Hegseth Says US Military Should Win Nobel Peace Prize “Every Single Year” |
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Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said that the U.S. military should win the Nobel Peace Prize “every single year” because it wages war “the right way” — just seconds after bragging about his reshaping of the military to ensure that officers can carry out “maximum violence” under his chain of command.
In a briefing on the Iran war on Friday, a TMZ employee asked Hegseth if he would consider renaming his “Department of War” to the “Department of Peace,” “since that is what we’re all after.”
Hegseth praised the question, and responded: “You go from [the Department of] Defense to ‘war’ because you want to be proactive about ‘peace through strength.’”
“When you fight a war the right way, the idea is, on the other side, to bring about peace,” Hegseth went on. “The one institution that should win the Nobel Peace Prize every single year is the United States military. Because we are the guarantor of the safety and security of — not just of our country, but of a lot of people in this world.”
Hegseth’s remarks come amid a fragile “ceasefire” in a war that the U.S. and Israel started unprovoked, in which U.S.-Israeli strikes have killed over 3,300 people in Iran, including over 1,700 civilians and hundreds of children, as well as thousands of people in Lebanon due to Israeli strikes. The war continues in the form of the U.S.’s sanctions campaign against Iran, which the administration has expanded despite the ceasefire.
US Killed Children in Iran Using New Missile That Explodes Into Pellets
A deluge of experts on international human rights have said that the U.S. and Israel’s conduct in the war has encompassed numerous war crimes — including President Donald Trump’s threats to destroy Iran’s entire civilization and target civilian infrastructure like power plants.
However, Trump and his administration have a noted fixation with the Nobel Peace Prize, as well as other résumé-padding accolades like crowd sizes. When the temporary ceasefire with Iran was first announced, Trump dubiously bragged again that he had ended another war — this time, a war that he and Israel unilaterally started.
It would be especially ironic to award the peace prize to the U.S. military — one already notorious for the killing of millions of civilians — under Hegseth, who has openly denigrated what he calls “stupid rules of engagement” that exist to prevent wanton slaughter of civilians in conflict.
Indeed, Hegseth’s remark came just a minute after he bragged, in response to another question, that soldiers feel empowered to inflict “maximum violence” under his leadership.
“I want them to feel empowered, to have every authority they need within our rules, within our law, to bring maximum violence to the enemy, because war is violent,” he said. “I want our people to feel empowered so it’s our guys who come home, and their guys who do not.”
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Sharon Zhang is a news writer at Truthout covering international affairs, politics, and labor. She has a master’s degree in environmental studies. She can be found on Twitter and Bluesky.