Sometimes, reality can deliver the kind of heavy-handed metaphor that no fiction writer would ever dare to even attempt.
If a TV show about Washington DC politics featured a plotline in which a secretary of defence thought to be reckless and chaotic ordered an antique globe moved to his office, only for it to be badly damaged in the process, viewers would switch off in droves. It would simply seem far too implausible.
And yet, according to reporting in the Washington Post, that’s exactly what has happened to Pete Hegseth in the Pentagon. Hegseth loves to hark back to an imagined era in which the US military was populated solely by alpha male “warfighters”, all clean-shaven and ruggedly good-looking, not worrying themselves about details like DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion), strategy or planning.
To get the aesthetics of his own office in line with his vision, Hegseth reportedly requested that one of two 30-inch globes used during the Second World War by General (later president) Dwight D Eisenhower be moved especially.
Whereas usually a cherished relic of US military history such as this would be carefully moved in time by trained curators, Hegseth’s staff decided they didn’t need to bother with such niceties. How hard can it be to move a globe across a building, after all?
Evidently, it was more difficult than they anticipated. During the attempted move, “the spherical portion of the globe was detached from the metal mounting that allows it to rotate”, according to a Pentagon spokesperson making creative use of the passive voice.
Whatever mishap caused the globe to become “detached” did more damage than that: photos published by the Post show a deep gash in the antique globe that Hegseth had apparently so admired.
A group dispatched by Hegseth's team in February attempted to move the historic globe, said to be used by Eisenhower during World War II.
— Dan Lamothe (@DanLamothe) October 22, 2026
They lifted it from its home in an Army office in the Pentagon … and dropped it. pic.twitter.com/vTjWdYXn0k
Some politicians would salvage something from the incident – perhaps even turning it into a useful lesson. Having the broken globe in your office might serve as a reminder of the follies of rushing in, or the benefits of waiting for proper advice. It could remind an inexperienced defence secretary that the world is fragile.
Sadly, Hegseth did not opt for that course of action. Once his staffers had damaged the relic – which belongs, of course, to the American people, rather than to him – they decided it shouldn’t feature in Hegseth’s office, after all.
The department initially released no information on whether or not the damage had been repaired – they later said only that it was now being repaired – but the globe has presumably sat for months until someone let slip what had happened to it.
When Hegseth’s tenure at the Department of Defence – renamed by him and Donald Trump as the Department of War – is over, the damage to Eisenhower’s globe is unlikely to be anywhere near the top of the list of things that he’s broken.
But it will be an awfully useful shorthand for a politician who has done an awful lot of damage in very little time. Hegseth’s chaotic tenure has seen an unprecedented politicisation of the senior ranks of the military, with many senior generals forced out of their posts, and the widespread denial of promotions for talented career officers unlucky enough to have been born female or black.
Hegseth has also proven much better at rushing the US military into situations than he has at getting them out of them – or fixing the damage he has caused along the way. He was among the most enthusiastic cheerleaders of the US war against Iran, and is said to be agitating for a renewal of bombing once the midterms are over.
That war has contributed considerably to Trump’s unpopularity, through mounting energy and diesel costs, leading to widespread inflation. At least 20 US soldiers are dead, and hundreds more injured – while thousands of Iranians have been killed.
US sailors spent months past their usual deployments stuck in the arena. The uneasy peace of the Middle East has been ignited into a shooting war that is disrupting regional alliances and global trade, and no one has a clue how it will end.
Eisenhower’s smashed globe might mean even more than that, though. The world order that Trump and Hegseth have so enthusiastically demolished – one based on rules, international institutions and measured diplomacy – was one built by Eisenhower and his political opposites in the aftermath of a devastating world war.
Hegseth has been one of the chief architects of tearing up and disrespecting everything Eisenhower fought for and stood for, in the name of the “Donroe Doctrine” – a Trump-flavoured idea of a 19th-century foreign policy doctrine based little more than a nostalgic idea of imperial spheres of power, and a weak pun.
The “Secretary of War” has spent all of his time in office tearing up the legacy of men like General Eisenhower. So, perhaps, it is particularly fitting that his staff shattered his antique globe, too. It could even be argued that breaking it has, at least, saved it from the dishonour of being used by Hegseth as a prop.