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When he was trying to win the
Vietnam War, Richard Nixon famously told his chief of staff that he
wanted Communist leaders - in the Soviet Union, in North Vietnam - to
think that the U.S. president was a mad man, that he was capable of
doing pretty much anything up to and including the use of nuclear
weapons. Fear of an unpredictable, erratic leader would bring the
Communists to the negotiating table and render them more
conciliatory.
Nixon’s
was, of course, a calculated craziness. “When the wind is
southerly,” Tricky Dick certainly could distinguish “a
hawk from a handsaw,” as Hamlet famously put it.
A
half century later, America has had to deal with a different kind of
crazy in the White House. Although Donald Trump has insisted that
he’s a “stable genius,” all the evidence suggests
otherwise. After Trump lost the 2020 election, even those in his
close circle of advisors began to question the president’s
sanity. There was a distinct possibility that a real mad man now held
the reins of power and that he was willing to do pretty much anything
to stay in the Oval Office, up to and including a coup.
Mark
Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was one of the
most prominent members of this group of the concerned. In their new
book I
Alone Can Fix This, Carol
Leonnig and Philip Rucker report
how Milley considered Trump’s declaration of fraud after the
November elections a “Reichstag moment,” with the
president potentially using false charges of electoral misconduct to
subvert the democratic process and remain in charge. Milley began to
strategize on how to prevent Trump from using the military toward
that end.
According
to another recent book, Peril
by Bob Woodward
and Robert Costa, Milley went further. On two occasions, just before
the elections and after the January 6 insurrection, he called
his Chinese
counterpart to provide reassurances that the United States wasn’t
planning on starting a war. He also told advisors to keep him
informed of any presidential decisions around the use of nuclear
weapons.
Those
specific dangers have passed. Trump is out of the White House. The
right-wing coup didn’t take place.
But
now Milley, who has continued on in his position into the Biden
administration, finds himself at the center of controversy because of
these recent revelations. Trump, not surprisingly, has
called
Milley’s actions “treasonous,” a charge repeated by
Republican
politicians
and the right-wing media as part of their
demand
that Milley be fired.
Most
everyone else has been quietly relieved that someone like Milley was
in place to put a policy straitjacket on the madman in the Oval
Office.
Interestingly,
it’s not just right-wing lunatics who have voiced reservations
about Milley.
The
Vindman Argument
Alexander
Vindman came to public attention during the first impeachment
proceedings against Donald Trump. Here was military rectitude
personified: a lieutenant colonel working in the National Security
Council who went through all the proper channels to voice his concern
about the pressure Trump was putting on Ukraine to launch an
investigation into corruption charges involving Joe Biden’s
son. Vindman gave testimony twice to Congress at great personal cost.
When the Senate acquitted Trump, Vindman was booted off the National
Security Council and forced out of the Army as well.
Here,
in other words, was someone who threw himself into the line of fire
in order to call attention to presidential misconduct. You’d
think he’d feel some affinity for Mark Milley.
Not
so.
In
an opinion
piece
for The
Washington Post,
Vindman argues that Milley should have simply resigned. He should
have “publicly expressed his concerns and joined other senior
leaders, including Cabinet officials, who stepped down after Jan. 6,
which would have been a proactive move against further abuse of
power,” Vindman maintains. “Instead, the reporting
suggests, Milley blustered to subordinates, raised grave concerns
with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and, sometime in the same period,
sought to circumvent or subvert the chain of command.”
But
wait, wouldn’t resignation have given Donald Trump exactly what
he wanted, an opportunity to replace Milley with someone more
pliable?
Vindman
disagrees: “I am befuddled by the notion that only Milley was
standing between a madman and Armageddon. That is the plot of a
Hollywood blockbuster. That is not the way the U.S. military
operates. Any one of the other chiefs of staff or the vice chairman
would have stepped up and continued to serve as a guardrail.”
This
all sounds reasonable.
But
it doesn’t hold up to closer scrutiny.
Let’s
first address the China question. Military officials routinely
contact their counterparts as part of efforts to avoid war and
deescalate conflict. “I didn’t consider that abnormal at
all,” former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen said
about Milley’s communications with Chinese officials.
Now
let’s add some information from Post
columnist Josh
Rogin to the effect that Milley wasn’t acting alone. Pentagon
chief Mark Esper, who was
also reaching out to China
with reassurances, even went so far as to delay the deployment of
U.S. ships as part of a planned exercise to make sure that the
Chinese got the message.
Okay,
then what about Milley’s insistence that he be involved in any
decision to use nuclear weapons? In The
Washington Post,
Carrie Lee portrays
his action as a
breach of the chain of command, because a mere advisor to the
president like Milley does not have such authority. U.S. presidents
can unilaterally order a nuclear attack and the rockets will fly a
few minutes later.
But
Milley’s intervention wasn’t unprecedented. Defense
secretary James Schlesinger did something similar late in Nixon’s
term when he was worried that the president had gone well beyond
playing crazy and had descended into despondency and drunkenness.
Writes
Garrett Graff
in Politico:
Defense Secretary James
Schlesinger recalled years later that in the final days of the Nixon
presidency he had issued an unprecedented set of orders: If the
president gave any nuclear launch order, military commanders should
check with either him or Secretary of State Henry Kissinger before
executing them. Schlesinger feared that the president, who seemed
depressed and was drinking heavily, might order Armageddon.
As
Fred Kaplan points
out
in Slate,
Milley didn’t go as far as Schlesinger. He only asked to be
consulted, which he was fully entitled to do.
And
let’s face it: this unilateral launch authority is insane. Just
because such a mechanism was established during the Cold War doesn’t
mean that it should endure. By all means, let’s have a
reasonable discussion about how to constrain this power of the
president. But in the meantime, let’s not insist on protocol in
the exceptional circumstance that the president goes off the rails.
By
Carrie Lee’s argument, Stanislav Petrov should have been fired
for defying the requirements of the chain of command. In 1983,
sitting in a bunker near Moscow, Lt. Colonel Petrov was
obligated to notify
his superiors
that nuclear missiles were on their way toward the Soviet Union. The
computer system monitoring incoming attacks provided him with not one
but five separate warnings. But Petrov hesitated to confirm the
attacks because something felt wrong about the notifications. As it
turned out, the computer had made a mistake. Fortunately, Petrov did
not blindly follow protocol.
The
same argument concerning “exceptional circumstances” and
“gut instincts” applies to Milley’s outreach to
domestic politicians around his fears of a coup. It was on November
10 that Milley felt his presentiments of a possible putsch. The
occasion was a security briefing on a “Million MAGA March,”
which would draw thousands of Trump supporters to Washington five
days later.
This
mid-November march turned out to be a dud in terms of turnout. But on
November 10, the situation was perilous. The president, refusing to
concede the election, was making unsubstantiated claims of fraud.
Earlier that summer, Trump had
talked about
putting Milley
in charge of a military crackdown on civil rights protests and
bruited the possibility of shooting protestors, all of which Milley
pushed back against. A month after the elections, Trump himself would
toy
with the idea
of declaring
martial law to overturn the results. And, of course, on January 6, a
MAGA march turned into an authentic insurrection.
So,
yes, Trump was increasingly out of control and dictatorial. Milley
was not imagining things.
Milley
made the decision to talk to policymakers on both sides of the aisle.
And what was his message? Did he rally the anti-Trump forces? Did he
come up with his own plot to counter what Christopher Caldwell, in a
frankly ridiculous piece in The
New York Times,
dismisses
as little more
than “mayhem”?
No,
Milley had a different message. “Everything’s going to be
okay,” he told
the
policymakers. “We’re going to have a peaceful transfer of
power. We’re going to land this plane safely. This is America.
It’s strong. The institutions are bending, but it won’t
break.”
In
other words, Milley was promising an anodyne adherence to the rule of
law, not its subversion.
Institutional
Craziness
A
mad man is, by definition, someone who is not playing by the rules.
But what happens when the rules themselves are mad? The president’s
unilateral authority to launch nuclear weapons is one such example of
institutionalized insanity. The two-decade war in Afghanistan was
another case of extended craziness. And what of the decision, year
after year, to bestow upon the Pentagon another $700 billion when so
many urgent needs are not being met at home and abroad?
Mark
Milley’s record of standing up to that kind of crazy is not so
good. He’d never previously questioned nuclear protocols (that
I know of). He tried to persuade Biden to keep U.S. troops in
Afghanistan in an
emotional but not terribly substantive appeal
earlier this
year. And he has never shown any Eisenhower-like skepticism of the
military-industrial complex.
It
took considerable courage to stand up to Trump and his coterie of
yes-men in the waning days of that presidency. I’m glad that
someone was available at the time who knew how to put on a
straitjacket and tie it tight.
But
right now, this country needs a different kind of courage to address
a different kind of crazy. We dodged the bullet of a military coup.
But we’re still dealing with the reality of a military that has
way too much money and way too much power.
The
military stood up to Trump, but who will stand up to the military?
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