On Tuesday, President Trump attacked the soul of the American military.
At 7:06 a.m., he posted, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” if Iran did not agree to open the Strait of Hormuz. The principal target of that message was the Iranian regime and the innocent men, women and children who would suffer if Trump acted on his unconscionable, reprehensible threat.
But there was another more subtle target for his words: the men and women of the United States military. The president was placing a choice before them. Do you serve Trump, or do you serve the Constitution? Do you serve Trump, or do you serve an even deeper law than the Constitution — the universal moral imperative to protect the innocent and the vulnerable?
The instant I read Trump’s post, my thoughts turned to a very different quote: “The soldier, be he friend or foe, is charged with the protection of the weak and unarmed. It is the very essence and reason for his being.”
Who do you think said those words? A chaplain? A pope? A woke professor who doesn’t appreciate Pete Hegseth’s constant evocation of “lethality?”
No, they come from one of America’s fiercest warriors, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, speaking after the end of World War II, during the military tribunal he organized to hold Japanese leaders accountable for their own horrific war crimes, including the sack of Manila in 1945.
After an anxious day during which much of the world felt as if it were teetering on the precipice of a historic catastrophe, Trump relented, at least for now. He agreed to a two-week cease-fire with Iran. The terms of the cease-fire are unclear. We don’t know if it will result in a permanent peace. And we don’t know if Trump will threaten Iran with destruction again.
So there is a reason to feel a degree of relief. The worst has not happened. Yet.
But we should feel anger even more than we feel relief.
Trump’s post was a declaration by an American president that he intended to commit war crimes so grave that they could, if fully carried out, constitute a crime against humanity. As terrible as that is, Trump’s putative orders also threatened to break the moral backbone of the American military and trigger one of the most serious constitutional crises in American history.
His threats, which apparently included the destruction of every bridge, power plant and possibly every desalination plant in Iran if it didn’t agree to his terms, would have plunged the country into nearly medieval conditions, creating human suffering on a staggering scale.
In other words, Trump is threatened to act like Vladimir Putin. Russia has been conducting a relentless bombing campaign against Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure, plunging much of the country into cold and darkness every winter.
From the beginning of that war, the United States has condemned Putin’s campaign. We have rightly called it a war crime, and Putin’s attacks on infrastructure represent a core element of the determination by the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine that Russia has committed crimes against humanity during its invasion.
That’s not to say that every attack on a bridge or power plant is a war crime. It is acceptable to attack bridges to immobilize approaching or retreating enemy forces, for example. Our military can attack plants that directly power important military facilities or military industries, so long as their destruction provides a definite military advantage.
But we absolutely cannot attack civilian infrastructure that has no direct military use — even if the intention is to use economic loss or the suffering of civilians to pressure our enemies to surrender. Imposing suffering on a country’s civilian population for the purpose of pressuring its government is by definition a war crime.
Western democracies imposed these legal limits on their adversaries after World War II, holding the leaders of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan accountable for their crimes against humanity. But the limits were intended to apply to us as well. Allied area bombing killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. The words “never again” of course apply primarily to the Holocaust, but they should also apply to the kind of total war waged by the great powers at the height of the conflict.
The best way to think about the legal standard is that an attack on a civilian bridge, power plant or desalination plant is presumptively unlawful. You can overcome that presumption only if you can demonstrate that the civilian facility is, in fact, dual-use (used for military as well as civilian purposes), and the use of force is proportionate — that the cost to civilians is not excessive compared to the military gains. It is necessary to satisfy both conditions to justify a strike.
It would be acceptable, for example, to bomb a bridge that you knew an advancing army was about to use to attack vulnerable troops, but you could not bomb a bridge in the middle of a city just because you know that some soldiers live there and might use it when commuting to work. And you definitely can’t bomb it simply because it’s a bridge and you believe bombing bridges hurts Iran.
When I served in Iraq, for example, I once approved a strike on a small bridge that would block a Qaeda force’s only known avenue of retreat, but only after we established that civilians had ample alternative means of transport and escape.
The law is so clear, in fact, that it would create a legal obligation for anyone receiving Trump’s orders to defy the president if he actually ordered these attacks. The Department of Defense Law of War Manual states that service members have an obligation to disobey orders to commit law of war violations when they receive “orders to perform conduct that is clearly illegal or orders that the subordinate knows, in fact, are illegal.”
Normally, if a soldier receives a plainly illegal order, he or she has avenues to contest the order, including asking his or commander to clarify, asking for JAG review, or going up the chain of command to seek a reversal of the order.
But if the unlawful order comes from the president himself? To whom does the soldier appeal? What is his practical recourse? Refusing the order places him in immediate danger of arrest and court-martial. And if the military does refuse the president’s order, then the nation faces a constitutional crisis that can be resolved only by Congress.
We do not yet know what happened behind closed doors in the hours before Trump’s deadline, but I hope part of the story was a furious effort by commanders to persuade the president to change course. They had to know the very soul of the United States military was at stake.
The American military has been so respected in this country for so long that it’s easy to forget that this was not always the case. After the Vietnam War, the military was in a state of profound demoralization and despair. Drug use was rampant. Public confidence in the armed forces collapsed.
Part of the solution was to end conscription and create an all-volunteer military. Every soldier, sailor, airman and Marine would put on the uniform only if they chose to. But that was merely the start of the necessary reforms.
An all-volunteer military could never succeed if it was the choice of last resort for America’s most disadvantaged or desperate citizens. “Prison or the infantry” might make for a good start to a movie, but it’s a terrible way to build an effective fighting force.
There is no question that people join the military for many different reasons. Sometimes the G.I. Bill alone is enough. Sometimes people do join because they can’t find another job. Sometimes they simply want adventure (“Join the Navy and see the world”). But for the military to become truly professional and truly excellent, it also has to attract some portion of America’s best and brightest — the people who have all the options in the world.
And you do that by centering professionalism and honor. You do that by creating an institution that rewards both technical and moral merit. You appeal to a person’s highest and best sense of purpose — to quote General MacArthur again, you tell the people of this nation that their warriors exist to protect the weak and unarmed.
In other words, if you want the best of America to join the military, you have to create a moral culture that the best people want to join. And so an indispensable element of creating the all-volunteer military was creating the moral framework for the noble warrior — the man or woman who defends the defenseless, who protects the innocent and, as we saw in the recent remarkable rescue of two airmen downed in Iran, never leaves a fallen comrade.
From the moment I joined the military in 2006, I was inundated with moral messages. I was told — like generations of Army officers before me — to read a book called “Once an Eagle,” a 1968 novel by Anton Myrer.
The book tells the stories of two officers, Courtney Massengale, a dishonorable, grasping careerist, and Sam Damon, a man of honor who puts his soldiers first. If you want to see how the Army tries to shape its officers, I’d urge you to read it. If you do, you’ll learn that the Army’s institutional ideal is best personified by two words: selfless sacrifice.
That’s what I saw in Iraq. I know the war was controversial. I know there are Americans who committed war crimes. I know that a majority of our readers likely believe it was a mistake, but when I was there the men and women I served with literally laid down their lives to protect innocent people.
We took extraordinary risks to make sure that we did not harm civilians, and we fought every day to protect them from an enemy that would blow up restaurants, markets and even wedding celebrations. The enemy died trying to kill civilians. Men I knew died to protect them. The two sides were not the same.
And from the top down the message was consistent. My unit was detached from the rest of our regiment and sent to an isolated base in eastern Iraq, so I had only one interaction with the regimental commander, Col. Michael Bills.
I was in Camp Buehring in Kuwait, waiting for the flight that would take me into Iraq, and he grabbed me firmly by the arm, looked me in the eye, and said, “Captain French, you will not screw up with detainees” (only he didn’t say screw). The Army was still reeling from the Abu Ghraib scandal, in which soldiers had abused Iraqi captives, and my job was to help make sure that my unit did not repeat yesterday’s mistakes.
Consider this — we are still shocked by the Abu Ghraib scandal, but that’s small potatoes compared to what Trump threatened on Tuesday.
Colonel Bills didn’t need to worry. My squadron commander, Lt. Col. Paul Calvert, delivered the same message. The soldiers constantly checked with me to make sure they did everything right. We were not perfect. No institution made up of humans is. But we did our best. And we left our little corner of Iraq infinitely better than we found it.
I share the names of my former commanders because I want you to know the names of men who served this country with honor.
Nor can we forget another group of men and women who also served with honor — the generals and admirals whom Pete Hegseth has fired abruptly and without public explanation. These men and women include Gen. Randy George, Adm. Lisa Franchetti, Adm. Linda Fagan, Gen. David Hodne, and Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr.
It grows more consequential every day that Hegseth didn’t just fire combatant commanders — the men and women who command America’s combat troops — he has also fired top JAG generals and the head of the Army’s chaplain corps.
One way of thinking about the military’s lawyers and chaplains is that they advance the mission in part by protecting the military from its own worst impulses. When they do their job correctly, they protect the integrity of the force.
But that’s not what authoritarians want. They want the loyalty of the force. And when that force possesses the training, equipment and resources of the United States military, the loyalty of the military can put unimaginable power in the hands of dishonorable and unstable men.
For this reason among others, it is not too much to say that the peace and stability of the entire world depends in large part on the character of the men and women who put on the uniform of the United States military. If their character falters, or if many of our best men and women are purged, then our nation risks becoming the very thing we built our military to oppose — a rogue regime bent on imposing its will on the world, with innocent human beings pawns in our grasp for domination and control.
I will end where I began, with General MacArthur imposing justice on the defeated Japanese empire for its crimes against humanity.
“The traditions of fighting men are long and honorable,” MacArthur said, “They are based upon the noblest of human traits: sacrifice.” When an officer violates this “irrevocable standard,” then “he has failed his duty to his troops, to his country, to his enemy, to mankind; has failed utterly his soldier faith.”
The vast majority of American service members know this to be true. Their commander in chief does not.
Some other things I did
My Sunday column was about Easter and what it means to actually believe that the Resurrection is real and that human beings possess eternal life:
Christians aren’t the only people who believe that man has a soul, that this life is not the sum total of our existence. We do, however, make a startling assertion, that God himself defeated death — that he entered into history, lived on this earth, was crucified and then returned to life. He demonstrated his mastery over death by appearing to many people, who shared their accounts of his crucifixion and resurrection. They say they saw him die and then live again.
If this is true, it changes everything. If we truly are created in the image of God, then his life becomes our life. We are not gods, of course, but we are eternal beings. The curse of Adam — “for dust you are and to dust you will return” — is broken by the sacrifice and resurrection of Christ.
Or, as C.S. Lewis wrote, Christ “has forced open a door that has been locked since the death of the first man. He has met, fought and beaten the king of death. Everything is different because he has done so.”
My Saturday round table with Jamelle Bouie and Michelle Cottle focused on Iran and the Supreme Court oral arguments in the birthright citizenship case. There was a remarkable moment in the oral argument when I felt as if I was in the upside-down. The allegedly “conservative” Trump administration argued for a version of the living constitutionalism, and the A.C.L.U. attorney argued for originalism. I expect the A.C.L.U. will win:
In the MAGA world, a lot of this new constitutional thinking is called “common good constitutionalism.” In other words, we envision our version of the common good, and then we interpret the Constitution, in essence, to back up that vision of the common good. This is completely the opposite of an originalist frame, which says that to the extent there’s any ambiguity, you go back to the original public meaning. In other words, there’s a fixed meaning to the language of the Constitution. “Common good constitutionalism” contradicts that. And so, what we saw was this clash of philosophies.
And it was interesting. There was a moment where the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer, who did a very good job arguing the position, said: “We have to go with the original, public meaning.” And the Trump administration is arguing some version of living constitutionalism, to try to conform the Constitution to their preferences. And the A.C.L.U. attorney, she was right where the justices were — and D. John Sauer was not. So, I’m not thinking this is going to be a terribly close case.
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