【Article/Observer Network Columnist Yu Bin】
Washington, in early autumn, is destined to be the capital of many events. At the end of August, the smoke of the US military's retreat to Afghanistan has not yet dissipated, and the senior US military officials have been exposed to "communism", and for a time, the relationship between US politicians and military leaders has been pushed to the cusp of the storm.
In mid-September, Bob Woodward, an American journalist who became popular in Watergate, said in his new book "Peril" that The Chairman of the Joint Staff, Mark Milley, spoke to the Chinese military twice around the time of the 2020 election, assuring the Chinese side that the United States would not attack China. Millie's behavior caused an uproar in the American political arena, and conservatives rose up in droves to attack him, strongly demanding that Millie confess and bring him to justice if necessary.
On September 28-29, the U.S. Senate held a hearing on Afghanistan and the U.S. military call, attended by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Chairman of the Board of Chiefs of Staff Milley, and Commander of Central Command, Frank McKenzie. At the two-day hearing, the military insisted on its own professionalism and procedural legitimacy on both the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and the call between China and the United States, and tried to draw a clear line with the disastrous withdrawal of troops in Afghanistan and all kinds of passers-by in the political arena. All three military leaders insisted that bids were addressed to Keep 2,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan to avoid the collapse of the Afghan government and the return of the Taliban to power.
In his testimony, Milley stressed that his communication with the Chinese side is based on the relevant procedures and regulations of the United States, which is intended to stabilize the relationship between the Two Militaries of China and the United States; he also said that he will do his best to support the US Constitution, oppose all enemies at home and abroad, firmly believe that civilian control of the military is an indispensable basic principle of this country, and is committed to ensuring that the military is not affected by domestic politics.
The two-day hearing was informative. However, whether it is Milley's own words, numerous questioners, and the media hype of the past few weeks, it seems that they are all on the facts, circling in the minimalist and politicized context of "yes" and "no", "right" and "wrong", "collaborating with the enemy" and "patriotism", consciously or unconsciously ignoring the deep causes of the constitutional crisis under Trump's regime and the militarized foreign policy of the United States.
Millie at the hearing. Image source: The Wall Street Journal
In view of this, this paper borrows the near-eternal issue of civil-military relations in US politics, sorts out, compares and analyzes the interaction between political and military relations and domestic and foreign policies under Trump, and its similarities and differences with the Cold War and post-Cold War political-military relations model, and looks forward to the trend of US political and political-military relations in the near and medium terms (1 to 3 years).
A preliminary observation is that after World War II, the US military, as one of the institutions of pluralistic politics, its own construction, strength and interest appeal, in different periods and different crisis environments, interacted, competed and played with other interest groups, showing at least three different stages: the politicization of the military (military-industrial group) during the Cold War; the militarization of civilian officials during the post-Cold War; and the increasing role of the military in the deep political and social crisis under Trump.
After Biden was elected, multiple crises such as partisanity, wealth and poverty, race, and the epidemic continued to plague and tear apart American society; Trump's second entry into the palace in 2024 is not a fool's dream. Robert Kagan, a neoconservative giant in the United States, published a 10,000-word article in the Washington Post on September 23, heralding the coming of the "darkest hour" in the United States, and the node is the year of Trump's 2024 election. [1] How the U.S. military in such a polarized political environment "stands alone" remains a huge variable.
Trump's last attempt: civil unrest to foreign war?
Trump is at odds with military leaders, and the immediate trigger is the nationwide protests and riots triggered by the kneeling death of black George Floyd by police officers on May 25, 2020, plunging the United States into its worst political crisis since the Vietnam War. On June 1, Trump, who had already entered the White House's underground fortifications several times for "inspections,[2] claimed to invoke the Rebellion Act of 1807 to deploy U.S. troops to counter the riots everywhere. [3] Trump wanted to lead the military to quell the "violence", and the military circles were in an uproar. The defense minister and many retired generals have expressed their support for the Constitution and opposed the president's "private use of public instruments" by the US military to "quell the chaos."
Looking back, as early as June 2020, at the height of the US constitutional crisis, the Biden campaign made a deal with the military: if Trump did not leave after losing the election in November, he would be "escorted from the White House" by the military, and Biden had "absolutely convinced" about this. [4] Nevertheless, on the eve of the election campaign, the United States was in a state of high excitement and confusion, and although the Democratic Party was leading in the polls, it was still uncertain who would die. After all, polls in the 2016 election have always been bullish on Hillary Clinton. Trump, who has always played his cards according to common sense, will be wrong with nothing, not to mention the new factor of the new crown epidemic. It was against this backdrop that Millie sent a telegram to the Chinese military on October 30 (november 3, the day of the vote), informing the Chinese side that the US political situation was "stable" and that it would not launch an attack on China.
However, the development of events, especially the use of Trump to overturn the election results after trump's defeat, far exceeded the expectations of biden's team. On January 6, 2021, Trump supporters violently broke into the Capitol, killing five people and injuring more than 140 people in hours of chaos, interrupting congressional voting procedures. Previously, Mr. Trump himself had been fueling the scene with highly inflammatory language, telling his supporters to "fight like hell" and "never concede." [5] Can the transition of regimes in the United States be peaceful? Will the beleaguered Trump desperately take risks and use his military power to trigger international conflicts and even nuclear wars, thereby declaring a state of emergency? In the eyes of the terrified establishment, everything is possible.
On January 6, U.S. President Donald Trump gathered a large number of supporters to rally to declare that the election results were false. The picture is from the surging image platform
On February 8, after another telegram from the Chinese military, Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, contacted House Speaker Pelosi and military leaders to reaffirm the authority and procedures for the use of nuclear weapons; Woodward's book also said that Millie had established a temporary mandatory rule for officials in the military's control of the nuclear process: the procedure for the use of nuclear weapons could not be initiated without Millikin's own consent. [6]
If Woodward's description is true, Millie's quick knife and self-respect are unique in the history of US political-military relations. However, there is a reason for this: the deteriorating Sino-US relationship is sliding into a situation of direct military confrontation in the final moments of Trump's administration, and the direct trigger is the Taiwan issue. On february 7, the day after the Capitol Hill riots, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations Kraft would visit Taiwan on January 13-15, once again trampling on China's red line on the Taiwan issue, and China reacted fiercely. According to reports, the Chinese side informed the US side through military pipelines that It is intolerable that The damage to China's sovereignty during Kraft's visit to Taiwan will not be tolerated, and that when the US special plane arrives close to Taiwan, the Chinese warplanes will also follow them into Taiwan's territorial airspace, declaring that China has sovereignty over Taiwan, and that if the Taiwan military plane obstructs it, "it will not rule out the consequences of firing in a straight line."
On the afternoon of January 12, Washington time, after the special plane of Kraft to Taiwan took off and hovered in the air for several hours, the US side announced the cancellation of all foreign visit plans of the State Department. [7] There is no official commentary on these media reports. However, the sharp turn of the US side from desperate bets on the Taiwan issue shows that the Trump administration and the Biden team are obviously in a fierce game behind the scenes, and the three parties involved in Taiwan are already on the string, and Milley is communicating with the Chinese military again at this time, obviously to reduce the pressure and cool down the situation in the Taiwan Strait, which is a huge risk.
The united efforts of the US political and military elites to oppose Trump's use of troops at home and abroad are not only rare in the history of the United States, but also raise many problems and challenges to the relationship between the us and the government and the military and even the operation of the democratic system. However, although Trump's game with the military has a strong personal color, it is inevitable to be biased if it is believed that Trump's previous US military has always been non-government affairs and concentrated on learning martial arts. Although Articles 1 and 2 of the U.S. Constitution clearly regulate the subordinate relationship between the U.S. civilian government and the U.S. military,[8] the relationship between the U.S. military and the pluralistic and mutually balanced government departments (executive, legislative, and judicial), as well as the federal system of decentralized powers, the connotation and extension of "political neutrality" have been in a state of constant change.
At the beginning of the Cold War, Wusheng was in decline
The formation of the political-military relationship in the United States as a "problem" came after World War II. Relying on its strong technical advantages and delivery capabilities, the US military has set up a global layout and become the spear and shield of the US hegemony, and the US military has also become an important participant or even a leading party in the formulation and operation of diplomatic and defense policies. The globalization of the functions of the US military has created a "structural" problem between it and the civilian government, that is, the "asymmetry" of the OPERATING environment of the US military: the US military travels around the world unimpeded and unrestrained; at home, it is subject to civilian officials, and must "fair competition" with other interest groups and share limited resources, which makes the US military quite "unsatisfied" in the domestic diversified environment.
During this period, there were many examples of American military disobedience and criminal offenses, the most famous of which was when General MacArthur sat in Japan, went his own way in the early days of the Korean War, caused the US military to suffer heavy losses, and insisted on expanding the war to China, and was dismissive of President Truman, with a great tendency of "will be outside, the king's life is not spared", forcing Truman to change generals halfway.
MacArthur (infographic)
After the Korean War, the US military's expenditure and scale further expanded, and it built an entangled and pervasive military-industrial group with the political and business circles. A typical example is that the U.S. Air Force, in order to expand the strength of the strategic air force, turned President Eisenhower's large-scale retaliation strategy, which was originally aimed at reducing military spending, into a cash cow for the Air Force. To this end, the Air Force did not hesitate to lie about military information and wantonly exaggerate the soviet military strength. In the early 1950s, the U.S. Strategic Air Force selected 70 targets in the former Soviet Union; by 1956, the Strategic Air Force had 2,997 targets, 3,261 in 1957, and in 1959 the Strategic Air Force estimated that U.S. nuclear strike targets would reach 8,400 and 10,400 in 1970, respectively. During this period, the U.S. military's nuclear warhead reserves increased from 1,169 in 1953 to 18,638 in 1960. The large-scale retaliation strategy originally formulated to save military expenditure has been completely disfigured in the wanton tampering of the military, and the United States has paid huge strategic resources for it. [9]
In the face of the general trend of "the decline of martial arts and culture", the American political science giant Huntington put forward the so-called concept of "objective control" in his famous work "Soldiers and The State", that is, the US civilian government should allow the military to have considerable autonomy in the field of specialization in exchange for the military's recognition and obedience to national interests and civilian government; civilian governments do not have to intervene in military affairs at all times. [10]
However, this ideal model of civilian officials in power and military generals obeying orders; and soldiers practicing martial arts and not interfering in their own government was bankrupt by the time Eisenhower left office. In his resignation speech on January 17, 1961, the veteran World War II hero deliberately reminded all walks of life in the United States to be wary of the all-pervasive influence of military-industrial groups on American politics and society. [11] After 60 years, the military-industrial group has not only been limited to the military and the arms group, but has multiplied into a ubiquitous and pervasive military-military-oil-political-Hollywood-academic-media complex, deeply embedded in the daily operation of American politics and society. [12]
Kennedy: From military-industrial darling to gun-to-gun ghost?
The Kennedy administration gave a youthful, "outstanding" image. [13] Behind the glamorous appearance of the Kennedy administration, however, is the lingering shadow of the U.S. military-industrial complex. In fact, in the 1960 election, democratic presidential candidates Kennedy and Johnson, with the connivance of the military industry group (Paul Nitz is the mastermind behind it), attacked the Republican Party's expansion of the army and the ineffectiveness of "military force", making the number of strategic missiles in the United States much lower than that of the Soviet Union, and fabricating the so-called "missile gap" problem. [14]
Although Kennedy entered the White House with "support for the army", the military circles were dismissive of the "scholars" in Kennedy's cabinet. Among them were Bundy, a national security assistant and former provost at Harvard University, and Defense Secretary McNamara, who is considered a "math prodigy." During the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff ignored civilian directives and insisted on using the military's "Standard Operational Procedure" to intercept Soviet ships, that is, to use naval guns to warn Soviet cargo ships carrying ballistic missiles on deck, which in McNamara's view was undoubtedly a joke on nuclear warfare. In fact, the U.S. military has been waiting for an opportunity to expand the situation in order to achieve its ultimate goal of militarily invading Cuba, which is contrary to Kennedy's vision of trying to control and eventually defuse the crisis.
In fact, the military was preparing to invade Cuba before Kennedy took office, and the CIA was also secretly training Cuban exiles and reporting the invasion plan shortly after Kennedy took office. Official declassified U.S. archives indicate that Kennedy was hesitant about the CIA's plan,[15] and asked General Lemniser, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to evaluate it. However, Lemnizer knew that the CIA's plan was full of loopholes and extremely risky, but he let it go, which led to the fiasco of the "Bay of Pigs Incident" in 1961, which embarrassed the Kennedy administration, which had been in office for less than a hundred days.
The real purpose of the military is to expect the CIA operation to fail, and the military can "justifiably" invade Cuba. Kennedy felt deceived afterwards, but it was too late to regret it. [16] Kennedy himself distrusted either the CIA or the military, and during the Cuban Missile Crisis, his younger brother Robert F. Kennedy, who was the Attorney General, was used to directly contact the Soviet high-level through the KGB's informant in New York, and finally defused the crisis. [17]
Kennedy was assassinated a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the real reason for Ken's assassination is speculated to be not only due to his "compromise" with the Soviet Union and Cuba during the missile crisis, and his post-crisis initiative to build world peace with the Soviet Union[18], which affected the business of the military-industrial group, but also because Kennedy signed the Memorandum of National Security Action No. 263 (NSAM-263) in October 1963, planning the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam at the end of 1963. All were withdrawn within two years (U.S. troops had 19,000 "military advisers" in South Vietnam at the time). People are still debating who killed Kennedy, and as time goes on, more and more people are taking aim at the military-industrial complex and its proxy in politics, Vice President Johnson. [19]
Jeffrey Sachs, an economics professor at Columbia University, noted in early 2017 that "Kennedy's 1963 peace initiative was perhaps the best chance to end the Cold War, when the two sides signed the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty." Some argue that the right-wing forces regard Kennedy's peace initiative as a major rebellion, and ken's assassination is inevitable. Now it seems that this does make sense." [20] The day after Kennedy's burial, new President Johnson signed the Memorandum of Action No. 273 on National Security Operations to resume troop surges to Vietnam. [21]
Kennedy before the assassination (infographic)
Vietnam War: An inflection point for civilian militancy
After Kennedy's assassination, the relationship between the us government and the military began to change from "military service" to "civilian warlike", and its inflection point was the Vietnam War.
In 1964, the Johnson administration single-handedly orchestrated the Gulf of Tonkin, beginning an 11-year "limited war." During this period, the US military invested almost all modern weapons except the atomic bomb, and it was still unable to recover the decline. Nevertheless, the high-level us civilian officials have made a big deal out of it from the beginning, describing what was originally a cruel war as a "police action", and the official and media have reported good news but no worries, and the American people certainly have no way of knowing the truth, and they have gradually become accustomed to this distant war. Until the "Spring Offensive" in 1968 (the Us side called the Ted Offensive), the Vietnamese side launched a large-scale attack on more than 100 places in South Vietnam at the same time, which greatly shocked the US side, and the anti-war demonstrations in the United States rose up, Mai Shi resigned, Johnson also gave up running for re-election, and the defeat in the Vietnam War was decided. [22]
It can be seen that the biggest problem in the political-military relationship that began to be distorted during the Kennedy-Johnson era was not the simple problem of military disobedience to civilian officials. As a result of McCarthyism and the Cold War system of the 1950s, the domestic political ecology in the United States became increasingly ideological and militarized. By the time of the Kennedy administration, the civilian community in the United States was not only difficult to stand alone, but also had a tendency to be involuntary or to collude with the military-industrial complex. The decision-making process and ultimate failure of the Vietnam War showed that civilian officials were more enthusiastic about military use than the military; a civilian government that could not control itself for various reasons was more harmful to the U.S. political system and international security than military personnel who danced with guns and guns.
The lessons of the U.S. military's great cost and eventual defeat in the Vietnam War formed the core of the Weinberg Doctrine published in 1984,[23] which was further affirmed by the Powell Doctrine after the end of the Cold War. [24] The Weinberg-Powell Doctrine[25] has two meanings: first, it sets strict preconditions for the future use of force by the United States, namely that it must involve major national interests of the United States, that it must have clear political and strategic objectives, that it must have prior public and congressional support, and that it must be used as a last resort. Second, once a civilian government decides to use force, the military should have the power to decide how to operate. [26] It can be said that Weinberg-Powell doctrine was formulated to draw lessons from the Vietnam War, in fact, on behalf of the military, to reverse Huntington's "objective control" blueprint and redefine the relationship between the government and the military in the United States.
Civilian officials are still military, and they cannot receive it at once
The US military won a complete victory in the Gulf War, the Cold War came to an abrupt end, and the United States[27] which was in a "unipolar moment", was no longer invincible, and the United States took advantage of the situation to shift the strategic focus of the United States to the so-called "Clintonism" aimed at humanitarian intervention. Although Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, advocated prudent use of troops, Clinton's Secretary of State Albright actively "asked for war," and Time Magazine called the Bosnian War "Albright's War." [28] At the urging of senior civilian officials who embraced "liberal interventionism," the U.S. military used troops in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and other "troubled areas."
In the 2000 election, the "Clintonism", which used force everywhere on humanitarian grounds, began to encounter strong opposition. Rice declared at the August 1, 2000 Republican Convention, that the U.S. military is "not an international policeman, not a world 9/11." [29] Bush was not interested in his predecessor's "liberal-interventionist" and intended to devote U.S. strategic resources to the challenge of the two great powers, China and Russia. However, the 9/11 terrorist attacks occurred, and the Bush administration was forced to change course and enter the road of no return for foreign military use in the name of "counter-terrorism."
At the military strategic level, the war in Afghanistan was not over, and Bush ordered the US military to enter Iraq, and the remnants of the Taliban were able to breathe a sigh of relief and finally made a comeback, and the military is still angry about it. In Iraq, the U.S. military top brass advocated an absolute numerical and qualitative superiority over Iraq with hundreds of thousands of troops; but Deputy Defense Secretary wolfwitz, a neoconservative cadre, thought that such a heavy force was "wildly off the mark." [30] Since then, although the US military has fought quickly and made quick decisions, it has been difficult to effectively occupy and control Iraq due to policy mistakes and lack of troops. The reason for the deeper contradictions between the Bush administration and the military circles is that the Bush diplomatic-military policy team, which is based on neoconservatism, has successfully directly controlled and intervened in the professional and technical fields and operational aspects of the military, which is the first time since the Vietnam War.
Hillary clinton was an out-and-out hawk who supported, participated in, or dominated all of America's foreign military use during the post-Cold War period
The U.S. military swallowed its anger during the Bush administration and paid a considerable price for it. When Obama took office in 2009, the New Deal for newcomers in the White House brought the relationship between the government and the military into a completely different situation. On the one hand, Obama himself talked extravagantly about the nuclear-weapon-free world, reconciliation with the Muslim world, multilateral cooperation and other lofty doctrines, and was unexpectedly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in the 9 months of entering the White House.
However, at the policy level, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has indulged "liberal-interventionism" and promoted color revolutions and regime changes around the world, especially in the "Greater Middle East" region including North Africa, creating a large number of failed states, indirectly and directly achieving the extreme Islamic State, and the resulting massive number of refugees has directly triggered the rise of anti-immigrant and anti-color populism in the West. Even the liberal New York Times published an article during the 2016 election that Hillary Clinton was an out-and-out hawk; from first lady, senator, to secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, who aspired to become the first female president in U.S. history, supported, participated in, or led all of the U.S. foreign military use during the post-Cold War period. [31]
Trump and the military leaders: Not a cold day
In the 2016 election, the spearhead of Trump's "America First" campaign platform pointed directly at the "liberal-interventionism" that Hillary Clinton has tirelessly promoted around the world. [32] However, the political man, who vowed to completely cut off American globalism since World War II, directly challenged the establishment that dominated U.S. diplomatic strategy. Even without Floyd's death and Trump's lazy and bad government on the epidemic and race issues, the military has been intolerable to our reckless president on a range of issues, including the withdrawal of troops from Syria, the Kurdish issue, and relations with allies in Europe and Asia. At the end of 2019, the military's well-connected and respected former defense minister Mattis resigned in anger over the Syrian issue. At this point, Trump's relationship with the military has turned red. [33]
To be fair, Trump, who takes the anti-system as his mission, entered the White House, and was quite lenient to the military, not only vowing to increase military spending and rebuild the US military in the election campaign, but also recruiting a number of generals into the cabinet, forming the most "militarized" presidential team in US history. Not only that, the US military budget under Trump has been rising steadily, basically reversing the trend of successive years of decline in military spending under Obama. Defense spending in 2020 increased by another $20 billion from 2019. [34]
Sources：https：//www.statista.com/statistics/272473/us-military-spending-from-2000-to-2012/
However, the military leaders and Trump do not seem to have had a "honeymoon" from the beginning. Before Defense Secretary Mattis resigned in late 2019, National Security Assistant and Army Lt. Gen. McMaster and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, retired Marine Corps general, left his posts. Not only is Mr. Trump at odds with the generals, but other cabinet officials alternate frequently, whether it's the moderate Secretary of State Tillerson or the far-right hawkish national security assistant Bolton, who seems to have struggled to adapt to Mr. Trump's capricious and unruly disposition. At the policy level, Trump's intentional or unintentional destruction of the global system that the American elite has run for many years has made the establishment uneasy. The preventive measures taken by Milley and other military leaders against Trump at a time of constitutional crisis in the United States may be unexpected, but they are also reasonable.
Conclusion: The gun is out of power?
60 years ago, Eisenhower, who came from the military, warned the US military industry group to grow up before leaving office. Today, the group's reach and influence are deeply rooted in all walks of life in the United States, and its interest advocates are also spread throughout all levels of government. In the "big net" sown by the military industrial group, almost no politician can "slip through the net", and there is no left or right, and the democratic and republican parties eat it all.
More importantly, today's political-military relations are far from being applicable to the relatively simple "military belligerence" and "civilian peace" models of the Eisenhower era. In U.S. foreign policy, examples of literati being more belligerent than military abound, and senior female officials (Aulbright and Hillary) who believe in liberal interventionism are even more reluctant to raise eyebrows; this is true of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Iraq War, Libya, and Syria. Trump's extremely willful and highly personal policy orientation has made the relationship between the government and the military more variable. In contrast, many military personnel are relatively realistic.
However, the biggest variable in the recent political-military relationship is the increasingly important role of the US military in the political transformation of the United States. This is reflected not only in Trump's reliance on the military during his campaign, administration and crisis (though sometimes unsatisfactory), but also in the rising expectations of the military by Trump's opposition. As early as before Trump was elected, the Democratic Party said that if Trump was elected unconstitutional, or made absurd decisions that were harmful to the United States, the military had the responsibility to rebel and solve the "Trump problem" in a coup d'état. [35]
Even before the epidemic, the Democratic Party was talking about 2021 if trump, who lost the election but refused to leave office, hoped that the US military would do something for the change of the White House. [36] This is exactly what Biden, the Democratic presidential candidate mentioned at the beginning of this article, put it, who "has absolutely convinced that the military will escort him from the White House with great dispatch". [37]
So far, the various factions in the chaotic situation have been happy to see the military interfere in politics. For American professional soldiers who have fought all over the world, the Us mainland has become the last place of right and wrong that the US military must take care of, which is undoubtedly a huge irony.
What is even more bizarre is that the "righteous deeds" of senior US military officials in the constitutional crisis described in Woodward's book are not empty. As early as the end of the Cold War and the fact that the U.S. national strength was in full swing, some people had the audacity to predict that the U.S. military would one day take over the government. In 1992, charles Dunlap, Jr., a U.S. Air Force officer, wrote an essay titled "The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012" while attending the American War College in Washington, D.C., which was published in the Army War College's academic magazine Parameters. Dunlep's assumption was that in the early 1990s, the United States won two wars in one go, namely the Gulf War and the Cold War of 1990-1991. Since then, the US political arena has become increasingly corrupt, the officials are incompetent, the drug epidemic is rampant, the crime is rampant, and the people are not happy, and the only thing left in the United States that can still make a difference is the military. Since then, the invincible US military has gradually taken over various functions of the US government: public security, medical care, education, environmental protection, civil aviation, and even various civil engineering projects. While the U.S. military is deeply involved in civilian affairs, it also despises and is even hostile to the poor and indomitable people and incompetent officials. Finally, on the occasion of the "death" of the US president one day in 2012, the military "took over" the White House. [38]
Dunleep himself wanted his bold vision to stay on paper forever. For 21st-century America, however, what matters is not the right or wrong of Dunlep's predictions; on a purely technical level, Dunlepp is already wrong. In 2012, the United States was successfully re-elected, and the historic "color revolution" (black people entering the White House) in the United States was able to continue for another four years. The United States, which has just emerged from the shadow of the Great Depression of 2008, is confidently committed to a new round of color revolution around the world under the guidance of a hawkish female secretary of state.
However, the cycle of cause and effect, good and bad, depends on each other. While liberal-interventionism, free from the constraints of the two-tiered system, tosses the world at will, the domestic and foreign affairs of the United States are becoming increasingly right-wing, ideological, and militarized. The US military's conquest in the world has not only created a large number of defeated countries, but also depleted the huge economic, military and diplomatic resources of the United States, ignoring the domestic people's livelihood and software and hardware construction. Dunlep's American social chaos and grievances eventually converged into a populist frenzy of anti-system, anti-elite, anti-intellectual, anti-rational, and anti-pluralistic, pushing the particularly unreliable "giant baby" figure into the White House. Not only is the public helpless against the sudden outbreak, but it also fuels the fire of deep-seated ethnic issues; and the military's position of protecting the Constitution and not protecting the Lord makes Trump rely more on the well-equipped White People's Soldiers organization throughout the United States to escort him for re-election. [39] The United States became a "failed state",[40] and was no longer just a possibility, but a matter of degree.
So far, the political-military relations in the United States have experienced the militarization of social issues and crisis handling from the politicization of military personnel in the early days of the Cold War to the militarization of civilian officials since the post-Cold War. Whether Dunlep's "Rhapsody 2012" will come true is actually irrelevant. If the US military can really solve difficult problems, eliminate evil and quell chaos, and realize the functional transformation from "disturbance" to "inside", it may be a not bad option for the United States and the world.
In 2024, will the United States fall into the darkest hour, or will it be blessed to be reborn? Let's wait and see.
[Notes]
[1] Robert Kagan, “Our constitutional crisis is already here,” Washington Post, September 23, 2021, https：//www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/23/robert-kagan-constitutional-crisis/.
[2] Libby Cathey, “Contradicting Trump, Barr says he went to White House bunker for security not ‘inspection’,” ABC News, June 9, 2020, https：//abcnews.go.com/Politics/contradicting-trump-barr-presidents-time-white-house-bunker/story?id=71152260.
[3] Scott R. Anderson and Michel Paradis, “Can Trump Use the Insurrection Act to Deploy Troops to American Streets?”, Lawfare, June 3, 2020, https：//www.lawfareblog.com/can-trump-use-insurrection-act-deploy-troops-american-streets.
[4] Justin Wise, “Biden says military will escort Trump from White House if he loses and refuses to leave,” The Hill, June 11, 2020, https：//thehill.com/homenews/campaign/502213-biden-says-trump-will-have-an-escort-from-the-white-house-if-he-refuses-to.
[5] NBR, “Read Trump's Jan. 6 Speech, A Key Part Of Impeachment Trial,” February 10, 2021, https：//www.npr.org/2021/02/10/966396848/read-trumps-jan-6-speech-a-key-part-of-impeachment-trial.
[6] Jamie Gangel, Jeremy Herb and Elizabeth Stuart, “Woodward/Costa book： Worried Trump could 'go rogue,' Milley took secret action to protect nuclear weapons,” CNN, September 14, 2021, https：//www.cnn.com/2021/09/14/politics/woodward-book-trump-nuclear/index.html.
[7] "Taiwan Media Exposes US Ambassador's Visit to Taiwan in January to Cancel Insider's Attack on Chinese People's Liberation Army Breaks the Game", Duowei News, March 14, 2021, https://www.dwnews. com/%E4%B8%AD%E5%9B%BD/60233050/%E5%8F%B0%E5%AA%92%E6%9B%9D%E5%85%89%E7%BE%8E%E5%9B%BD%E5%A4%A7%E4%BD%BF1%E6%9C%88%E8%AE%BF%E5%8F%B0%E5%8F%96%E6%B6%88%E5%86%85%E5%B9% 95%E4%B8%AD%E5%9B%BD%E8%A7%A3%E6%94%BE%E5%86%9B%E5%87%BA%E6%89%8B%E7%A0%B4%E5%B1%80
[8] See Section 1, Section 8 and Section 2, Section 2 of the United States Constitution, The Constitution of the United States, https://constitutionus.com/.
[9] Andrew Bacevich, “Elusive Bargain： The Pattern of U.S. Civil-Military Relations since World War II,” in Andrew Bacevich, ed., The Long War： A New History of U.S. National Security Policy Since World War II （New York： Columbia University Press, 2007）, 228.
[10] Samuel Huntington, The Soldier and the State： The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations （Cambridge： Harvard University Press, 1957）.
[11] Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945-2006, 10th ed. （McGraw-Hill, 2008）, 202-4.
[12] Nick Turse, The Complex： How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives （New York： Metropolitan Books, 2009）.
[13] See David Halberstam, The Best and The Brightest (New York: The Random House, 1969). The Chinese edition of the book is titled "The Exceptional."
[14] LaFeber, America, Russia, 202-203.
[15] Aleksander Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble： Khrushchev, Castro & Kennedy, 1958-1964 （New York： W.W. Norton, 1997）, 84-5.
[16] Peter Kornbluh, ed., Bay of Pigs Declassified： The Secret CIA Report on the Invasion of Cuba （New York： The New Press, 1998）.
[17] Robert Kennedy, Thirteen Days： A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis （W. W. Norton, 1969）.
[18] John F. Kennedy, “Commencement Address at American University,” Washington, D.C., June 10, 1963,
[19] William Pepper, An Act of State： The Execution of Martin Luther King （New York： Verso, 2003）, 127.
[20] Jeffrey Sachs, “Donald Trump’s dangerous China illusions,” Boston Globe, February 5, 2017, https：//www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2017/02/05/trump-dangerous-china-illusions/51H7yrI9vTE3PSmXDJDl3M/story.html.
[21] Pepper, An Act of State, 126-7; Kevin Ruane, War and revolution in Vietnam （UCL Press, 1998）, 60; Sergei Blagov, “A tale of two assassinations： Vietnam's JFK,” Asia Times online, November 22, 2003, https：//deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/printthread.php?tid=14617.
[22] Bacevich, 2007, 235-37.
[23]“温伯格主义”于1984年11月发布。 见 Walter LaFeber, “The Rise and Fall of Colin Powell and the Powell Doctrine,” Political Science Quarterly 124, no. 1 （March 2009）： 71–93。
[24] Colin Powell, “U.S. Forces： Challenges Ahead,” Foreign Affairs （winter 1992/93）： 38.
[25] Kenneth Campbell, “Once Burned, Twice Cautious： Explaining the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine,” Armed Forces and Society 24, no. 3 （Spring 1998）： 357-374.
[26]“Caspar W. Weinberger： Excerpts From Address of Weinberger,” The New York times, November 29, 1994, A5, https：//www.nytimes.com/1984/11/29/world/excerpts-from-address-of-weinberger.html.
[27] Charles Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment,” Foreign Affairs America and the World 1990.
[28] Walter Isaacson, “Madeleine's War,” Time, May 9, 1999, http：//content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,24446,00.html.
[29] 911 is an emergency telephone number in the United States. See Condoleezza Rice, speech at the Republican National Convention, August 1, 2000, http://www.famousquotes.me.uk/speeches/Condoleezza-Rice/index.htm.
[30] Bob Woodward, The War Within A Secret White House History, 2006-2008 （Simon & Schuster, 2008）.
[31] Marl Landler, “How Hillary Clinton Became a Hawk,” New York Times, April 21, 2016, https：//www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/magazine/how-hillary-clinton-became-a-hawk.html?searchResultPosition=1.
[32] Full transcript： Donald Trump NYC speech on stakes of the election, New York Times, June 22, 2016, https：//www.politico.com/story/2016/06/transcript-trump-speech-on-the-stakes-of-the-election-224654.
[33] Max Boot, “A Few Good Men： Trump, the Generals, and the Corrosion of Civil-Military Relations,” Foreign Affairs 99, no. 3 （May/June 2020）： 172-178.
[34] Joe Gould, “Pentagon finally gets its 2020 budget from Congress,” Defense News, December 19, 2019, https：//www.defensenews.com/congress/2019/12/19/pentagon-finally-gets-its-2020-budget-from-congress/.
[35] James, Kirchick, “If Trump wins, a coup isn’t impossible here in the U.S.,” LA Times, July 19, 2016, https：//www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-kirchick-trump-coup-20160719-snap-story.html; John Feffer, “The Surprising Popularity of Military Coups,” FPIF, July 20, 2016, https：//fpif.org/bring-in-the-military/.
[36] Joshua Geltzer, “What if Trump refuses to accept defeat in 2020?” CNN, February 23, 2019, https：//www.cnn.com/2019/02/23/opinions/trump-contest-2020-election-loss-geltzer/index.html.
[37] Justin Wise, op ed.
[38] Charles Dunlap, Jr, “The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012,” Parameters 22, no. 4 （winter 1992-93）： 2-22.
[39]“From Debate Stage, Trump Declines To Denounce White Supremacy,” September 30, 2020, NPR, https：//www.npr.org/2020/09/30/918483794/from-debate-stage-trump-declines-to-denounce-white-supremacy.
[40] Derek Thompson, “America Is Acting Like a Failed State,” The Atlantic, March 14, 2020, https：//www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/america-isnt-failing-its-pandemic-testwashington-is/608026/.
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