Americans love a good comeback story, and the tenure of War Secretary Pete Hegseth so far is precisely that.

Yesterday, Hegseth testified along with Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan Caine before the House Armed Services Committee, and the man whom critics assailed, the man whom they said couldn’t possibly handle such a gigantic job, more than held his own against the Chicken Littles and the anti-American Democrats on the committee. Indeed, when it came to taking the fight to the naysaying defeatists yesterday, Hegseth was a Trump-class destroyer.

Secretary Hegseth full opening remarks before the House Armed Services Committee. pic.twitter.com/t2qdEMGQBv

— DOW Rapid Response (@DOWResponse) April 29, 2026

The secretary’s opening remarks lasted just over eight minutes, and for the first 7:30, they focused on the budget and on the remarkable transformation of the War Department during Donald Trump’s second term — both in terms of morale and of warfighting capability.

But then this:

The biggest adversary we face at this point are the reckless, feckless, and defeatist words of congressional Democrats and some Republicans two months in … to a conflict. Lest I remind you — and my generation understands how long we were in Iraq, how long we were in Afghanistan, how long we were in Vietnam — two months in, on an existential fight for the safety of the American people. Iran cannot have a nuclear bomb. We are proud of this undertaking. I am proud that President Trump has had the courage to do it. And I look forward to sharing more about what our troops have accomplished.

The most heated exchange of the day occurred with California Democrat John Garamendi, who clearly hadn’t listened to Hegseth’s opening remarks. Garamendi accused Hegseth and Trump of “lying to the American public about this war from day one,” and he kept going: “You have misled the public about why we are at war. You and the president have offered ever-changing reasons for this war. You’ve misled the public about the progress of the war. … The president has got himself and America stuck in the quagmire of another war in the Middle East. He’s desperately trying to extricate himself from his own mistakes. It is in America’s and indeed the world’s interest that he succeed in that.”

Hegseth returned fire — or, as the AP might put it, he pounced:

“My generation served in a quagmire in Iraq and Afghanistan — years and years of nebulous missions and utopian nation-building that led us to nothing,” he said. “Shame on you calling this a quagmire. Two months in the effort, what they’ve undertaken, what they’ve succeeded, the success on the battlefield that could create strategic opportunities, the courage of a president to confront a nuclear Iran. And you call it a quagmire, handing propaganda to our enemies.”

So far, Operation Epic Fury has run up an estimated $25 billion tab. That’s not insignificant, but nor is it anything that the drunken-sailor Democrats can credibly complain about. But when did that ever stop Chuck Schumer? “$25 billion,” Schumer kvetched. “$25 BILLION. Imagine everything we could have done with that money — funds for healthcare, hospitals, schools, veterans, military families and so much more.”

The $25 billion price tag is mostly for munitions, and it’s chump change in the scope of this fiscal year’s budget ask from the Trump administration, which is a record-setting $1.5 trillion. The Communist Chinese, as was pointed out by Republican Congressman Mike Rogers at the start of the hearings, are spending a greater percentage of their GDP on defense than we are.

Going into the hearings, there was some scuttlebutt as to how congressional Republicans would treat Hegseth, especially as it pertained to the prolonged turkey shoot in Iran. There’s an election coming up in six months, after all, and, politicians being politicians, their foremost concern is self-preservation. So it was a pleasant surprise, at least for me, to see Hegseth doing battle with Democrats alone.

The Iran ceasefire is now in its 22nd day, but peace talks have stalled even while our naval blockade around the Strait of Hormuz is strangling the life out of Iran, like a boa constrictor. This has forced a desperate regime, or what’s left of it, to seek new trade routes to rearm and resupply itself by road and rail through the neighboring countries of Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Pakistan.

Iran’s new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, (ostensibly) claimed today via X, “The US’s presence and establishment in the Persian Gulf is the main source of instability in the region.” We suspect the ayatollah’s neighbors would take issue with that remark, but it is what it is. And it indicates that Iran is likely to keep talking tough for as long as it can, and then perhaps break all at once. Donald Trump has been insistent that Iran must forgo its nuclear ambitions as part of any deal, but the mullahs have been reluctant to agree.

So far. My sense is that they’ll cave, with a wink and a nod, in order to break the U.S. stranglehold over the Iranian economy. And then, long after the dust has settled, the U.S. will turn to other pressing matters, and they’ll quietly resume. The Iranians lie and cheat. It’s what they’ve done for 47 years, and habits like that are highly resistant to change.

None of this is nothing. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has caused the largest oil supply shock in history, with U.S. prices rising about 40% since the war began two months ago. As Fox News’s Lucas Tomlinson noted this morning, Team Trump calls this a worthy sacrifice if it keeps Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. On the other hand, folks tend to vote with their pocketbooks, and folks are feeling it at the pump.

Still, if you think you’ve got it tough, consider the plight of everyday Iranians amid their country’s economic death spiral. They can’t sell their oil or their Persian rugs or their pistachios. The country’s rate of inflation is near 70%, and the Iranian currency, the rial, is now trading at an all-time low, with 1,810,000 rials being equivalent to a single U.S. dollar. Ouch.

The question, then, is which country, the U.S. or Iran, has the greater pain tolerance, and which one will blink first. If we can glean anything from Pete Hegseth’s performance yesterday, the administration has plenty left in its tank.