Bill McRaven Calls For a New President

Retired Admiral Bill McRaven, formerly commander of JSOC and later SOCOM, has penned a piece calling for the replacement of President Trump "the sooner, the better." I'm one of the kind of people he's trying to motivate, and he's speaking in language I understand. The argument has an unusual structure, one rarely seen in American politics.

The piece is fifteen paragraphs long. The first ten paragraphs are purely about honor, as are his last three. He lays out numerous examples framed around two specific recent events of men and women of honor showing honor to and for each other. Honor is indispensable to society and to politics, so this kind of argument is not out of place. Without honor, there is only power, and the direct exercise of power is expensive. Showing respect for each other and each other's interests lowers the cost of running a political system, and indeed a society. It allows us to accept that others may assume positions of power and authority, because we believe they will respect us enough not to use that power irresponsibly; and because a concern with being seen as worthy of honor by us will mean they behave honorably and respectably. They are and ought to be motivated by 'a decent respect for the opinions of mankind,' as the Declaration of Independence puts it. It is not for no reason that the Founders, who were concerned not only with 'lives and fortunes' but also 'sacred honor' built so successful a system of governance.

It is also unsurprising that a man whose life is built around honor would find Donald Trump especially objectionable. Trump is not concerned with the proprieties of honor at all. He uses the language and forms of honor to reward and punish, but without regard to whether the rewards or especially the punishments are merited. It is proper to regard him as ridiculous in this way -- just last week Jim Mattis drew a connection between the insults Trump had directed at him and those directed as Meryl Streep to declare himself 'the Meryl Streep of generals' -- but it is not completely our of line to feel this misuse of honor represents a dagger at the throat of basic social connections. McRaven's closing argument, in his last three paragraphs, suggest that our ability to maintain the military power that holds the order of the world together is fundamentally threatened by Donald Trump. His arguments as to why a disdain for promises and alliances and respect for the interests of allies are perfectly reasonable.

So thirteen of the fifteen paragraphs are places where McRaven and I share a basic worldview about the role of honor and its place in the world. It's really only parts of two paragraphs where we come apart, but those two are enough to call the whole thrust of his argument into question for me. They are these:

It is easy to destroy an organization if you have no appreciation for what makes that organization great. We are not the most powerful nation in the world because of our aircraft carriers, our economy, or our seat at the United Nations Security Council. We are the most powerful nation in the world because we try to be the good guys. We are the most powerful nation in the world because our ideals of universal freedom and equality have been backed up by our belief that we were champions of justice, the protectors of the less fortunate.

But, if we don’t care about our values, if we don’t care about duty and honor, if we don’t help the weak and stand up against oppression and injustice — what will happen to the Kurds, the Iraqis, the Afghans, the Syrians, the Rohingyas, the South Sudanese and the millions of people under the boot of tyranny or left abandoned by their failing states?

The problem with the first paragraph is the assumption that our power comes from "ideals of universal freedom and equality." It is true that many Americans believe that these are universal ideals. But ideals like 'equality' are not universally held, and the appeal to these things as if they were universals is a category error, as this essay explains in detail.

Category errors are very serious philosophical mistakes. McRaven is not a philosopher, and as the essay notes this error is extremely common among those we tend to name as our 'foreign policy elites.' Nevertheless this is an error of thought with severe consequences. It is one that has drawn us into wars, and could again, to fight for values that aren't even held by the people we think we are defending. The most prominent of the Kurdish fighting organizations, for example, are Communists. Communists don't believe in 'universal freedom,' and while they profess a view of 'equality,' they don't mean anything like what Americans do by the term. The idea is not that everyone is endowed equally with basic liberties, but that society should control everything in order to ensure something like an equal distribution of goods (or at least an equitable one, since those with greater needs might receive more; though in practice, the 'equities' somehow always align with closeness to the political elite). Such a state is in most respects aims at the opposite of our traditional notion of 'equality,' and is completely opposed to our ideal of freedom.

Which brings us to the second paragraph. The problem here is not an opposition to oppression, which is noble. It is the list of conflicts. American honor might compel us to do something to defend allies like the Kurds, but it cannot compel us to fight in South Sudan. Most Americans could probably identify that Sudan is a nation in Africa, but I'll bet you that the percentage who can tell you where the Rohingyas live is vanishingly small. Honor bonds are mutual relationships, not one-way duties of provision. The Kurds have one with us because they fought with us against a common enemy, and bore a lot of the burden of the fighting while we mostly provided fire and air support. Where no deep relationship with us exists, honor does not and cannot compel us to fight someone else's war. We might choose to do it, and think it worthy of honor that we chose to bear a burden we did not have to bear. Honor cannot compel us to do it. If they want an honor bond of the sort that would compel us to do it, well, formal alliances are negotiated formally, and usually between nations rather than between a nation and disfavored ethnic groups.

Meanwhile McRaven has omitted a significant honor concern that touches on this project of removing the president 'the sooner, the better.' The class of public servants, to include military servicemembers, is honor-bound to uphold the will of the American people. This will is expressed formally and permanently in the Constitution, and less formally and permanently in the elected government of the day. The current impeachment hearing (if it is that) was kicked off by a letter to Congress from an unnamed intelligence officer who has chosen to remain in the shadows rather than testify even incognito. The intelligence community has no constitutional standing even to exist, but it is legally bound to the Executive Branch, whose elected leader is a President of the United States. The State Department, similarly, is now a merely statuatory authority that is in open revolt against the Constitutional authority. The New York Times just ran an article openly praising "the deep state" for its attempt to resist and remove the elected leader of their branch of government.

McRaven must know that having military officials throw their weight behind the removal of the Constitutionally-named Commander in Chief would set an alarming precedent with echoes to ancient Rome. There is no guarantee that allowing the unelected bureaucracy or military replace the elected and Constitutional leadership would happen only once. It certainly cannot be said to be consistent with the honor owed to the Constitution or the constitutional structure to advocate for the bureaucrats to be allowed to override the election.

Now Congress has constitutional authority to remove the President if it chooses to do so, but it is supposed to be for 'high crimes and misdemeanors,' not because the President lacks honor. He does, I agree. That is a big problem, I agree. But the cost of removing a President outside the constitutional norms, at the behest of an unelected bureaucracy and even unnamed intelligence officers, is too high to be borne. There will be an election in a year and a week. If the American people want rid of him, they will have the chance to do it themselves.