The United States is a global superpower, and its military trains for war in every domain. During my years as a military educator, I saw American officers wrestle with any number of scenarios designed to challenge their thinking and force them to adapt to surprises. One case we never considered, however, was how to betray and attack our own allies. We did not ask what to do if the president becomes a threatening megalomaniac who tells one of our oldest friends, Norway, that because the Nobel Committee in Oslo refuses to give him a trophy, he no longer feels “an obligation to think purely of Peace” and can instead turn his mind toward planning to wage war against NATO.
As my colleague Anne Applebaum wrote today, Donald Trump’s threatening message to the Norwegian prime minister should, in any responsible democracy, force the rest of the U.S. political system to act to control him. The president is talking about an invasion that would require “citizens of a treaty ally,” as she put it, “to become American against their will,” all because he “now genuinely lives in a different reality.” And yet neither Congress nor the sycophants in the White House seem willing to stop him.
[Anne Applebaum: Trump’s letter to Norway should be the last straw]
The U.S. military is obligated by law, and by every tradition of American decency, to refuse to follow illegal orders. But what about orders that may not be illegal but are clearly immoral and illogical? The president, for example, can order the Pentagon to plan for an invasion of Greenland; such an order would be little more than a direction to organize one more war game. (The military, as it sometimes does during war games, might not even use real place names, but rather use maps that look a lot like the North Atlantic as it organizes an invasion of “Verdegrun” or something.)
But after years of experience with American military officers, I believe that even these hypothetical instructions will sound utterly perverse to men and women who have served with the Danes and other NATO allies. Denmark not only was our ally during the world wars of the 20th century, but also, as my colleague Isaac Stanley-Becker has written, joined our fight against the Taliban after 9/11 and suffered significant casualties for a small nation. Their soldiers bled and died on the same battlefields as Americans.
American officers know what Trump is planning—the world knows it, because Trump won’t stop saying it—and their minds will rebel at directives to take everything they’ve prepared to do for years and apply it backwards, against the people they have trained to work with and protect. The president, in other words, will be ordering them to do something they have been trained never to do.
America’s armed forces are conditioned to obey the orders of civilian authorities, and rightly so. But these will be orders that force U.S. military minds to step into a horrifying mirror universe where the United States is the aggressor against NATO, a coalition that includes countries that have been our friends for centuries. Should Trump pursue this scheme of conquest, the military’s training will have to be shattered and reassembled into a destructive version of itself, as if doctors were asked to take lifesaving medicines, reconstitute them as poisonous isomers, and then administer them to patients.
I think back to my days as the chairman of the Strategy and Policy Department at the War College, and I can only imagine what would have happened had I convened the faculty and students and said: “It’s time for us to think about how you might plan for an American invasion of a NATO country. Small nations have no claim to sovereignty and cannot defend their borders or possessions; we should create case studies for seizing whatever we want from them.”
The most likely outcome of such a meeting is that I would have been called in to explain myself to my superiors. If I had stayed fixated on such an idea, I might have been relieved of my leadership duties. If I had remained as adamant as Trump has become on the subject, I might have been directed to seek counseling or even undergo a renewed background check. Today, however, this aggressive and immoral stance is the policy of the commander in chief—because when the president speaks, it is policy—and he may well order the military to move it from rhetoric to reality.
[Tom Nichols: The silence of the generals]
Some military officers will shrug at Trump’s ravings and say that orders are orders, and that yesterday’s friends are today’s enemies. Every defense organization has people in it, uniformed and civilian, who are morally hollow and see only figures on a map that must be targeted for elimination. But most Americans, and the members of the military that serves them, are decent people. They know that attacking your friends is evil and mad. I am certain that the men and women of the armed forces will be conflicted and disturbed as they try to turn Trump’s unhinged obsessions into a coherent military plan.
In the end, however, if senior officers—starting with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the heads of each service—follow Trump down this dark road, the officers and enlisted people below them will likely obey the chain of command. Such an outcome would be a tragedy, and potentially a global catastrophe.
It is not up to the armed forces to put a stop to Trump’s ghastly ideas. Every molecule in the body of almost every uniformed American service member is likely to reject doing something they have spent a lifetime training never to do, but the United States is not run by the military, nor should it be. Americans, and their elected representatives, must take this burden away from the armed forces—now.
