 |
| From left: John Kelly, H.R. McMaster, President Trump, James Mattis |
Don't count on 'Trump's generals' to save us
Well, that’s a relief.
For a while there, it seemed as if our democracy was starting to look like some backward former colony in Africa or Latin America, where everything is controlled by the ruling family whose demagogue patriarch doles out fiefdoms to a tight circle of privileged heirs.
But ever since Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr. got pulled into this whole mess with Russia and the campaign, you don’t hear as much from the Trump Bunch. (Also, Jared is busy negotiating peace in the Middle East, which is, like, really time-consuming.) Even when the president seemed to sympathize with neo-Nazis, his Jewish son-in-law and daughter were oddly absent.
No, apparently, we’ve now moved on to a government administered by military council — a powerful trio with oversight of all Cabinet agencies and armed forces that the civilian president refers to as “my generals.”
So you see, we’re on our way from being Zimbabwe or Saudi Arabia to, say, Myanmar. How badly can that go?
Actually, this latest turn has done a lot to buoy the spirits of President Trump’s liberal critics, a generation of whom grew up thinking of military leaders through the twisted prism of “Dr. Strangelove.” They’ve learned to love the generals now, and you can understand why.
There’s been a sense these last few months that nobody can put a brake on Trump’s careening crazy train — not the kids, not establishment Republicans on the Hill, not the Wall Street guys or the Cabinet of billionaires. While North Korea tests its missiles, Trump whines about the media in middle-of-the-night tweets and self-delusional rallies.
At least now, the current thinking goes, the administration seems to be in the hands of strong and serious-minded patriots who can fill in a map without help. As Newsweek put it in a subtle headline last week: “Trump’s Generals Can Save the World From War — and Stop the Crazy.”
That’s a low bar, and maybe the generals — Kelly, McMaster, Mattis — can clear it. But even if these guys can keep Trump’s presidency from immediately derailing, that doesn’t mean they’re likely to steer it in the right direction.
Modern America has a real mythology around its generals; we’ll ask them to fix almost any problem. Generations removed from a time when the burdens of war were shared by everyone, we tend to idealize the men and women who still rise up to shoulder them.
Our weathered institutions sag under the weight of bureaucratic inertia. We imagine that a battlefield commander will attack intractable problems as he might a battery of machine guns, immune to petty grievances and lawyerly objections.
Except that in reality, and with few exceptions, military leaders haven’t had much success running other things — political campaigns, school districts, businesses, Cabinet agencies. The courage and brilliance they display in rising up through the armed forces don’t seem to translate very easily.
Maybe that’s because the careers they spend in service to the public are also spent inside a kind of socialist bubble, with very little exposure to the more mundane trials of civilian life. There’s no reason, really, that a general should know the first thing about finance or domestic policy or politics. We only like to pretend they do, since we’ve pretty much lost faith in everyone whose job it really is.
If I told you I had a novel plan to partition Syria, you’d wonder — with good reason — what I could possibly know about it. But when John Kelly, the chief of staff, assumes responsibility for legislative strategy or tax policy, he’s like the guy in the ad who stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night. Somehow we assume he’ll figure it out.
Even in foreign policy, where generals are assumed to hold vast expertise, that may not translate into progress. Modern generals are, in fact, nothing like the cigar-chomping, Cold War cowboys we remember from iconic movies, hell-bent on killing Commies and reducing villainous countries to rubble.
No comments:
Post a Comment