Speaking in Glendale, Arizona, on Thursday night, former President Donald Trump made the statement that Liz Cheney and other neocons should have to fight in the conflicts they start.
“She’s a radical warhawk. Let’s put her there with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it,” Trump said. “You know, when the guns are trained on her face. They’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, ‘Oh, gee, well let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy.’”
Vice President Kamala Harris immediately distorted the quote, desperate to “turn the page,” as she likes to say.
But Trump is exactly right: it’s all too easy to send other people to war.
The irony of Donald Trump is that he is not just fighting against the radical left. He is in a vicious bar fight with the neoconservative right, too.
Who are neocons? Short answer: the D.C. desk jockeys who think democracy can be exported by American firepower. As Trump rightly points out, most never face the consequences of their policies. They leave that to our men and women in uniform.
Neoconservatives are not bound by party. Exhibit A: Liz Cheney. Exhibit B: Dick Cheney’s deputy national security advisor, Victoria Nuland. Nuland went on to become President Barack Obama’s chief on Ukraine. If you’ve noted depressing similarities between American policy in both Iraq and Ukraine, you’re not wrong. Some people never learn.
My eye-opening lesson in American statecraft was a deployment with the U.S. Navy to Afghanistan in 2010-2011. I watched with incredulity as the Obama administration launched a third war against Libya. My thought at the time: could we finish the two wars we’re in before you start another?
When you’ve seen the body bags and empty boots of your fellow service members, war becomes more than an intellectual exercise. The human cost is staggering.
So is the cost to the American treasury. While I was in Afghanistan, the United States spent $2 billion per week on the war. Where did all that money go? I’ll never forget standing in Bamiyan Province and watching a farmer guide his donkey down the side of a beautifully paved road. I asked my translator why the farmer was walking alongside the road, and not on it. He replied, “Because it’s too nice!”
I’ll never forget what my guide called that road: the “Laura Bush Highway.” It was indeed nicer than 90% of the roads I’ve traveled in the United States and I later learned that the First Lady had indeed cut the ribbon when it opened. I’m sure someone at the State Department or Pentagon could issue a 50-page directive on why building a hostile nation a slew of new highways, power plants, schools and cell phone towers made sense.
But Trump rightfully calls it what it was: stupid.
Most of the career bureaucrats in Washington, D.C, have never served. They should. To veterans, war isn’t just a tool of national power. It’s personal. For good or ill, the memories of war last a lifetime.
In the waning weeks of the Trump administration, I had visited Kabul, Afghanistan with Trump’s last Secretary of Defense, Chris Miller.
We had dropped into a country I never wanted to see again to wish the troops a merry Christmas and to meet with Gen. Austin Miller, the last commander of Operation Resolute Support. Kabul smelled just as I remembered it — like burning tires, feces and jet fuel. At a forward operating base, the secretary shook hands with special operators and listened to their stories. Most seemed miserable, but at least the country was stable and relatively peaceful.
That would all change with President Joe Biden’s disastrous withdrawal a few months later.
But the lessons lingered. When the neocons began saber rattling in 2022 about Ukraine — with politicians on the left and right clamoring for the U.S. to commit supplies, money, and yes, even troops — I remembered what my guide had called the Laura Bush Highway.
Wars have a way of escalating. A no-fly zone turns into a downed American airman. Ten billion dollars in aid becomes $100 billion. Commit ground troops and soon you’re attending funerals among the white marble headstones at a national cemetery. Stay long enough and some Beltway idiot will think it is a good idea to name a foreign highway paved with American dollars after the First Lady.
Trump has proven to be the only commander-in-chief in half a century not to lead this nation into war.
Morgan Murphy is military thought leader, former press secretary to the Secretary of Defense and national security advisor in the U.S. Senate.
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