There’s been a LOT of flack, not all of it from the foamers-at-the-mouth on the right, over the steps Milley took during and after the last election to reassure his Chinese counterpart that Trump wasn’t going to nuke them in a desperate grab to stay in power. And there is some reason for concern in the weakening of military respect for civilian control. But it is also becoming clear that Milley wasn’t the only military — or civilian — official in the administration to take this action. WaPo columnist David Ignatius makes this point:
Gen. Milley’s stress test
Milley’s detractors have focused on his Oct. 30, 2020, and Jan. 8 telephone calls to Gen. Li Zuocheng, his Chinese counterpart, to calm Chinese fears that Trump might take rash military action. This criticism is misplaced. Military-to-military contacts to “deconflict” crises are common and essential. [emphasis added]
He describes other, similar acts:
Milley’s predecessor, Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., recalled in an interview that in 2018 he had contacted Gen. Valery Gerasimov, the Russian chief of military staff, to ease his fears of instability while Russia was hosting the World Cup soccer tournament that summer. Dunford said he encouraged NATO to call off a scheduled military exercise, just as Milley did in advising postponement of an Indo-Pacific Command exercise after the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol.
Nor was it just the generals:
The focus on Milley misses a larger point: He was just one of a half-dozen senior military and civilian officials who took similar unusual steps during the final months of Trump’s administration to prevent what they feared might be a domestic or international catastrophe. This group — which quietly placed guardrails around the president’s actions — included Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Attorney General William P. Barr, CIA Director Gina Haspel and other senior officials, according to Woodward and Costa’s book and my own reporting.
And lest we forget, there were other concerns besides wagging the dog:
Milley worried after the election that Trump was trying to seize what he called the intelligence “power ministries” of government — the CIA, FBI and NSA. He refused to endorse a December plan to break up the National Security Agency from Cyber Command and install a Trump loyalist at the NSA. Meanwhile, Barr had rejected an effort to dump Christopher A. Wray as head of the FBI, Woodward and Costa write. And as I reported in April, Haspel said in December that she would quit if Trump fired her deputy and installed Trump zealot Kashyap Patel.
This is more than just more exposure of Trump’s machinations and auto-coup plotting. We really have no good mechanism in place to prevent another, smarter would-be Trump from being more successful. The safeguards established in the Constitution envisioned the three branches of government each acting to restrain the others. The Founders didn’t plan on the kind of partisan collusion we’re seeing now (though Washington did warn against factions that were already forming during his presidency).
The main defense against the next autocrat (or the return of TFG) is the ballot box — which the Republicans are doing their best to neutralize.