‘No’ to General Austin

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, December 08, 2020

 

General Lloyd J. Austin III for secretary of defense. The nomination should be rejected.

 

There isn’t much wrong with General Austin, save the fact that he is General Austin. U.S. law requires a seven-year gap between active-duty military service and serving as secretary of defense, the idea being to keep military policy firmly in civilian hands and to limit the political clout — and the political ambition — of the nation’s senior military commanders.

 

The law has served us well. The Trump administration successfully sought to have it set aside in order to accommodate the confirmation of General Jim Mattis as secretary of defense. General Mattis is an admirable man, but he was not especially effective in the role — it is difficult to imagine how he might have been, given the character of the administration he served — and nothing about his service establishes the urgent necessity of making a habit out of making an exception.

 

Some on the Democrats’ left wing oppose General Austin on the foregoing grounds, and a few are chafed that he is being chosen over a woman, Michèle Flournoy, who served in Barack Obama’s administration as undersecretary of defense for policy. Austin would be the first African American to serve as secretary of defense, while Flournoy would be the first woman. Neither of these is an especially compelling rationale: We have had a black president, we have a black vice president-elect, George W. Bush was served by two black secretaries of state, etc.; in addition to our female vice president-elect the nation has been served, though not always well-served, by women in senior cabinet positions, including Hillary Rodham Clinton’s rolling theater of incompetency as secretary of state. As riveting as it is to watch Kamala Harris check her boxes — she has been the first black South Asian woman of Caribbean background in many positions — it is probably time to leave that kind of thing behind, and thank Barack Obama for that much.

 

Flournoy has opposition from her left, too, with progressives harboring skepticism about her lack of skepticism regarding U.S. military involvement in Iraq and her support for the U.S. intervention in Libya, which Biden opposed as vice president. Flournoy is probably closer to traditional conservative views on defense than are most of Biden’s likely nominees, but in the Trump era it is not clear that Republicans still take a traditional conservative view of defense policy, having partly slipped into the intellectual quagmire of Donald Trump’s Ron-Paul-by-way-of-Scrooge-McDuck attitude.

 

Republicans will of course be called hypocrites if they oppose Austin’s nomination after supporting Mattis’s, and they will of course be called racists by the people professionally obliged to call Republicans racists on days of the week ending in “y.” But making the same mistake twice isn’t principle — it is stupidity.

 

It is entirely natural that the party in opposition to the president will in Congress be more energetic in the defense of congressional prerogatives and limits on executive power than it is when one of its own is in the White House. There is a lot of wrongheaded bellyaching about “gridlock” in Washington and the need for national “unity” (whatever that means), but in fact the oppositional nature of our political system is among its greatest practical virtues. Of course members of one party will be more insistent about imposing restrictive norms on a president of the other party, but if the norms are good ones — and the exclusion of recently active generals from the top job at DoD is a good one — then three cheers for hypocrisy.

 

As a matter of pure politics, Republicans would be doing themselves no harm by making common cause with some of their Democratic colleagues in opposition to a Biden nomination that is, on the merits, the wrong choice. Republicans will be looking for a chance to hand Biden a defeat, and it is best to do it on something about which he is fundamentally wrong, and wrong enough that even some Democrats can see it. Republicans do not get enough opportunities to do the smart thing and the right thing at the same time to pass one up.

 

If we must for a moment entertain the quaint superstition that the national interest enters into consideration here, well, the republic will be no worse off if General Austin is put into a political time-out for a few years. Republicans should thank him for his service and decline, at least for now, his offer of more.