This New Yorker article from August 2022 talks about how members of the military defied orders given by Donald Trump. This included defying arguably illegal orders to intervene in domestic affairs, which I would tend to agree the generals deserve credit for. But the article also praises the military for refusing to unwind and withdraw from foreign conflicts and interventions when they were ordered to. I find this disturbing. Consider:

• Trump ordered a withdrawal from Syria – twice. Military leadership publicly criticized him, and it was not fully carried out either time. The U.S. is still in Syria today.
• He floated the idea of pulling out of South Korea – described by Robert Gates as an “absolutely crazy notion”. The U.S. is still in South Korea today.
• He ordered all troops withdrawn from Somalia. The U.S. is still in Somalia today.
• He reportedly wanted to withdraw from Iraq, Germany, and all of Africa. He tried to go around the usual military channels to get this done, knowing they would try to block him. They found out, and they blocked him. The U.S. is still in Iraq, Germany, and many countries in Africa today.
• He wanted to withdraw from Afghanistan immediately. The military slow-walked it throughout his presidency. Finally, he ordered a withdrawal, which was delayed several times and ultimately carried out by Biden. Afghanistan is the one country on the list that the U.S. military is not in today (officially at least), and Biden seems to get most of the credit and blame for the way it went down.

I am not claiming that Trump was some great peace maker, but his instinct does appear to have been to bring U.S. troops home from many of our foreign entanglements. The exception was Iran – he assassinated a senior political and military figure inside Iran, and advocated repeatedly for a military attack on the country, perhaps at the urging of the Israeli government.

Another thing disturbed me about the article – the idea that the military are heroes because they supported the peaceful transition of power and refused to participate in a potential coup attempt during the 2020 election. This is like a protection racket. This suggests the military has some constitutional role in the peaceful transition of power, which to my knowledge they do not. It suggests that a peaceful transition of power occurs because they allow it to occur through their beneficence, when they could choose to step in and prevent it at any time they want. This may be an uncomfortable truth. They seem to have a de facto veto power over our strategic engagements, our foreign policy, our national budget, and our election system. They haven’t taken over because of their “professionalism” or sense of “honor” or “duty”. Or just maybe, there is no need or desire to go to the trouble of governing as long as the civilian government continues to pay them off with a quarter of the federal budget or so.