Angry Planet - Pete Hegseth and the Surreal World of the Civ-Mil Divide With Phil Klay

Episode Date: January 20, 2025

Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.comBetween the idea and the reality falls the shadow. Marine Corps veteran J.D. Vance will soon be vice president. Pete Hegseth, a man with a Crusader Kings tattoo who doesn’t want women to serve in combat roles, is probably going to be confirmed as secretary of defense. Over New Years, two members of the U.S. military committed domestic terror attacks.Today on Angry Planet we get into the highs and lows of the American military with Marine Corps vet and author Phil Klay. What are the limits of amoral pragmatism?“Most troops are opposed to murder.”A rant about Crusader Kings.Vance’s view.Trump, Hegseth and the Honor of the American MilitaryAsking Pete Hegseth how many pushups he can do during a confirmation hearingThe Cult of ‘Sicario’Anguish and Anger From the Navy SEALs Who Turned In Edward GallagherSen. Ted Cruz insulted a ‘woke, emasculated’ U.S. Army ad. Angry veterans fired back.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Hello and welcome to another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. I am Matthew Galt. I am here with Jason Fields, and we are also sitting here with Phil Clay. Sir, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you. It's Clyde, actually. We just pronounce it that way to consider. confuse people. Whof, I'm having, I'm having a day. It would not be the worst of my pronunciation sins on this show. I'm sure long-time listeners will, we'll have a list. But thank you, thank you for correcting, correcting me kindly.

So can you introduce yourself? Sure. I'm Phil Kly. I served in the Marine Corps a long time ago. I served in Iraq, actually, as a public affairs officer in 2007, 2008. And I have been writing about American military activities. And that's pretty much since I got out. And yeah, I'm a professor at Fairfield University's MFA and undergrad

and write a lot about war. I feel like there's been a lot of American veteran-related news lately, and we wanted to have somebody on to talk about the possible incoming Secretary of Defense and the New Year's attacks and kind of the shifting American perception of the military and civilian military relations, and Matt Gallagher, who we've had on the show several times, suggested you thought you would be a good pick. and I read your essay that you published on the second in the New York Times, which was excellent and hit on a lot of the things I wanted to talk about. Titled Trump, Hexeth and the Honor of the American Military, and we will link it in the show notes.

My first question then to kind of get us kicked off is you say in the piece that Trump is the least hypocritical president of your adult life. Can you explain that? I was specifically talking in terms of Ford policy, right? And the reason for that is that, you know, I served in the Iraq War under George W. Bush, and then Obama was the president at the end of my time and service. and look, the Iraq war was launched with a lot of really dramatic rhetoric. You know, we were going to fight without conquest and risk ourselves to defend the freedoms of other people or to advance the freedoms of other people. I forget the exact quote of George W. Bush said.

And, you know, there has been a lot of talk since then about, you know, Biden is our current. Certainly, the, you know, theoretically, the rules-based international order president. And the fight in Ukraine is one of authoritarianism versus democracy, which I agree with, actually. But that sort of rhetoric doesn't really appear in Gaza. The sort of nitty-gritty of the Iraq war was a lot more ugly and complicated than the rhetoric might have seen. and meanwhile Donald Trump will just come out and say like, yeah, we should take the oil. I actually asked him a question in 2016 when he was running for president at a televised event about what his military should be in policy should be in Iraq.

And he said, yeah, we should take the oil, right? Which is a dumb answer. But it was like, you know, if we're going to be risking troops overseas, we should be getting something out of it. And it sounds like just sort of Trumpian bluster, but a couple years later when he was finally convinced to keep troops in Syria, he announced publicly that they were only there for the oil, right? They were only there for the oil. So, you know, he's the, he's the president who's not going to talk about American, traditional American values and the sorts of things that American presidents

like to justify their policy preferences around, you know, famously in response to, you You know, questioning about his praise of Putin. He said, we've got a lot of killers. What, you think our country's so innocent. So there's this sort of no hypocrisy in the sense that he doesn't pretend to be more than a kind of collection of venal impulses. And, yeah, so that's why I begin to peace. Well, that's absolutely brilliant. And I look forward to our conquests, both of Greenland and.

of Canada, which have extensive resources. Easy access to the Arctic, too. I mean, the thing is, right, that this doesn't necessarily mean that his foreign policy in terms of its outcomes will necessarily be better or worse than some of the presidents whose rhetoric sounds better, right? I mean, when he was running for president against Hillary Clinton, I knew veterans who wanted to vote for him because he was skeptical of prolonged overseas engagements. And Hillary Clinton very much came of the sort of older kind of view of America as this strong, dominant, indispensable force on the world stage that was going to, be very active abroad, both diplomatically and militarily, and that the upshot of that would be not just increase power and security and wealth for Americans, but that this was somehow going to create a more democratic and stable order for the entirety of the world, right? and that kind of aggressive view, sort of aggressive liberal internationalism, people were extremely skeptical of, right? Hillary Clinton had General John Allen who wanted to put a combatant command in Syria speak at her convention.

The lesson that she took from Libya was that we should have been more involved. And a lot of people who were otherwise not necessarily super sympathetic to a very much. of other aspects of of of of trumpism were found a lot of appeal in someone who said like no we shouldn't have this extensive presence abroad we should be very skeptical of starting new wars and pulling back from the wars that were currently engaged in and you know they sort of thought like yeah is trump a sort of inconstant and an untested person sure, but maybe that would be better than somebody who will confidently expand America's military footprint because the downside of that can be quite disastrous. And I think that, yeah.

Sorry, go ahead. I just think that that that has to be reckoned with when you talk about Donald Trump and his view of how we should use American power, which is that the folks who speak purely in terms of idealism, have so discredited that by, you know, what that has wrought, right? And that's why there's, like, a part of me that is somewhat sympathetic to that argument, right? I guess what I struggle with, and like you, I completely understand being done completely with, the neoliberal order and looking at people like Hillary Clinton and saying, like, you guys are full of shit.

I don't think you actually believe in any of these ideals you tout. And we should, America should be at war in fewer places. And feeling like on a gut level, Trump represents that. But also, they're talking about, you know, doing Gwatt style forever. war in Latin America. Yep. At the same time. And so there is, I see

some of the people I know. Is it GWAT now? I've always thought of the global war and terror as GWAT. But yeah. I like GWAT because it sounds grosser. So it sounds like a noise, right? Like something the body does. Yeah. The idea of further militarizing

the drug war, the idea that that couldn't have incredibly disastrous consequences, is just sort of insane, yeah. Well, it's interesting because, of course, Trump has different motivations for different things. And he's always been very, very anti-drug. He had a brother who had a serious drug problem. He doesn't drink famously.

So I guess I'm less surprised that he would take that on in a less transactional sort of way, you know? Well, I mean, we'll see what actually happens, right? because with Trump, it's always difficult to figure out what's there behind the bluster. And then there's always the, you know, there seems to be the things that his administration is doing, that you're not entirely sure how much is actually emanating from him, right? You know, we know, for example, I referenced Syria and ultimately, yes, he said that we would keep troops there only for the oil. But he had initially ordered a pull out from Syria by tweet, I believe.

and was essentially slow-rolled. And the special envoy actually later admitted that they played shell games with the administration to not let them know how many troops that we had in Syria, which is kind of a crazy sort of, you know, if you want to complain about the deep state, that's a fairly strong argument in terms of it, even though I'm sympathetic to the reason that they wanted to do it. And I think that it's ultimately a good thing that we did keep a small troop presence there. but there are things that people inside his administration are doing that are not necessarily emanating from him or there are things that he's ordering that the military leadership diplomatic leadership whoever is slow rolling or not fully complying with and you know then there are things like you know famously trump said nice things about Putin, but at the same time, we were expanding the number of special operations troops around Russia's border, right? So, you know, you had this strange thing where there was a lot of positive rhetoric coming from Trump while there were a lot of fairly aggressive moves happening that weren't as much discussed. And it's still not entirely clear to me how much

of that was his policy or things that he was pushing to do versus things that were sort of part of his administration but there were sort of aspects of military policy that he wasn't interested in and just sort of had subordinates doing well so if I could just jump ahead because in a second because or Matthew you might want to push this back I just want to mention And that's what's so fascinating about a secretary of defense like Hengseth, you know, who people have been speculating, we'll just do what Trump wants. Yes. Matthew, is that jumping too far ahead?

No, but I think I can, I think I can create a segue between what I wanted to ask and Pete Hegseth. So I'm less interested in, like, I feel like I understand as much as one can, Trump and, like, like the Trump brain at this point. Like we've all been swimming in it for almost a decade now, right? Not a lot of surprises there. But what I am, you know, there's all these contradictions in American life and all these opposing ideas. And the thing I think I'm struggling with, one of the things I'm struggling with right now

is that I feel like the same people who are telling me that, um, the, the American war machine is bad and we should be in fewer places are also. the same people, or at least some of them are the same people, and some of them are veterans, who are saying, yes, the American War Machine is a death machine. And that's good. And it should be used as such. We need to increase our lethality.

We need to increase our lethality. And that is the only point of the American military. American military is very lethal, by the way. You know, it's, look, obviously, yes, you need your military to be. lethal, you want it to be an effective fighting force, that's important. I think there's this, well,

so it depends on which part of the debate you're talking about, because there's some folks who think, there's a sort of like, and Pete Hegeseth represents this, you know, where it's like, well, the military's gone, woke, and so we're soft now or something, and that's why we've lost wars, as if

the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would have somehow gone better if we just killed more people, which I find very dubious. But, to put it mildly, then there's, and I think that that's really mostly kind of just American culture war paired with a little bit of a kind of stabbed in the back narrative that always happens after failed wars, right? Like if only, you know, if only we slaughtered another million Vietnamese civilians, we would have won in Vietnam kind of thing. And that kind of argument I don't have much respect for.

And then some of it's just American, like, culture war garbage. You know, I remember when Ted Cruz retweeted like a, basically a Russian propaganda ad. And it was like, the American military is like, has these soft-looking ads. where they're trying to recruit a diverse array of candidates. And the Russian military has people looking really, really tough, you know, and, like, doing extremely manly things. It's like, yeah, they do in their ad. But, you know, how many casualties is Russia taken against Ukraine?

Like, 750,000, something like that? Like, it was sort of insane because you're talking about a military that is just not very competent, right? And, you know, may be effective in the long run because Russia is a much bigger country than Ukraine and is willing to just take a tremendous number of casualties in this war against a smaller opponent. But that's just American culture war. Well, the cruise example is – The cruise example is really interesting to me because it is part of this thing that's been going on my entire. a life where it seems like the symbol increasingly in the aesthetic matters way more than the reality.

And I see Heggseth as like a big, you know, like here's the guy where the symbol is way more important than the reality, right? Fox News host, handsome in a way that Trump would find pleasing, loyal to Trump in a way that Trump finds pleasing. And a content producer, a guy that makes TikToks and shows off his tattoos

and indulges in like right wing meme culture. Yes. And hates women. And well, does he, that I don't know. Yeah.

No, no. Yeah, he does. He wants to keep him out of the military. Keep them out of the military. Yeah, he said a lot of content. With stuff about women in the military. Fair. Yeah, fair enough.

what are the what are the like you know we can dismiss right wing culture war domestic politics bullshit all day long but it seems like

that stuff's becoming more important and is affecting policy more and more especially yeah I don't I don't mean to dismiss it in terms of it's extremely important

in the sense that people in power are making like actual decisions on the basis of this nonsense I'm dismissing it in terms of like something that you intellectually

need to grapple with right it's fundamentally stupid. That doesn't mean that it doesn't have real consequences. And, you know, Pete Hegseth being put up for Secretary of Defense, which it looks like he's going to get, despite the fact that he's no, you know, he's no real qualifications for this. It's also unclear how effective he's actually going to be, right? You know, this is not Donald Rumsfeld. This is not a bureaucratic warrior who knows how to make a complicated machinery of state work for him.

The deep stadiest of the deep state positions. Right. This is a blowhard. This is a Fox News blowhard whose primary achievement as an advocate for veterans is getting more criminals pardoned, right? You get into that in your piece. Can you tell that story of the audience real quick? I think that's a really important. It's a particularly disgraceful thing.

And it's something that is clearly important to Hague Seth. So he was one of the people whispering in Trump's here on behalf of. of a couple of war criminals to try and get pardons or for Trump to intervene in their cases. Clint Lawrence, Eddie Gallagher, and McGlstein. Goldstein essentially admitted to killing someone who he thought was a bomb maker but didn't have the evidence for. Eddie Gallagher became a conservative cause-seleb. He was a seal. While he was overseas, he had a lot of problems.

He was addicted to drugs, which was a sort of function of, you know, many, many deployments and insufficient. There's a whole host of issues with Eddie Gallagher, but he wasn't a very effective team later. wasn't very good at his job, but really, really wanted to come away from his deployment with a big kill count. And during that time, you know, Seals in his unit talked about how he would shoot civilians, shoot at children.

One of them would actually take shots when he knew Gallagher, you know, was looking for targets to warn people away because they didn't. want him to kill people and then finally he was accused by his seals of stabbing a teenage ISIS prisoner to death, right, who was injured and they brought this up to their immediate chain of command, both the platoon commander and the level above, both the enlisted and an officer in charge during the deployment and afterwards, the sort of seals didn't act on it. And then ultimately went to NCIS and there was this

like famously botched trial that they had. And the you know the Gallagher case became this like sort of bizarre thing where right wing kind of rallied to him claiming that he was innocent

but also at the same time very clearly enjoying the idea that he might have stabbed a kid to death. You know he later put out a knife with some company called alibi. So it was just sort of like, I'm being persecuted unjustly, but also wink, wink, you know, I totally murdered a prisoner and don't you get to get a little bit of vicarious joy out of, you know, imagining, stabbing a helpless prisoner, like a tough guy. And then the Clint Lawrence case is another one. And by the way,

It's worth mentioning that because Hig Seth and his defenders will always talk about how there's like, you know, I'm defending the guy on the front line and against, you know, people far away from the battlefield who are second guessing decisions made in the heat of the moment. Well, in these cases, you're talking about people who were a poison to their unit for whom the actual frontline troops turned them in because they were morally disgusted. by them and found them to be both dangerously incompetent commanders and moral stains on the uniform, right? Lawrence was a so there was a unit that had been in for four months had taken four very serious casualties

including their platoon commander. Lawrence gets put in and he's their commander for all of three days, right? He clearly wanted to kill people and kind of got off on cruelty, right? At one point, he threatened to kill a farmer and the farmer's like three to four year old son. He, a day later, he ordered his man to shoot within inches of a bunch of villagers, including near children. His soldiers ultimately bulked at doing that and then refused to put in a false report. as he had told them to, claiming they've been fired upon.

Lawrence said something like it's funny watching the motherfuckers dance. And then the final day, he ordered fire on unarmed Afghans, who were over 100 yards from the tune, no danger at all. And then radioed a false report claiming bodies couldn't be searched. And his men turned him in that night. Fourteen of them ultimately offered testimony against him, either written or in trial. none of them spoke up in his defense and the murderer. Pretty straightforwardly a murderer.

But he became a kind of right-wing cause celebrity, right? This is sort of this fantasy that, you know, the military brass love nothing more than accusing people for crimes, which is, you know, especially for the seals is just kind of like an interesting fantasy. and that they're just looking for like some split moment, you know, split second decision where it's life or death. And then they made, if they made, like, the wrong decision in the moment, then, you know, the whole weight of the criminal justice is going to come upon them as if this is, like, a perpetual and constant threat for soldiers. and as if that applies to these cases when in fact, they're murderers, the straightforwardly murderers.

It's obvious. And the frontline troops are the ones who turn them in and thought they were disgusting human beings. And also were devastated by the fact that these guys were held up as heroes, right? You know, Trump didn't commute Lawrence's sentence.

He pardoned him and then invited him to a fundraiser. Right. Meanwhile, the guys in his unit, one of them talked about how, he tried to kill himself in the wake of Lawrence becoming

you know sort of folk hero among the Magarite and they just felt utterly betrayed and that it tainted

their whole service and these these people are the ones that are held up and specifically held up by Pete Hagseth right

well so I just think one thing should be mentioned which is that doesn't this speak tremendously well of the majority of troops? Yeah. Yeah, most troops are opposed to murder. I think that, you know, maybe that happens in other militaries. I'm sure it does.

But I think it really, it's just worth noting for people who don't like the military or have, you know, people out there saying that everyone's a bloody-minded killer if you join I just think it's an interesting point. For the cynics among us, for the people that believe that the military is there to kill people and break things and that's it, right? It is this kind of disconnected strain from what the military actually does. It is important to remember. Yeah, people sign up to just, you know, for a variety of reasons, but doing something good in the world is one of them. It does matter to people.

If you're going to risk your life, you want to risk it. for an actual moral purpose, right? And that's why, you know, one of the men from Lawrence's platoon later said, you know, he thought of the army's this altruistic thing and Lawrence stuff broke his faith, right? What then does this say about that the guy that championed them is going to be, probably Secretary of Defense. How do you think that means

Trump is going to use the military in his second term? So I don't know how it means that he'll use the military in terms of you know,

where people will be deployed, right, in terms of what we normally think of his military policy. The thing about Hegset is it is, it's part of that culture war,

right? Using the military as a part of cultural war. You know, one of the interesting things about Trump, when he came in, he clearly didn't know much about the military, and he very clearly had this idea that the generals that he surrounded himself with. Because if you remember, he loved surrounding himself with generals in the beginning, right? Kelly, McMaster, Mattis, et cetera. The handsome generals.

Right. He thought they were going to be. No one ever accused Mattis of being handsome. I'm sorry. I just have to break in with that. he thought they were going to be hardcore killers. He loved saying mad dog Mattis, right? And was clearly surprised when they didn't think torture was a good idea because they thought that torture had hurt the reputation of U.S. troops and hadn't generated good intelligence and had sparked disgust and increased resistance to American troops in the places where they were stationed.

and overall had been a moral and strategic failure as a policy, you know, that these guys did not think about the military the way that he did. And over time, he became more and more distance from them. And he started doing things where he talked to enlisted troops and sort of talk about them against the generals. And that's something that he did very explicitly in his most recent campaign where he talked about how they had bad leadership. They had bad generals. But like the troops are great, but the generals are bad.

So there's this kind of thing. And that is also, by the way, the way that the pardons were issued. I'm defending the frontline troop against, you know, the military brass who just want to throw you in prison for mistakes, right? You have to lie about, you know, those cases in order to do that, but that's not really a problem. for people like Higgs Seth or Trump, right? And so, yeah, the thing that I think will almost certainly happen is a continuation of that kind of using the military as one part of his general culture war kind of acts to grind. And that might then come to play in terms of how he uses the military, right? He's going to want to use the military for politically divisive things, whether it's stuff at the border or, you know, everybody talks about whether he's going to, you know, use the military to put down protests.

I think you can expect that he will once again push the boundaries of, you know, what the military is it really ought be used for. and kind of violate the normal sort of civ-mill relations issues. And he's going to try and have people put in place who will be more aggressive in pursuing that. And also, it seems like they'll be much more interested in looking at who gets promoted to general in the first place, would be my guess. Right. This really makes me wonder. It just goes back to the prior question. If troops are ordered to break up protests, you know, you see in other countries, they do it.

And I just wonder what you think from your experience in the military and writing about the military and all that. Do you think that that would be a discipline issue? Look, I think that the armed forces are pretty politically diverse. General officer You know Officer ranks tend to be pretty conservative Though the conservatism When I was in I'm not sure

How much it It still is like that Was a different kind of conservatism Than this sort The And they're very interested In the institution of the military And

Preserving its its status. It's very dangerous for the military to get too involved. The commander-in-chief has pretty wide latitude in terms of how he uses the military. You know, I don't think we're in any kind of risk of the military being used for some kind of coup or anything like that. And I would be very surprised if you had a situation where American military was firing on protesters or anything like that. I just, I doubt that will happen. But at the end of the day, the checks really are.

political, right? And so, you know, during the first term, there was this sort of maybe the generals will save us kind of idea. And I think that's, that's really, there's a whole variety of reasons that that, you know, I have problems with that. But at the end of day, it's not really possible. Like, we either have to, as a republic, make more responsible. You know, responsible decisions, right, and hold elected leaders accountable. Or, you know, we're going to have a disaster. I think that, you know, the more that Trump leans into the more aggressive things that he might do with the military, the more public backlash there will be, right? A lot of the things that he wants to do sort of, you know, if you're of a certain mentality sound good while you're sitting on a bar stool into your third or fourth pint.

but, you know, considered in the abstract, right, and with a certain kind of tough guy swagger, but look very different when enacted, you know, with all the complications that putting something into practice actually has. So I think that, you know, it's fairly clear that there's going to be less guardrails on Trump, this administration. There's going to be more people in key posts who are actually trying to do what he wants. and that means that you'll probably going to have a much more chaotic and dangerous policies, right? Because you'll have less restraining influences.

And then we're going to have to see whether we like that or not. Can I switch tracks here? And I'll use a Pete Hegseth tattoo to do it. Um, Hexeth has been in trouble before for, uh, having some extremist views. People point to his day's vault tattoo, uh, just like a crusader era symbol means God wills it. So, so it is a crusader era symbol. But it's also like a hearts of iron for online video game. Right.

Right. Right. Like, right. Made our Cairns pointed out on Twitter, the really telling thing about Hegss tattooed Deus Volt is that it was never really in frequent use at any point in the history of Christianity prior to around 2012. Very important. The video game Crusader Kings 2. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, yeah, it's, it's, this is like right wing meme culture.

Right. But, but to, but to kind of use that as a point to go to. Sorry, it is, I do just, it is very stupid that it's like, do you, do you play video games? No, not really. Okay. So, like Crusader Kings and Hearts of Iron where this Deuce Volt thing comes from is like such a very, like, very nerdy, like hyper technical spreadsheet video game. Yeah. Not a lot of people.

Anyway, so it's just like, it's very funny that. a thing that from its community has bubbled up and is tattooed on the body of a guy that's going to be in charge. It's just like so many parts of social groups that I'm a part of, like all the worst stuff is bubbled up. Just like the worst, dumbest pieces of my whole life are just everywhere now. And it's terrible.

Anyway. That's right, Matthew. It's personal. It is. Well, like, you know, the, like, I don't know if I've talked. about this on here before, but, you know, I'm a, I'm a long-time gamer, and like, the culture was always toxic and bad. And my entire life, we, we grew up hearing slurs in Xbox live chats, and we wrote it off. We said, this is just the way it is. And now here we are.

And part because we didn't, we didn't police our own spaces. Anyway, sorry, that's a whole other discussion. We're going to set that aside. I'm sorry. extremism in the military. How big of a problem is it? During the Biden administration, the DOD issued several reports saying that it was, and that is something that we had to get on top of. Sure seems like a whole lot of white supremacists

have sought training from the American military and gotten it. Yeah, I mean, sort of radical groups always look to recruit military veterans because there's a kind of mystique around them and that sort of thing. So, you know, I don't know. I think that there's Alex Horton, his Washington Post reporter did stuff at the, you know, whether or not the military representation of January 6th really was all that disproportionate to what you might expect. I honestly don't know.

I mean, it's the sort of thing that you would like the administration to be looking into. I mean, part of the problem, right, is not just that these folks are dangerous or might do terrible things overseas. You know, as you can see if you actually look into the cases of the people that, that Hague says, intervened on behalf of, they're poison within the internal culture of the units, right? They're bad for the military, you know, even from a kind of amoral standpoint, right? They're horrifically destructive to, you know,

carrying out the mission, having any kind of espried decor, et cetera, et cetera. So there's a way in which, you know, what what kind of plays politically as a kind of, you know, media item sort of loosely connected to reality, right? Where, you know, it's almost like they were looking for cases that they could just use to craft this narrative of the put upon frontline soldier and didn't even look that closely at the specifics of the actual case, right? the you know so it it works in the media but like if you're actually in that unit with those guys

no it doesn't work it doesn't work at all and that has nothing to do with you know sort of niceness or normal morality even but also it would be nice if some degree of normal morality the replay in in terms of wanting people to not murder with impunity. Do people care? Hold on. Just one question, you know, since we're talking about culture and what people in the military really care about, I'm just wondering, does anybody care about the cultural issues that Trump and Hankseth want to bring up in terms of gays in the military or people who are trans in the military? Yeah, the trans thing is this. Is that an actual issue? It's, it is kind of bizarre to me because, you know, I, okay. So I have seen, like, I've never seen any, like, argument of, of a unit that's somehow been harmed by this policy, right?

It's always in the abstract and always seems to revolve around just kind of like the generalized, disgust. towards people, right, who are trans. That said, right, even if you honestly believe that it was an issue for whatever reason, right, how big of an issue could it possibly be, right? I mean, how many trans people are there in the military? The amount that it's been talked about versus like the potential impact that a could have, like, you know, is, is wild. You know, I'm very skeptical that the United States military has become a paradise of DEI trainings.

You know, obviously, it's been a while since I've been out of the military. I just don't really find that particularly plausible. But, yeah, it's, it is interesting because that was one of the, You know, people would respond to the New York Times piece about, like, you know, Hegg Seth. And, you know, the complaint that I specifically make about Hexeth is something that he did that's really morally repulsive, right? And dishonorable and shames the American military, right? It dishonors the American military to be the kind of. military that lets murderers go unpunished.

Okay. And people would respond, well, you know it's really dishonorable? The transgender stuff. It's like, okay. Whatever. You know, like, this is, it's, it's, um,

it's, it's, it's a, it's a fixation. I just, you know, again, even if, even if you have actually really looked into the issue in a serious way. And you know, you've looked at the studies of when transgender person comes into a military unit and what it does for a spriticore or whatever, which nobody's done. There's no, just no, I don't think there's any issues. Um, uh, but like, but like what, how big a problem could it actually be, you know? It strikes me that the underlying issue here in a lot of this

stuff is the complete and continued disconnects between the American, American civilian population and its military, and that's been going on for decades. Yeah. You know, is it less than 1% of the population has served? Military families are increasingly kind of isolated from the rest of their communities. They're geographically clustered. They're clustered. They're in their own enclaves. And there's not a lot of cross-contamination between the two areas.

And so the civilian population gets to kind of dream up whatever reality it wants to, right? Not based on what's actually going on in those military communities. Yeah, I mean, I think that's a problem in politics more generally, right? But yes. Yeah. I think it's something like somewhere on like five or six percent of Americans have served in the military at some point in their lives, right? And then it's less than one percent who are currently serving. And we should point out that Trump is actually like several of our presidents had bone spurs and has not in fact served.

Like it's a grand American. He's got the first G-WAT vice president, right? Let's talk about this because he's in her piece as well, actually. JD Vance. J.D. Vance, who is the fur, like, it's, it has been. a while since we've had someone that was a veteran that that close to the presidency, right? Mm-hmm. Can you talk about your read on Vance's reaction to his service?

Because that was an interesting part of your piece as well. Yeah, Vance talking about the wars in Iraq in Afghanistan. He said I was lied to, right? Vance, Vance served in Iraq. He did the same job I did. He was in public affairs. we didn't know each other, but I think we knew some of the same people. And he was well liked, actually.

Smart guy. I suspect he was very good at his job. And like a lot of veterans, he's a certain degree of bitterness towards how everything went down. I think, how could you not, right? The interesting thing for me was the much, much remarked upon. comments at the Republican National Convention where he gives his talk about his, the patch of earth where his family is buried, generations of his family. It's being quite movingly about a connection to place and home. And then, you know, he says that's something real, right? It's something concrete.

It's a homeland. People will not die for abstractions. You know, ideals are great, but people will not die for abstractions, but they will die to defend a homeland. And which for an American to be saying is peculiar, so then later he has to explain that, yes, America was founded on ideals, you know, the American notion of the homeland has always been bound up with abstractions, actually, right? But, yeah, it was a remarkable thing because, of course, I mean, on the one level, it's sort of straight up factually untrue. Obviously, people have died for ideals.

People have understood why they've joined up for as in idealistic terms. People absolutely will fight for ideals. And it says something rather sad about your view of human nature if you think that they wouldn't, right? But the kind of, the point of sympathy that I have with him is this sense that, you know, every time there's something we want in terms of foreign policy, we're, you know, our elites try and shovel the ideals down our throats without ever talking about our actual interests, right? And I have a certain degree of sympathy for that. I mean, I support American support for Ukraine, for example. I think it's a fairly straightforward case.

I think that it is, it's good for us and fits with ideals, actually, which is why I think it's a straightforward case. But I remember going to an event where a former American ambassador to Ukraine talked about how we need to be supporting Ukraine because they're a democracy and this is an autocracy and this is an unjustified land grab. And those things are all true. But to hear an American diplomat speak only in terms of ideals when trying to justify by us deeply in meshing ourselves in a foreign war, even to level of just support,

kind of made me feel like I was being sold a used car, right? Because there are American interests at play. They're very serious American interests at play. And yes, it makes it a more complicated conversation to have, but I'd rather we speak forthrightly, right? Why are we doing this? Because there's a lot of places around the world that don't have freedom. where freedom is under attack in some way. And there are a lot of places where there is not freedom,

and we have no problem supplying those places with weapons to fight very ugly wars. So, you know, let's have a straightforward conversation about this, right? But to cut out the idea of abstractions as a whole seemed, to me telling, right? And it's in a way, I mean, the funny thing is it reminds me of, there's an interesting moment towards the end of the Vietnam War when Henry Kissinger was given the Nobel Peace Prize, right? Which was very contentious.

The, they called it the Ig Nobel Peace Prize. Why would that be? Yeah. And Kissinger didn't actually accept it himself because, you know, it was supposed to be him and Lidecteau, Ducky, who had negotiated together. Liducto declined it. He said such bourgeois sentimentalities were not for him, which is kind of hilarious. And then Kissinger was going to decline it, but that would have caused a sort of diplomatic incident with Norway. So they worked at a compromise with the American ambassador to Norway would accept on Kissinger's behalf. And the American ambassador at the time was my grandfather, Thomas Byrne. So he gave Kissinger's speech.

And it's a fascinating speech because it is utterly devoid of the kind of rhetoric that Americans, you know, would traditionally go to Europe and spout. You know, this is no will. Ilsonian rhetoric. There's none of the American idealistic talk. If you compare it to Martin Luther King's speech nine years earlier, you know, King's speech is full of like American idealism and the promise of America. Kissinger's is about maintaining stability, right? And it is very low in terms of the idealism. And it's like, okay, this is how a nation talks after a more. moral and military humiliation, right? And I feel like that's the place that, interestingly enough, the American right is in, you know? Vance's talk, just limiting our horizons for what America can be in the world

in terms of just getting ours is, you know, okay, that's the rhetoric of a humiliated nation that has failed in wars. right and um and and you know it's uh it's understandable in those terms actually um the problem is i don't think it's in the long term less dangerous i suspect it's more so why more so is this the uh abutting the limits of amoral pragmatism yeah i think that um look america's role around the world is complicated, right? And there are some conflicts that I think you can make a very clear moral case for as in Ukraine, right? I wrote a piece last year arguing against American support for Israel's war in Gaza, right? And I think the moral issues at play there are

very different. Nonetheless, I do think that there is a very real danger in giving up some of the, yeah, the traditional liberal international order type values because it makes the world a much more dangerous place. So one of the things that Vance will talk about is, you know, he's much more, he's been much more hostile to aid to you. Ukraine than Trump has been, actually, right? And one of the things that everybody is sort of waiting to find out is, you know, what exactly will Trump do in terms of Ukraine? Because it's never quite clear. People were surprised when it turned out that Trump's envoy to Israel actually pushed very hard for the Biden deal, right? because he wanted you know, he wanted a win,

he wanted a foreign conflict closed and very good, good on him, that he did that. It's not clear what he's going to do there. But I'm very grateful that Biden was president when the war in Ukraine broke out. I think that

the idea that the international community will not come together to try and exact as great a cost for straight up 19th century style land grabs from authoritarian regimes as is possible and pragmatic

is a very dangerous one because it leads to more 19th century style land grabs on behalf of authoritarian regimes which is extremely bad for global security and ultimately for the safety and security and prosperity the United States, right?

I don't think that the, that those principles, even though we violate them all the time, are completely hollow. And I think that they're worth upholding. And I think that it'll be a more dangerous world if we don't try to uphold them, at least sometimes. That's the kind of dower note we like to go out on here on Angry Pee. planet. Jason, unless you've got something else. No, but it's really a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you.

Yeah, no, I think it's a point of view that it's really good to get on the show. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. What are you working on now? What's next? I'm working on a novel that starts with my grandfather accepting the Nobel Peace Prize for Henry Kissinger. Perfect.

Nice. Then it goes to Prague. becomes a spy story. He was ambassador to check his vodka afterwards and my grandmother was asked to pass secret messages to the underground church.