Hegseth Broke Eisenhower's Globe. The World Ike Built Is Next.

The Army can patch the globe. The world order Eisenhower helped build is a lot harder to repair.

Photo Credits: The Washington Post

On Thursday, Alex Horton and Dan Lamothe of The Washington Post reported that in February, a team dispatched by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s office tried to move a historic globe out of an Army office in the Pentagon and into Hegseth’s own.

The 30-inch floor globe, which an accompanying plaque dates to the 1930s, is said to have been used by Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1942, when he led the Army’s War Plans Division in the desperate months after Pearl Harbor. For decades since, it has passed from one generation of Army leaders to the next.

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The Army historians who normally oversee the movement of such artifacts were furloughed at the time because of a partial government shutdown. Rather than wait, Hegseth’s team moved the globe themselves, and in the process, they dropped it. The fall tore an inches-wide gash near Antarctica and knocked the sphere loose from the mount that allows it to turn. The shutdown ended that same day.

A Pentagon official now calls the globe a replica. Either way, an object that survived more than eighty years in the care of the United States Army did not survive its first encounter with Pete Hegseth’s team.

It is not the first thing to break in their hands.

Inside the Building

Most of what Pete Hegseth inherited when he walked into the Pentagon was built the way that globe was preserved: slowly, carefully, by people who understood they were holding something that would outlast them. In Hegseth’s hands, piece after piece of it has cracked.

Let’s start with the officer corps. For generations, the people at the top of America’s military have served the Constitution, not a party or a president. That idea is the reason a soldier in Ohio and a soldier in California can trust the same chain of command.

Hegseth fired the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He fired the chief of naval operations, the first woman ever to lead the Navy. He fired the top lawyers of the Army and the Air Force, the people whose job is to tell commanders when an order crosses a legal line. Every officer who watched that learned the same lesson about what keeps you employed in this Pentagon.

Then there’s the arsenal itself. The precision missiles and interceptors that protect American troops took years to build and stockpile. In the war with Iran that Hegseth helped sell as quick and easy, we have burned through them faster than factories can replace them, and the bill to rebuild what’s gone now runs into the tens of billions of dollars.

Each of these took decades to put together. And like Ike’s globe, each one cracked the first time this team got its hands on it. But they’re just the things you can see from inside the Pentagon. The most important thing Hegseth and Donald Trump are breaking is the world outside it.

The World Ike Built

Dwight Eisenhower didn’t just study that globe. He spent the rest of his life helping to reshape the world on it.

He commanded the Allied armies that liberated Europe. A few years later, he became the first Supreme Allied Commander of NATO. As president, he spent eight years keeping a nuclear-armed Cold War from turning hot. He and his generation had watched what happened when America stayed out of the world’s problems: they came to our shores anyway, and the bill was paid in American lives.

So they built something different. Alliances like NATO. Rules about how wars are fought and how prisoners and civilians are treated. A system of trade with the American dollar at its center.

And here’s the part people like Pete Hegseth like to forget: they didn’t build it out of charity. Ike and the people that came after him built it around America’s interests. That order made the United States the richest, safest, most powerful country in human history.

It meant that when we had to fight, we fought with allies beside us. It meant the rules the world lived by were rules we wrote. And all of it rested on one thing: credibility. Friends and enemies alike believed that America meant what it said.

That’s what’s breaking now.

Under Hegseth, the United States has blown up small boats it says were carrying drugs, killing at least 231 people in about 69 strikes by September’s count, without releasing evidence and, in nearly every case, without releasing the names of the dead. For eighty years, America held other countries to the laws of war. It’s hard to keep doing that while ignoring them yourself.

Then, last month, Europe invited Canada, our closest neighbor and one of our oldest allies, to become the first associate member in the history of the European Union. The President called it “laughable” and suggested it might be a “hostile act.”

It wasn’t hostile. It was our allies seeing clearly an America they no longer trust to keep its word and building a future without us.

What a Conservator Can’t Fix

The Army, according to the Post, is now consulting experts on how to safely move what’s left of the globe. A good conservator can probably patch a gash near Antarctica. They can reattach a sphere to its mount so the world turns again.

Nobody can do that for the rest of what Trump and Hegseth have broken.

Ty Seidule, a retired brigadier general who taught military history at West Point, told the Post what was really going on with the globe. “Hegseth wants an Eisenhower totem to be like Ike, brilliant in war and peace,” he said. “Hegseth is no Ike. The globe won’t give him Ike’s attributes of humility, intellect and judgment.”

Hegseth wanted the object because of what it stood for. But what it stood for was in Eisenhower himself, and in the generations of people who took care of his world after him.

I’ve been fortunate enough to meet many Americans, a large chunk of them veterans, from the Greatest Generation. And, compared to them, Pete Hegseth is spoiled and petulant child.

The Patient Work

Eisenhower left us a better guide than his globe. In his farewell address in 1961, the old general warned about what could happen when military power grows unchecked, and he told the country who would have to stand guard against it.

“Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry,” he said, “can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

Pete Hegseth wanted Eisenhower’s globe. He never seemed to want Eisenhower’s warning.

The globe can be repaired by experts. The world Eisenhower built will be repaired by an alert and knowledgeable citizenry, or it won’t be repaired at all.

— Adam