A Tale of Two Peters

Hegseth and Beinart are opposites with a common view about ethics and power

What do Secretary of Defense War Pete Hegseth and Jewish anti-Zionist intellectual Peter Beinart have in common? They both seem to believe that wielding power and behaving ethically are incompatible. And they are both thoroughly and self-sabotagingly wrong.

Making that claim about Hegseth probably won’t surprise very many readers. According to reporting in The Washington Post, he is responsible for an order to “kill them all” in the context of a strike by a Navy SEAL team on a boat off the coast of Trinidad that our government claims was running drugs. This order was interpreted as a demand that there be no survivors, so after the first attack on the boat, a second missile was fired to kill survivors who were spotted clinging to the wreckage. (I specify that it was “interpreted” that way because is not yet clear whether Hegseth himself specifically ordered the follow-up strike, or, as officials are currently claiming, whether he ordered a strike that would kill everyone on board but did not specifically order a second missile be fired to kill the survivors.) An order to give no quarter is flagrantly and unequivocally illegal, to the point where it is used as an example in military training of the kind of order that officers are obliged to disobey regardless of its provenance.

Assuming the reporting is correct, then Hegseth gave an order to commit a war crime, and did so in a context where, for lack of a better way of putting it, there was no reason at all to give such an order—such as in the famous hypothetical of torturing someone to find the location of a ticking time bomb. That those kinds of scenarios quickly become a justification for more widespread violations of the laws of war is something we learned the hard way in the mid-2000s. But in this case, no one that I’m aware of has even made the argument from necessity. So I presume that, in fact, the point of giving the order was just to establish that going forward this kind of thing is going to be part of the job for soldiers and sailors—that is to say, the illegality was itself the point. I doubt anyone in the military believes that, if they disobeyed a flagrantly illegal order, that choice would be anything other than career-ending. So by giving such orders, you drum out people unwilling to obey, and make the remainder dependent on your personal authority for their continued freedom (since the pardon power is the only thing that assures they will be exempt from subsequent prosecution for having committed war crimes).

The political purpose of such an order, meanwhile, is essentially trolling: anyone who raises an objective will be mocked as weak and a loser simply for saying that there are such things as laws and ethical guidelines for behavior. I’ve written before about the gutter Nietzscheanism underlying this phenomenon, and specifically espoused by Hegseth: the belief that reestablishing manliness requires breaking both the law and ethical rules because in our purportedly feminized era one can presume that anyone who cares about such things only does so because he is pussy-whipped. That’s basically the message of Hegseth’s children’s book stunt in a nutshell. If you’re not one of the people who believes this, it should be obvious why it is horrible—and why it’s incredibly ominous if it proves politically effective. Even if you are a person who believes this, though, it should be obvious that, at least in the short term, you’re tossing ethics overboard—which is to say: doing things that you yourself think are wrong—in the service of a larger effort to reshape society.

What may not be obvious is that the choice to behave this was also directly reduces your own power, which is to say America’s power. I don’t just mean that behaving ethically attracts allies to fight alongside us while committing crimes repels them, though that’s true, or that treating the wounded and incapacitated enemy properly encourages enemies to surrender in hopeless situations, while picking them off encourages them to fight to the death, though that is also true. It’s also that orders to commit crimes discourage honorable people from continuing to serve. Most members of the military do not want to commit war crimes, and most of those are not “woke” or otherwise dismissible as not being the kinds of “warriors” you’d want around anyway. If it becomes clear that a career in the military is becoming akin to a career in the mafia, then a lot of the most capable potential officers will, quietly or noisily, seek other careers. In their place, you will attract people who want the job for less-honorable reasons, including outright corrupt ones. Honor is an extremely powerful motivator in the military, perhaps the most powerful one. That’s why a politicized military will reliably perform worse than a professional one, something that folks on the right understood perfectly well when the shoe was on the other (left) foot. In that sense, any effort to break the military free of its ethical moorings isn’t just a crime; it’s a potentially catastrophic mistake.

But what about Peter Beinart? How can I possibly compare him to Hegseth? Aren’t they the exact opposites of each other?

Well, the flip side of believing that to be truly powerful you must be unethical is the belief that to be truly ethical you must be powerless. Beinart has been accused of seeking powerlessness for many years as he drifted from liberal Zionism to non-Zionism to anti-Zionism, and, while generally disagreeing with him on the specifics of his political views, I’ve also defended him from that broader charge, mostly because I felt like he deserved the benefit of the doubt, and because saying his views were motivated by a desire for Jewish defenselessness struck me more as an attempt to prevent engagement with him than a refutation of his views.

I can’t defend him anymore, though. Not after this post:

The rhetoric, reminiscent of Maoist self-criticism, should be familiar from the “peak woke” era. Beinart did something—speaking in Israel at Tel Aviv University—that certain Palestinian groups have declared unacceptable. For him to remain an “ally” in good standing with these groups, he had to not only say that in retrospect he thinks the decision was a mistake, but to apologize, acknowledge the harm he caused, and ask forgiveness. We’ve seen this kind of thing before—but I wonder if we fully understand what it implies.

While it takes the form of an acceptance of responsibility, what it implies to me is a complete abdication of responsibility in the sense of imputing value to being an individual with individual judgment for which one is responsible. The “harm” that Beinart supposedly did is simply that he pursued a different political strategy than these organizations, one premised on engagement rather than boycott. Their view, clearly, is that if you don’t toe their line then you are, in some sense, an enemy rather than an ally. Beinart, in so many words, is accepting that view, and accepting, therefore that their judgment will and must overrule his own.

I happen to think that this approach is phenomenally counterproductive, whether it is practiced by Zionists or by anti-Zionists or by pretty much anybody else. You make progress by engagement across difference, not by anathematizing difference or by pretending differences don’t exist. But leave my views aside; leave aside whether Beinart has helped or hurt the cause he purports to have devoted his intellectual life to by acceding to this line and publicly recanting his prior deviationism. What has he done to himself?

The implication of his statement, which I doubt he has absorbed, is that future interlocutors should no longer assume that Beinart is speaking for himself, communicating what he has come to believe through an independent process of thought, but rather that he is speaking an approved line that he has checked with those in a position to dictate before articulating it. Yet the only power Beinart ever had was precisely the power of his intellectual independence, the fact that he was willing to reject a political line that he had been raised in and taught and had done what he could to further propagate in his early years as a writer, and instead think for himself. His apparent conviction that he must not exercise that power for fear of doing “harm” says much more about his true views about power, and whether it can be exercised ethically, than anything he has ever said about Zionism or Judaism. And now I can’t help but read it back into those views as well.

A view of power that sees it as incompatible with any respect for law and ethics is obviously one that will trash both law and ethics. But if you follow it, you will ultimately destroy the foundation of your power as well. (Beinart would probably say that this is precisely what is happening in Israel today, and I might well agree.) The same is true for an ethics terrified of the exercise of power, though. It will obviously and directly destroy your own power, but in doing so it will also destroy your ability to act ethically or achieve ethical goals. It turns you into a supplicant at the table of those who are willing to use power, to whose consciences you have surrendered your own in order to avoid the burden of ethical choice. And what makes you think that once you have surrendered your conscience to them, those people will prove any less corruptible by that fact, any less willing to throw ethics in the garbage because that feels like power to them, than the people you once broke with because of their moral failings and corruption by power?