’t want to fight, but, like our fellow Christians one thousand years ago, we must.” He advises readers to “Arm yourself—metaphorically, intellectually, physically… Our fight is not with guns. Yet.”

No, not yet. Then again, Pete Hegseth isn’t secretary of defense. Yet.

Vir: Robert Wright, Nonzero