Say what you will about Donald Trump’s intellectual acumen, but he does have a certain flair for drawing attention in directions he desires—or better yet, prompting his detractors to say things he wants them to say. This may not be “genius” in the usual sense of a much-abused term, but it’s a political talent of a very high order—especially impressive in a president whose political wounds tend to be self-inflicted.
The latest case in point: his suggestion that the annual Bastille Day parade in Paris—featuring troops on the march and mechanized hardware—has inspired him to sponsor a similar event here in Washington.
The reaction to this bright idea was instantaneous and revealing. People who have a high regard for American armed forces (among whom I would count myself) were favorably disposed to the idea, although not fervently so. But the Resistance was apoplectic: Military parades only take place in the event of a victory, it was argued; and in any case, throngs of soldiers and weaponry processing down the boulevard are familiar sights in Beijing and Moscow but not in Washington.
More revealing still, people who ought to know better—that is to say, Democratic members of the House and Senate—joined in the swelling chorus of derision, citing budgetary costs, or unseemly displays of martial spirit, or, especially, a spectacle of armed might consciously intended to acclaim Trump.
Here was that tactical skill I mentioned earlier. You would think that Democrats, who have labored mightily to overcome their post-Vietnam status as the anti-military party, would avoid the appearance of hostility or petty condescension toward a celebration of our men and women in uniform—especially as those men and women, since 1973, have volunteered to place themselves in harm’s way to protect us. But you would be wrong. And the television pundit Rachel Maddow captured their tone:
To which, I suspect, a comfortable majority of Americans might respond: So what?
Now I would be the first to concede that ceremonial displays of “military prowess” are not characteristically American. We have a long tradition of civilian supremacy and strict separation of barracks and state. Yes, military parades featuring goose-stepping troops, tanks, artillery pieces, even missiles were features of the pageantry of Nazi Germany and, later, Soviet Russia. Indeed, they are just about the only image that comes to mind when Americans think of Kim Jong-un’s North Korea.
But Trump was inspired not by what he saw in Pyongyang but in Paris, where Bastille Day commemorates that country’s revolution. Even the British—who have a mildly irreverent attitude toward their army that would shock most Americans—gather annually in London to watch the monarch review her infantry regiments.
For that matter, the record of American military demonstrations is curiously mixed. For most of our national life we have had neither conscription nor a standing army of any great size; but the 19th century—when America was neither a world power nor especially enamored of professional armed services—was a golden age of martial pageantry in the land.
There was, of course, an abundance of “preparedness” marches before and during the First World War and ticker-tape parades in the great metropolises after World War II. But in the decades following 1945—when the United States did, in fact, become a world power, dominated the Cold War struggle against communism, and maintained a draft—mass military displays, certainly after the Korean armistice and Vietnam, were practically unknown, even taboo.
This particular drought ended in 1991, when George H. W. Bush sponsored a comparatively modest victory parade in Washington at the end of the first Persian Gulf war. By then, however, the notion of a tribute to soldiers in review had been complicated by partisan politics: The president was remarkably popular at the time of the parade, but while the U.N.-sanctioned war to punish Saddam Hussein’s aggression was undoubtedly won, it was a victory complicated by notions—limited objectives, no-blood-for-oil, a multilateral alliance featuring Arab monarchies—that made it “Bush’s war” as much as an American victory.
Which raises an interesting question: Can any celebration of U.S. armed forces be successfully separated from their (temporary) commander in chief? And the answer, unfortunately, appears to be that it cannot—for proof of which we are once again indebted to Rachel Maddow. For just seven years ago, when Barack Obama was in the White House, her attitude toward the prospect of a military parade was rather different from today: “How long do we wait,” she asked then, “to have some showing of national appreciation for the people who have fought the long, long Iraq war on our behalf?”
In that sense, Obama’s successor has a point that makes his critics seem especially churlish. He’s the president and entitled to take the salute on the reviewing stand. But it’s not Donald Trump who will be marching; it’s the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines—male and female, gay and straight, overstretched and uncomplaining—who, in a dangerous two decades, have overcome the Taliban, ousted Saddam and crushed his predatory forces, fought the war on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan, crippled al Qaeda, beaten back Obama’s “junior-varsity” Islamic State, and, above all, prevented any repetition of 9/11.
Parades, to be sure, are not to everybody’s taste. But of all the things a president can do with armed forces, a single day of sympathetic pageantry seems a Good Thing.
