WATCH: Hegseth says Trump favors 'peace through strength'

(The Center Square) – Secretary of War Pete Hegseth compared President Donald Trump to a president known for peace through strength during a talk at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum.

“If you look at the actual policies, Donald Trump is the true and rightful heir of Ronald Reagan,” Hegseth told a large crowd during his keynote address at the all-day Reagan National Defense Forum Saturday at the museum in Simi Valley, near Los Angeles.

Speaking in the museum’s Air Force One Pavilion, Hegseth also defended the recent U.S. military strikes on boats allegedly smuggling drugs from Venezuela. He noted he never issued an order to kill everyone on a boat Sept. 2 in the Caribbean Sea.

“Of course not. Anyone who’s been in the Situation Room, the War Room, knows you don’t go in there and say, ‘Kill them.’ That’s patently ridiculous,” Hegseth said, answering a question from Fox News journalist Lucas Tomlinson during a short on-stage interview after Hegseth’s speech.

A second strike on the boat, ordered by Navy Adm. Frank "Mitch" Bradley, killed two survivors of the first strike. Bradley told members of Congress last week that he ordered third and fourth strikes to sink the boat.

Hegseth said the second strike was necessary because the drugs were still on the boat and the survivors had access to a radio and a potential link-up with another boat. 

Hegseth said he left the Situation Room after the first strike.

"A couple hours later, I was told there had to be a re-attack," he said.

“From what I understood then and understand now, I fully support the strike,” Hegseth said. "I would have made the same call myself."

The Trump administration follows specific criteria and protocols for military attacks, the secretary of war said. “What people think is cavalier and cowboy is the exact opposite.”

Before his interview with Tomlinson, Hegseth noted critics of Trump like to invoke Reagan’s name.

“They say the current president’s approach is nothing like the vision championed by Ronald Reagan at the height of the Cold War as we grappled with the Soviets and ultimately prevailed,” Hegseth said.

“These folks are wrong, dead wrong,” the secretary of war said.

“It’s President Trump who inherited and restored President Reagan’s powerful but focused and realistic approach to national defense,” Hegseth said.

He compared Trump’s buildup of the U.S. military to Reagan’s efforts to rebuild armed forces after the Vietnam War.

“But President Reagan also believed sincerely in the peace part of peace through strength as his actions showed,” Hegseth said. “It was not a popular thing to do at the height of the Cold War to talk to Communists, yet President Reagan did. Ronald Reagan saw the prudence and potential in engaging with the nation’s adversaries from a position of strength, even in the face of criticism from home including his own party.”

Like Reagan talking with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, Trump has talked with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, Hegseth said. “People in Washington like to criticize President Trump for doing so, but they forget this is exactly what Ronald Reagan did.”

Hegseth criticized elected officials, who compared themselves to Reagan but didn’t govern like him, for trying to make America the world’s police officer while subsidizing allies’ defense with U.S. taxpayers’ money. He also accused those officials of dismantling the U.S. industrial base and said their actions resulted in “rudderless wars in the Middle East, a land war in Europe and the economic rise of China.”

“President Trump knows better. He knows what it means to restore peace through strength on an enduring basis, to put our nation’s interest first,” Hegseth said.

“Like President Reagan, President Trump is dedicated to both sides of the peace through strength point, not using the phrase as a thin veil for warmongering,” Hegseth said. “In less than a year, President Trump has secured eight major deals, including a historic end to the war in Gaza. And he’s not finished yet.

“Even as we speak, under the president’s leadership, we are working tirelessly to end the war in Ukraine, a war that never would have started had Trump been president,” Hegseth said, criticizing the Biden administration.

He noted the newly renamed Department of War received a historic boost in funding.

“Make no mistake about it. President Trump is hell-bent on maintaining and accelerating the most powerful military the world has even seen, the most powerful, the most lethal and American made,” Hegseth said.

He later added, “The opposite of peace through strength is war through weakness.”