Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s firing yesterday of Navy Secretary John Phelan would normally be bound for the “world will little note nor long remember” file, but for its ironies and its context. As for ironies, Phelan was a perfectly typical Trump appointee: a Florida-based investor whom President Trump had hailed as “one of the most successful businessmen in the country.” Phelan even was aligned with Trump’s nostalgic desire to have the Navy build more battleships—power symbols of Trump’s youth—even though naval officials and scholars universally believe that they’ve been obsolete since 1942. But even all this was not enough to make Phelan the kind of Hegseth acolyte who can enjoy job security (at least until the criteria for Hegseth acolyte change, as they do every few weeks).
But it’s the context in which the firing occurred that makes it part of a broader and more important story. That context is the purge of top commanders that we’ve seen under Trump and Hegseth: the firing of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Navy’s chief of staff, and the commandant of the Coast Guard, who violated Trump and Hegseth’s norms of propriety by being, respectively, Black, female, and female. Those discharges preceded the firing of the Air Force chief of staff and, earlier this month, Army Chief of Staff Randy George, even as our war on Iran was raging. According to a Wall Street Journal report, George was upset that Hegseth had struck Black and female colonels from the Army’s list of candidates about to be promoted to generals, and George was also close to Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, whom Hegseth views as a rival.
The Hegseth purge, which also has cost the jobs of leaders of intelligence agencies, legal advisers, and sundry other chiefs of staff, exemplifies the normal staffing criteria of the Trump administration. It assumes that any officials who are not both white and male are only in their jobs due to some dastardly DEI machinations, and, fundamentally, just don’t look the part. (See, e.g., battleship nostalgia, above.) It assumes that any officials who stand up for their nonwhite, non-male colleagues are woke themselves, which is reason enough to get the axe. It makes support for Trump and his whims (“whims” being the real meaning of “policy” in this administration) the sine qua non of the ability to continue to hold an administration job, and the same goes for support for Trump’s appointed department heads (e.g., Hegseth). It is suffused with paranoia about real or potential or imagined rivals. And it dismisses—indeed, disdains—knowledge of the official’s area of responsibility and the empirical facts therein as grounds either for being hired (see, e.g., Hegseth again) or for staying on the federal payroll. One of the world’s greatest universities could be assembled from the ranks of the scientists whom Trump and his underlings have canned.
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There’s one more context in which Hegseth’s purges comfortably fit. He’s hardly the first leader to have purged military chiefs for non-military reasons—chiefly, for a deficiency (either real or imagined) of loyalty to him even when facts compel those military chiefs to dispute the leader’s judgment. In this, Hegseth is following the example of China’s President Xi, who has arrested, fired, or disappeared 29 of China’s 44 top generals and admirals since 2023. Even Xi’s paranoia pales alongside that of Stalin, who notoriously purged roughly 80 percent of his army’s generals and thousands of colonels and other officers in 1937 and 1938, in many cases executing them. The purge, which coincided with the “show trials” of virtually every Communist leader who wasn’t entirely a creature of Stalin’s every impulse, goes a long way to explaining why the Soviet army was repeatedly repulsed by the Finnish army in 1940 when the USSR invaded Finland, and why Stalin wasn’t at all prepared when Hitler invaded Russia in 1941.
So, an essay question: Is the U.S. to Iran 2026 the equivalent of the USSR to Finland 1940? What factors are common to both?
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