Washington has been roiled by reports that in the waning days of the Trump presidency, Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made two calls to Gen. Li Zuocheng of the People’s Liberation Army to assure him that the United States would not go to war with or attack China. The reports were based on excerpts from the forthcoming book Peril by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa. The most explosive claim in the excerpts, and the one with the most staying power as a scandal in itself, is that Milley told Li he would warn him if the U.S. were planning an attack on China.
These reports also say Milley inserted himself into the operational chain of command by demanding that he be consulted by commanders regarding any Trump order to use force. His purported conversation with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in which the latter supposedly told Milley the president should have been arrested, has also raised eyebrows.
After a long period of silence, Milley now claims the calls were “perfectly within the duties and responsibilities” of his job. He is supported by retired flag and general officers.
Parsing this requires some explanation of what Milley’s job actually is. It is true that high-ranking military officers often reach out to their allied counterparts. The problem is that neither President Donald Trump nor the acting secretary of defense authorized these calls, a crucial detail given that we are not talking about allies but our main geopolitical adversary. As the senior officer in the U.S. military, the Joint Chiefs chairman is not in the chain of command but is an adviser to the president and defense secretary. He had no authority to make such calls on his own. He is also not permitted to inject himself into operational issues, as he apparently did.
It is a long-applied norm that the professional U.S. officer corps is supposed to provide advice to civilian decision-makers and then execute the policies they are directed to, but not act as the decision-makers themselves. The military has no right to insist that its recommendations be accepted.
At the same time, the military is not obligated to follow an illegal order. But there is no indication that Trump ever issued any such thing.
One of the common charges against Trump was that he would involve the country in a war. For example, after the 2020 election, the president asked for options, including an attack on Iran’s main nuclear site, following a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran’s uranium stockpile had reached a level 12 times higher than allowed under the nuclear accords. His advisers, including the secretary of defense, Joint Chiefs chairman, and national security adviser, recommended against military action.
Both the president’s question and the advisers’ responses were reasonable. But the fact that this affair was leaked was not. On the one hand, it permitted the president’s detractors to portray him as seeking to provoke a conflict in his last days in office. On the other, it may have signaled to our enemies that Trump, as a lame duck, would be unable to respond to aggressive provocations, with his hands tied.
At a minimum, Milley’s actions violated the foundational norm of U.S. civil-military relations: the subordination of the military to civilian control. But they also constitute an example of “praetorianism,” the idea, foreign to the principles of civilian control of the military, that the military can act on its own to advance what it believes are the interests of the state. Pelosi’s call to Milley is an example of praetorianism on steroids.
Unfortunately, the idea that it was acceptable for the military to protect the country from Trump, a duly elected president, has had its advocates from the beginning of Trump’s presidency. For example, right after his inauguration, Georgetown law professor Rosa Brooks, the author of How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything, expressed an extreme version of this view.
Writing in Foreign Policy, she remarked that Trump’s “first week as president has made it all too clear” that “he is as crazy as everyone feared.” She laments a “possibility … that until recently I would have said was unthinkable in the United States of America: a military coup, or at least a refusal by military leaders to obey certain orders.” A senior Pentagon appointee from 2009 to 2011, Brooks continued that, for the first time, she could “imagine plausible scenarios in which senior military officials might simply tell the president: ‘No, sir. We’re not doing that.’”
Ironically, it is Trump who has been accused of violating civil-military norms, and he certainly did his part. During most of his presidency, Trump’s relationship with the generals was uneven. At times, he heaped praise on them. At other times, he publicly questioned their intelligence, courage, and commitment to their soldiers. And he certainly rejected their advice on many occasions. Of course, the president is not obligated to accept military advice, and all this was nothing compared to Milley’s actions.
Some are excusing Milley because to do otherwise would require them to side with Trump. But those justifying Milley’s actions cannot object on principle if a future general does it to their president. Even those most vociferously opposed to Trump must ask themselves: Is it a good idea for military officers to form a phalanx around the duly elected president “for the good of the country”? Do we really want to normalize the view that the military is the protector of the republic? If so, we have moved perilously close to accepting praetorianism, a concept at war with the very idea of republican government.
Mackubin Owens is a senior fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia and author of U.S. Civil-Military Relations After 9/11: Renegotiating the Civil-Military Bargain.
