“This should calm some nerves,” wrote Peter Daou, the former Hillary Clinton staffer and founder of Verrit. Daou was referring to a CNN report
in which Gen. John Hyten, head of the US Strategic Command, warned that
he would resist any illegal orders from President Donald Trump — or any
president — to launch nuclear weapons. "He'll tell me what to do, and
if it's illegal, guess what's going to happen?” said Hyten on Saturday
at the Halifax International Security Forum. “I'm gonna say, 'Mr.
President, that's illegal.’”
The comments follow a hearing
held by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Tuesday on the
president’s authority to order the use of nuclear weapons, the first
time a congressional committee has investigated the question in more
than four decades.
At that hearing, retired Air Force Gen. Robert Kehler,
Hyten’s predecessor under President Barack Obama, told the committee
that Trump can’t simply launch nuclear weapons at whomever he wants,
whenever he wants. “The legal principles of military necessity,
distinction, and proportionality also apply to nuclear plans,
operations, and decisions,” he said. “Legal advisers are deeply involved with commanders at all steps.”
It is comforting to know that Trump cannot order a
nuclear holocaust as easily as he can launch a tweetstorm. But behind
these hearings and headlines lurks the unnerving way in which many have
come to see the military as the last, best bulwark against our erratic
commander-in-chief.
This is, in part, because the military appears to be one
of the few institutions that Trump respects. He is contemptuous toward
career politicians, toward executive agencies, toward judges, toward the
civil service. But he admires military men, and at least occasionally
listens to them.
John Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff, is a retired
four-star general, as is Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. National Security
Adviser H.R. McMaster is an active duty three-star general in the Army.
And their supposed steadying presence has been a source of comfort to
Trump’s many skeptics.
Mattis and Kelly "help separate our country from chaos,” says
Senate Foreign Relations Chair Bob Corker. They “see the world
similarly and privately express a sense of duty to help steer Trump,” reports Axios’s Mike Allen. The AP reported
that they formed an early pact “that one of them should remain in the
United States at all times to keep tabs on the orders rapidly emerging
from the White House."
In conversations around Washington, I have often heard a
confidence that if Trump tries to do something truly dangerous on the
international stage, like strike North Korea after being offended by a
comment from Kim Jong Un, the military will quietly beat back the order,
drowning the president’s intention in bureaucracy and complexity and
rallying allies on Capitol Hill to intercede.
Read more: Trump’s recklessness is magnifying the military’s political power — and independence - Vox
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