ESSAY
Should We Worry About Trump’s Fawning Admiration of the Military?
By Gary J. Bass
The New York Review of Books, June 29, 2018
In his short time in office, President Trump has surrounded himself with senior military officers and expressed unquestioning admiration for the armed forces, even going so far as to propose a military parade on Veterans Day— something more typical of Beijing or Moscow. Should we be worried?
The best answer can be found in a book by Samuel Huntington that came out more than six decades ago. When most people think of Huntington, they remember his book “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order,” or perhaps his hostility to Latino immigration in his latter years, but they would be far better off reading “The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations.” First published in 1957, it is by far the most influential book on the subject — and itself a source of no small controversy.
Ambitious and deftly written, “The Soldier and the State” is an argument for civilian mastery over a professional military. For Huntington, modern military officers were like doctors or lawyers, with a specific professional expertise: managing violence. Whether in the United States or even the Soviet Union, their proper ethic was realistic, conservative and prudent, more wary of going to war than their reckless or crusading civilian masters.
Crucially, a suitably professionalized military stands aloof from politics. It should avoid the disastrous examples of Germany’s domineering general staff in World War I or Japan’s bellicose generals in World War II, whose political dominance brought confusion, fanaticism and ruin. Instead, Huntington believed that maximizing the professionalism of the armed forces would render them “politically sterile and neutral.” There would be no need to fear military domination or coups, because the officer corps would shun politics.
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário