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I have not read Hegseth's book. Have you? Where are you drawing the idea that he is in favor of new wars in the Middle East?
Here he is discussing the war in Afghanistan. His critiques match my own well, and I detect no enthusiasm for further middle-east interventionism. This matches the interviews I've watched of him, and also matches the general attitude toward foreign wars that Trump has been hewing to since his run in 2015, which convinced me to back him. I am fairly confident that Trump will not be starting any new wars in the middle east, and I am extremely confident that he will start less wars in the middle east than Kamala would have.
I do not know where your confusion over Trump's intentions come from, but I do not share them. I've heard this sort of FUD during Trump's first term, re: John Bolton. Bolton got no new wars, and his political influence seem to me to have taken a precipitous nose-dive under Trump.
His critiques about Afghanistan were pretty unsubstantive. Obviously the Afghanistan war was unwinnable, but he didn't acknowledge whose fault it was that we were there in the first place. He didn't acknowledge the fundamental problem with Bush era foreign policy that got us stuck in those wars. And going further back, why were we ever so involved in the middle east that Bin Laden wanted to attack us? All of this could have been avoided by simply leaving the middle east to sort out its own problems. But Hegseth has an emotional bias at play here - he views the middle east as his holy land. His loyalties are not to the American people, or western civilization, but to his god and Jesus. The title of the book is all you have to read to understand his philosophy, and why he's dangerous.
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