KISUMU, 6th March, 2026 –In my last two reflections on the current US–Israel–Iran confrontation, I approached the crisis from two structural angles.
First, I situated the escalation within the longue duration of American grand strategy in the Middle East. Analysts across Southeast Asia, particularly within ASEAN security circles, often characterise US behaviour in the region in three broad patterns: Alliance Consolidation, Coercive Deterrence, and the Preservation of Strategic Dominance.
Second, I examined the resource-geopolitical undercurrents, particularly the politics of the Strait of Hormuz and the structural leverage embedded in global energy chokepoints.
Together, those analyses argued that what appears as a sudden eruption is in fact deeply embedded in systemic imperatives. But structure is never the whole story. Scholars attentive to the psychosocial milieu (a person’s social environment) remind us that foreign policy is not merely produced by the “black box” of the state.
It is executed by human beings who are gentlemen with biographies, convictions, and cognitive habits.
Thus, when reports emerged of a US–Israeli strike targeting Iran’s senior leadership, which claimed the life of the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and senior military officials, our analytical lens must widen beyond grand strategy and resource politics. We must confront a third dimension: the idiosyncratic variable. The individual decision-maker whose beliefs, education, experiences, and temperament can shape the threshold between restraint and escalation.
For starters, foreign policy analysis has long grappled with causation, and among the most enduring frameworks is that of James Rosenau, who identified five Clusters of Variables shaping state behaviour: the individual, the role, the governmental/state, the societal, and the systemic/structural levels.
The individual variable concerns personality, beliefs, cognitive style, and life experience, while the role variable captures expectations attached to the office, and state variables involve institutional arrangements and bureaucratic politics.
Societal variables encompass public opinion and domestic coalitions. Structural variables refer to the international distribution of power.
I first encountered this framework under my undergraduate lecturer, Ochieng Agolla-one of those rare intellectual craftsmen whose clarity made theory feel like lived experience.
If, we focus on the Trump administration, under Donald Trump, particularly Trump 2.0, the idiosyncratic dimension becomes particularly salient. Trump’s foreign policy style has consistently privileged disruption over continuity, spectacle over quiet diplomacy, and coercion over gradualism.
Within such an executive environment, the Secretary of Defence becomes not merely an administrator of military capacity but an operational amplifier of presidential instinct.
Let us consider first his biographical experience with conflict. Hegseth is not a technocratic civilian parachuted into the Pentagon. He served as an officer in the US Army National Guard and was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan during the post-9/11 wars. Combat environments socialise decision-makers differently. Exposure to insurgency, asymmetric warfare, and high-value targeting operations can normalise the logic of decapitation as a strategic tool.
When one’s formative professional years are shaped by doctrines that prioritise eliminating leadership nodes to disrupt adversaries, the translation of that logic into interstate confrontation becomes psychologically conceivable. In this cognitive frame, targeting senior leadership is reframed not as reckless escalation but as decisive disruption. One sees, in his pre- and post-strike rhetoric, a securitised worldview in which ambiguity equals threat and threat demands preemption.
Second, let us briefly take a look at his educational formation and intellectual grammar. Hegseth earned his undergraduate degree in Politics from Princeton University and later completed a Master’s in Public Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School.
These are institutions steeped in strategic studies, statecraft, and realist traditions of international relations.
Moreover, his public record reveals scepticism toward liberal internationalism and multilateral constraint. In interviews and speeches before assuming office — including numerous appearances on Fox News — he repeatedly invoked “peace through strength,” the indivisibility of American and Israeli security, and the dangers of projecting weakness.
Education does not mechanically determine behaviour, but it shapes the justificatory language through which action becomes thinkable. When realist assumptions such as adversaries exploiting weakness and respecting force become deeply internalised, preemptive or even extraordinary measures can be narrated as prudence rather than provocation. And maybe Iran, and Venezuela are just the beginning.
Third, let us attempt to link his belief system, especially moral and civilizational framing, to the foreign policy action in question. Since his official appointment to the office, Hegseth has spoken extensively about restoring a “warrior ethos” to the Pentagon and about “American exceptionalism” as a moral obligation. When foreign policy is moralised, for example, framed as order versus chaos, democracy versus theocratic extremism, the possibility for compromise narrows.
Iran, in this frame, is not merely a strategic competitor but a destabilising ideological centre. Graham Allison confirms that once adversaries are cast in civilizational terms, striking their symbolic apex can be narrated as restoring equilibrium. History shows that moralization of geopolitics often precedes radical policy thresholds.
When policymakers believe they are correcting a moral imbalance rather than managing a rivalry, escalation acquires ethical colouration.
And just so, it might have been with the Secretary of Defence.
Lastly, let us consider age and generational positioning. Hegseth is significantly younger than many past Secretaries of Defence. He belongs to a cohort shaped not by Cold War nuclear brinkmanship but by the War on Terror and targeted elimination doctrine. Cold War–era leaders were socialised into escalation caution under Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).
Post-9/11 leaders were socialised into drone strikes, counterterror raids, and high-value target removals. Studies have shown that generational security culture influences risk tolerance. The willingness to authorise unprecedented action may partly reflect a worldview in which decapitation is a legitimate instrument rather than an unthinkable taboo.
Finally, we must be cautious because the role variable can serve as an extraneous variable insofar as it amplifies the individual.
Under a president who prizes loyalty, boldness, and visible strength, such as Trump, it is not far-fetched to argue that institutional incentives align with audacity and bureaucratic resistance can be filtered, as a norm or even a new work ethic. Dissent can be reframed as weakness.
In such an environment, idiosyncrasy does both survive structural constraint and is empowered by it. Logically therefore, the fusion of presidential disruptiveness and secretarial conviction lowers the threshold for crossing red lines that previous administrations treated as prohibitive.
To sum it up we need to be cautious while we focus on idiosyncratic dimensions. No foreign policy action, including a strike widely reported to have targeted and killed Iran’s top echelon, can be reduced to personality alone. Structural rivalry, alliance commitments, domestic political calculations, and resource security remain central.
However, as has been argued above, the idiosyncratic variable explains timing and threshold. Why now? Why this target? Why in this manner? Structures generate pressures; individuals decide how to respond to them. It is this context that, in the unfolding US–Israel–Iran confrontation, the idiosyncratic dimension may prove as consequential as oil routes, alliance systems, or grand strategy itself.
Okombo Odhiambo Kasera is a political scientist and adjunct lecturer at Maseno, Rongo, and the University of Kabianga.
