The Cambridge Dictionary defines “relish” as “to like or enjoy something” and “to get pleasure from something.”

I was reminded again this week at how much Pete Hegseth seems to relish war.

The Secretary of Defense announced that there will be a new Office of Religious Affairs. “Our department is, you might say, putting on the full armor of God because while we wage physical war, we all know the real battle is spiritual,” Hegseth said Wednesday.

“God is good. Evil is not,” he added. “And America’s military must understand the difference.”

Despite any leftist or perhaps atheist criticism of this language, there was nothing inherently wrong with what Hegseth said. There is also nothing wrong with invoking God or faith in military or civil affairs; America has a long and proud history of doing so.

But coupling his choice of words with the shameful likely double-tap U.S. bombing of an Iranian girls’ school in February, and his past excited rhetoric like “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies” in March (which legal experts worried could have been teasing potential war crimes), there does seem to be a bully-with-a-badge zeal for warmaking for the secretary. Hegseth’s unusual foreign policy passion also seems fueled by his own Crusader version of Christianity, particularly as filtered through the theology of his ultraconservative Reformed evangelical church, which is often at odds with other Christian churches (including the oldest one).

War does not seem like a mere necessary evil to Hegseth. I’m not sure he sees even unjust war as evil at all.

I think he likes it.

Is this conservative?

The late conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet didn’t think so. While mulling over Hegseth’s latest warcries, this passage from a 1979 speech Nisbet delivered, republished recently by Modern Age, jumped out at me: “War is, above any other force in history, the basis of centralization and collectivization of the social and economic orders.”

“No conservative can relish, much less seek, war and its attendant militarization of social and civil spheres of society,” Nisbet added.

Having grown up on Russell Kirk, I was familiar with the more traditional conservative view of war and peace that Nisbet was expressing. Kirk and Nisbet were contemporaries and friends.

For conservatives of old, war undermined civilization. It was never its primary mission or cause, as Hegseth appears to regard his own nation’s. “Not by force of arms are civilizations held together, but by subtle threads of moral and intellectual principle,” Kirk wrote.

Conservatives’ default aversion to war spans centuries. “War never leaves where it found a nation,” wrote the man Kirk called the father of conservatism, 18th century British statesman Edmund Burke.

In contrast to the radical French Revolution, Burke considered the American one conservative. “Of all the enemies of true liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other…. No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare,” said the American Founding Father James Madison.

Almost two centuries later, the Old Right’s Robert Taft would say, “History shows that when the people have the opportunity to speak, as a rule the people decide for peace. It shows that arbitrary rulers are more inclined to favor war than are the people, at any time.”

The Woodrow Wilson– and FDR-despiser H.L. Mencken wrote in the first half of the 20th century, “Wars are seldom caused by spontaneous hatreds between people, for peoples in general are too ignorant of one another to have grievances and too indifferent to what goes on beyond their borders to plan conquests.”

“They must be urged to slaughter by politicians who know how to alarm them,” Mencken concluded.

Hegseth, his boss, and others have tried to alarm Americans and the world about Iran supposedly soon acquiring a nuclear weapon, only to find an America and a world that doesn’t believe them and hates their war.

They should have listened to conservatives.

My mind flooded with antiwar quotes from these historic figures and others, like GK Chesterton, Richard Weaver, Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul, and the other men (and women) of the right that had all reached a similar conservative consensus on war. It would be impossible for me to include every quote here, although I did enjoy finding some new ones in researching this essay.

Still, Hegseth and the Trump administration are on the contemporary right, and are indeed a certain kind of conservative at least in name, if one adds the “neo” prefix to the moniker.

The neoconservatives Trump once vowed to vanquish now seem to direct and define his administration, which has been as reflexively pro-war as they could have wished—and has been as disastrous as the last thoroughly neoconservative administration was nearly two decades ago.

It should be noted that neoconservatives, who are not conservative in any traditional sense, have long tried to claim President Ronald Reagan, who was a conservative, as their eternal Republican model.

Never mind that the neoconservatives actually hated Reagan’s diplomacy with the Soviet Union, which turned out to be his greatest legacy. The former American Conservative Union head David Keene’s framing of Reagan’s true foreign policy will always be gold:

Reagan resorted to military force far less often than many of those who came before him or who have since occupied the Oval Office…/ After the [1983] assault on the Marine barracks in Lebanon, it was questioning the wisdom of U.S. involvement that led Reagan to withdraw our troops rather than dig in. He found no good strategic reason to give our regional enemies inviting U.S. targets.

Can one imagine one of today’s neoconservative absolutists backing away from any fight anywhere?

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Nope.

The neocon religion is war, and in Pete Hegseth, this notorious ideological band appears to have found a more than willing warrior who savors it much as they do.

But conservatives do not relish war—if any conservatives can still be found.