Tom Nichols

The United States is in the middle of a major war, but that didn’t stop Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Thursday from firing General Randy George, America’s most senior Army officer. George was the Army’s Chief of Staff, and he was cashiered along with another four-star general, David Hodne, and Major General William Green, Jr., the top Army chaplain, in what has been a rolling purge by Hegseth of senior officers—particularly those close to the Secretary of Army, Dan Driscoll.

Americans have been waiting for their president and commander in chief to address the nation and explain why the country is at war. For weeks, Donald Trump has offered only snippets and sound bites about his decision to lead the United States into another conflict in the Middle East; his primetime address this evening was, one assumes, aimed at informing and reassuring the American public.
Maybe he’d have been better off not trying.

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The term virtue signaling refers to an annoying moral peacocking that has less to do with politics than with self-gratification. It’s the dinner guest who feels compelled to comment on the climate impact of every course.

The war in Iran has reaffirmed two truths. One is that the United States is blessed with the most professional and effective military in the world. The men and women of the American armed forces can conduct missions of almost any size with formidable competence, from special operations to seize a rogue-state president to a large-scale war. The other truth is that the Trump administration, when it comes to strategy, is incompetent.

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The United States is at war. Americans, at such a time, might expect their government to speak to them regularly and report on U.S. goals—and casualties—but so far, they have gotten little beyond prerecorded videos of the president and some sound bites from various officials.

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Donald Trump has taken America into war with a country whose population is approximately the size of Iraq’s and Afghanistan’s combined. He has done this without making a case to the American people, and without approval of any kind from their elected representatives.

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American diplomats are supposed to represent the nation, advocate for the interests and policies of the U.S. government, and stay on generally good terms with the country to which they’re assigned.

The longest State of the Union in modern history is now over. Donald Trump held court in the House of Representatives and said little of substance, but substance wasn’t the point. This year, he intended to put on a show, with an array of guest stars and special appearances. He was happy, because he was playing the roles he clearly loves: game-show host, ringmaster, MC, beneficent granter of wishes—and, where the Democrats were concerned, a self-righteous inquisitor.

Harvard University has more than 100 students who are in the Reserve Officer Training Corps. They will get their diploma and then put their life on the line for their country, serving under a secretary of defense, if he is still in his job by spring, who has nothing but contempt for their education and their alma mater.

This story was updated on January 24, 2026, at 8:46pm ET.
The Trump administration has once again immersed the United States in a crisis. The officers who are supposed to be protecting America’s borders have again been unleashed on an American city—this time, Minneapolis. The authorities in Minnesota want the Border Patrol and ICE forces to leave; the U.S. government’s response has been to continue to allow them to operate without any limits.

The United States is a global superpower, and its military trains for war in every domain. During my years as a military educator, I saw American officers wrestle with any number of scenarios designed to challenge their thinking and force them to adapt to surprises. One case we never considered, however, was how to betray and attack our own allies.

President Donald Trump has launched not a splendid little war, but perhaps a splendid little operation in Venezuela. He has captured a dictator and removed him from power. So far, Trump seems to have executed a bad idea well: The military operation, dubbed “Operation Absolute Resolve,” seems to have been flawless. The strategic wisdom, however, is deeply questionable. And the legal basis, as offered by the president and his team, is absurd. Some Americans, and some U.S. allies, are appalled.

Alone in the dead of night, a man can fall into bleak thoughts. In the wee, small hours of the morning, he might think about lost loves, mull over great regrets, or wrestle with the inevitability of his own mortality. But Donald Trump, awake and restless in the Florida darkness, apparently consoles himself by imagining a war of liberation in a Middle Eastern nation of 92 million people.
At 2:58 a.m.

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Christmas has always made me nostalgic, but I have come to realize, with something of a jolt— perhaps because I just turned 65—that my sense of nostalgia is not what it used to be.

Imagine the CEO of a car company telling his engineers and designers that he wants them to make a new line of automobiles. He knows nothing about cars and has no interest in how they’re produced, but he knows one thing for certain: The line will be named after himself. Everyone claps—because of course they do—but no one really knows what comes next, except that the line needs to look sexy and sporty.

The president of the United States just barged into America’s living rooms like an angry, confused grandfather to tell us all that we are ungrateful whelps.
When a president asks for network time, it’s usually to announce something important. But tonight, Donald Trump did not give anything like a normal speech or address.

The report from the Pentagon’s Inspector General’s investigation into Signalgate, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s transmission of the details of a U.S. military option in Yemen to a group on Signal—including, by mistake, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg—have now been released to the American public. Its conclusions are unequivocal and brutal: Pete Hegseth endangered the success of a U.S. military operation and put the lives of American military personnel at risk.

Presidents have always sent people to lead the Pentagon who respect the institutions and personnel of the armed forces, not least because Americans tend to bristle at any sign that an administration does not unreservedly support the men and women of the U.S. military. (Just ask Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, both of whom were castigated for such supposed disrespect.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth apparently thinks that Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona is in the wrong job. Kelly was one of six Democratic legislators who released a video reminding the officers and enlisted people of the U.S. military that they are bound by their oaths to disobey illegal orders.

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In 1949, the German historian and political philosopher Hannah Arendt visited Europe for the first time since fleeing to America during the war. A year later, she wrote an analysis of what she called “the aftermath of Nazi rule.

Just before heading to his meetings with the leader of China, the president of the United States issued some comments about nuclear weapons, or “nuclear,” as he tends to call them. He wants to resume nuclear bomb tests, something no nuclear state except North Korea has done since the last century.

The Defense Department is notoriously picky about films that depict military and national-security issues, and understandably so. Many movies that feature the military get a lot of things wrong, including innocent flaws such as actors who are the wrong age for the rank on their costume, or scripts that invent procedures or terms that don’t exist.

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The winter of early 1981 was a simpler time, a gentler time. Like so many college students, I was watching Saturday Night Live in the living room of my small dorm when the SNL cast member Charles Rocket dropped an f-bomb on live television. I looked around at my fellow students.

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To capture a democratic nation, authoritarians must control three sources of power: the intelligence agencies, the justice system, and the military.

Members of the U.S. military have long had a tradition of giving or exchanging “challenge coins.” The medallions have no monetary value; they come in various shapes and sizes, but most are about the size of a silver dollar, and they carry the symbols and names of military units or commands. Members of those units carry them to give to others as tokens of esteem.

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Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s convocation of hundreds of generals and admirals today turned out to be, in the main, a nothingburger.

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Today, President Donald Trump threw one of the most important tenets of his own foreign policy into a 180-degree turn, reversing course without even slowing down. Trump has always been overly deferential to Vladimir Putin, including enabling the Russian president’s war in Ukraine. Now Trump appears to be signaling that he’s fed up with the Kremlin. But is he?
Trump’s latest policy reversal came after he spoke to the United Nations General Assembly for nearly an hour today.

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You there. Stop what you’re doing. Take off that tool belt and hard hat—let’s see some ID. Why? Because we don’t think you’re a citizen. Now show us your papers.
This kind of behavior by government officials is now legal in the United States.

Donald Trump is a showman who likes flashy spectacles and heated controversies. He has chosen Cabinet nominees for their shock value, attacked famous American universities, mobilized the Justice Department against his political enemies, and sent troops into American cities, fully aware of how much these theatrics would enrage his opponents.
But even in a term marked by political performance art, Trump’s plan to rename the Department of Defense as the Department of War might be a new high—or low.