Rash: Trump’s ill-advised military displays in Washington and LA

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The massive military display was supposed to wait until Saturday.

But President Donald Trump got a jump on it early, not waiting for the planned parade in Washington but deploying National Guard troops and active-duty Marines to Los Angeles in response to people protesting immigration raids.

Both projections of force are ill advised.

In LA, the deployments, which could cost $134 million, are legally and politically dubious as the president stretches the constructs of constitutional authority in what’s become a pattern, according to many experts in a New York Times analysis headlined “‘Bogus Emergencies’ Alarm Scholars.”

In the case of Los Angeles, neither California Gov. Gavin Newsom or LA Mayor Karen Bass requested federal help or a call up of the state’s National Guard, the normal procedure for such an extraordinary step. In fact, Newsom is suing the administration on behalf of California to overturn Trump’s orders.

“The overriding principle is that federal troops should not be doing ordinary law enforcement within the domestic United States,” said the University of Minnesota’s Distinguished McKnight Professor of Law Jill Hasday. “I think [Trump’s] on shaky ground.”

The nation seems the same way, with a demonstration contagion spreading elsewhere, a specter the president has said will be met with commensurate force.

Meanwhile, a major military parade will take place in the nation’s capital to mark the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army on Saturday — which just conveniently (coincidentally, the White House says) happens to be Trump’s 79th birthday.

Trump had pushed hard for such a display during his first term, but was reportedly rebuffed by then Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, according to a former aide who wrote that Mattis told Trump it would “harken back to Soviet Union-like displays of authoritarian power.” Privately, the aide wrote, Mattis said, “I’d rather swallow acid.”

Pete Hegseth, the current secretary of defense, is no Jim Mattis. He hasn’t had commensurate qualms, so on Saturday, according to reporting by the New York Times, at least 28 M1A1 Abrams tanks; 28 Stryker armored personnel carriers; more than 100 vehicles; a World War II-era B-25 bomber, 6,700 soldiers, 50 helicopters, 34 horses, two mules and a dog will parade (or trot or wag) past the president at a cost of up to $45 million.

The U.S. Army, formed before and formative in the creation of the country itself, is worth honoring. But this flex of hard power comes amid a weakening of soft power by the administration that doesn’t seem to understand the nexus between the two.

The link isn’t lost on Jake Sullivan, national security adviser in the Biden administration. Speaking in his hometown at a Humphrey School event last week, Sullivan said that hard power “is economic sanctions and military force; it is the power to compel.” Conversely, soft power, he said, “is diplomacy and foreign assistance and moral authority; it’s the power to persuade. A sustainable foreign policy requires a blended mix of those two elements.”

That’s clear to the Army itself. Which was clear to me when I attended the U.S. Army War College National Security Seminar some years back, where for a week I sat in with a cohort of officers from all branches and multiple countries who discussed diplomacy as much as warfare.

The U.S. Army War College is also the driving force behind the International Strategic Crisis Negotiation Exercise (ISCNE) held at top college campuses across the country, including the Humphrey School in October and last month at Carleton. The exercise revolves around “frozen conflicts,” with teams of students representing countries seeking diplomatic solutions in lieu of what could be a kinetic geopolitical event. Among my fellow mentors at the two-day exercise were former diplomats and military officers, including one of the program’s leaders, Jon Olson.

A retired U.S. Navy commander and intelligence officer, Olson now teaches courses in national security at Carleton and Humphrey. He said that “senior military leaders understand the value of diplomacy” and emphasize events like ISCNE to find peaceful resolutions. Diplomacy, he added, is one of the four “tools of national power,” along with information, military and economic power.

The Trump administration has shortchanged many of the diplomatic and information tools. The Department of Government Efficiency cut the U.S. Agency for International Development by more than 80%. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in March that 5,200 of the agency’s 6,200 programs would be eliminated and that he would oversee the others while he concurrently cuts his department’s budget. That strategy is counterproductive, as Mattis noted all the way back in 2013, telling Congress that “If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition ultimately.”

Meanwhile, the voice at Voice of America’s parent organization, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, is Kari Lake, an election denier (Trump’s 2020 race and her 2022 bid to be Arizona’s governor) who has outlined steps to reduce VOA staffing from over 1,300 people to 81.

These and other integral instruments of soft power, Olson said, “were force multipliers for the United States of America and our allies and friends all around the world in helping to communicate to people the value of things like democracy and capitalism and the rule of law and human rights.”

The term “soft power” was coined by Joseph Nye, a diplomat in multiple administrations who once led the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. Shannon Felton Spence, the Kennedy School’s director of global communications and strategy, worked close with Nye, who died at 88 last month. In an interview she said that Nye often noted that “the Berlin Wall did not fall under bullets and bodies, it fell with chisels and hammers” because East Germans wanted to be part of the West.

“America as an idea, America as a story, is its main driving attraction,” Spence said. “America has an engine of soft power and as a path of persuasion is very important to geopolitical strategies across the world.”

The world already knows of America’s military might. Parades in Washington and deployments in LA, all the while the American “engine of soft power” is idled, shows how unnecessary and unwise such projections are.