H.R. McMaster’s view of the assault on the US Capitol, CNN.com

Opinion by Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

Updated 8:00 PM ET, Thu November 11, 2021

Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is the author of “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos.” The opinions expressed here are his own. Read more opinion on CNN.

(CNN)Lt. Gen. H.R McMaster was one of the most accomplished and competent of former President Donald Trump’s cabinet picks. On Wednesday, McMaster gave me a tour d’horizon of his views, including those about the debacle in Afghanistan which he blames on the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations, a fiasco that he believes China is now trying to take advantage of. McMaster also pointed to the conspiracy theories used by Trump to “incite an assault” on the US Capitol on January 6.

Trump asked McMaster to serve as his national security adviser after Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn was pushed out for providing “incomplete information” to then-Vice President Mike Pence about discussions he had with the Russian ambassador to the United States.

An active duty three-star general, McMaster had served heroically in the first Gulf War. As an Army captain, he led a tank battle that destroyed 28 Iraqi tanks, 16 personnel carriers and more than 30 trucks in under half an hour. McMaster was awarded the Silver Star for valor.

Then, as a colonel in the Iraq War in 2005, he led the first major victory against Al-Qaeda in Iraq in the city of Tal Afar.

While a major, McMaster earned his PhD, which became the book “Dereliction of Duty.” The book caused something of a sensation in the US military when it was published, as it took the top Pentagon generals to task for failing to provide substantive military advice to President Lyndon Johnson during the Vietnam War.

Following is our discussion, which was edited for clarity and flow.

BERGEN: You’ve described the Taliban peace agreement with the United States that was signed by the Trump administration in 2020 and implemented by the Biden administration this year as a “surrender agreement.” Who’s responsible for this surrender?

McMASTER: Well, I think there’s responsibility across multiple administrations. And I would put a lot of responsibility on the Obama administration, especially in connection with announcing in 2009 the timeline for our withdrawal from Afghanistan and then trying to negotiate with a terrorist organization, the Taliban, and that was delusional.

And then the Trump administration for doubling down on those same flaws, not understanding the nature of the enemy, and again, giving a timeline for a withdrawal, making concession after concession, and then thinking you’re going to get a favorable agreement.

Then President Biden could have reversed those horrible decisions and that fundamentally flawed approach to the war, and he didn’t.
So, I would say three administrations share responsibility for what I would call the “surrender” to a terrorist organization.

We created the enemy we would prefer in Afghanistan: A Taliban that would be more benign, a Taliban that was separate from other jihadist terrorist groups, and that was a complete pipedream. All of us knew it, but you kept hearing the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the secretary of state, the President describing an enemy that didn’t exist in Afghanistan, and then surrender to terrorists.

BERGEN: Are you talking about Trump or Biden or both?

McMASTER: I’m talking about the Biden administration, especially toward the end. The Biden State Department said the Haqqanis were separate from the Taliban. And then we watched the Taliban’s elite unit, Badri-313, take over the Kabul airport, which is a Haqqani force.

BERGEN: On Siraj Haqqani, what’s your reaction? The United Nations has identified him as part of the leadership council of al-Qaeda, and now he’s the acting Afghan minister of the interior. What does this signify?

McMASTER: This is what happens when you surrender to terrorists: The terrorists are in charge.
BERGEN: Switching gears, it seems the Taiwan situation is heating up. Is this just the Chinese doing what they always do and is nothing particularly new, or is this something different?

McMASTER: I think it’s connected to Afghanistan. We are exuding weakness at this moment, and China thinks they can probably get away with intimidating Taiwan. After the humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan, the message in Chinese state-controlled media to Taiwan was, “Hey, do you really think the United States has your back?”
What China really wants is the annexation of Taiwan by invitation, and they want to do that through intimidation in a sustained campaign of political subversion against the Taiwanese people to affect their will. This has many components to it: Economic coercion is involved, the co-option of elites, a sustained campaign of disinformation and propaganda, and military intimidation is part of that as well.

BERGEN: What’s America’s best policy here?

McMASTER: I think “strategic ambiguity” is still a solid policy. If it’s made clear to the Chinese Communist Party and the people of the People’s Liberation Army that they can’t accomplish their objectives using force because of the possibility of US intervention and because of the capabilities that we have positioned forward in the area of Taiwan.
Also, it’s important for our allies and partners to send the same message, and we’re seeing that now. You saw that with the former prime minister of Australia, Tony Abbott, giving a strong speech in Taiwan recently. And it was the Japanese deputy defense minister who said, “We’ll defend Taiwan,” and that sent shockwaves; Japan had never made a commitment like that before, and Japan is increasing its defense capabilities.

But the real key is to help Taiwan develop its own defensive capability, so it becomes indigestible from the perspective of the Chinese Communist Party.
BERGEN: Do you see continuities or differences between the Trump administration’s China approach that you were deeply involved in and the Biden team’s China approach?

McMASTER: I think there are mainly continuities. I think there’s a recognition that we can no longer adhere to the flawed assumptions of the past, and the primary assumption was (that) China, after having been welcomed into the international order, would play by its rules, and as it prospered would liberalize its economy and liberalize its form of governance.

China’s President Xi Jinping did the opposite. The Chinese Communist Party is driven by fear and ambition and is extending an exclusive grip on power through brutal means, including a campaign against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, extending the party’s oppressive arm into Hong Kong, but also it’s become more and more aggressive internationally. I think it’s clear from Chinese Communist Party actions that this isn’t a Washington-Beijing problem. This is a free world-Beijing problem.

BERGEN: Should the Biden administration be saying more about the Uyghurs, more about Hong Kong?

McMASTER: I think so, and rally others to say more as well. And it’s not just talking about the issue: It’s imposing costs. The costs would be impeding the massive financial flows into China that allows China to base its decisions on its own strategic advantage rather than on real return on their investments. So, I think there’s a very important financial aspect to this, and I think economically is where we have the greatest leverage. You have European companies who are manufacturing cars in Xinjiang and saying, “What genocide? I didn’t know there’s genocide going on.” That’s ridiculous.

What we need across the free world is for China and the Chinese Communist Party to become the number one ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) issue in boardrooms. How can genocide not be an ESG issue?

BERGEN: Biden: What’s he getting right? What’s he getting wrong?

McMASTER: There’s a lot of talk about processes. We’re hosting a conference on democracies when we just abandoned the Afghan people to live under the hell of Taliban? We keep talking about women’s rights and watching women’s rights be completely extinguished in Afghanistan. So, what I’m concerned about is credibility, because I think this is a performative administration, and it’s confusing what it says with what the reality is in the world.

BERGEN: Is it a good thing that the US is back in the Paris Climate Agreement?

McMASTER: The danger of thinking that everything is OK by being a member of the Paris Agreement is complacency, and the Paris Agreement will not achieve anything because even if the United States and the developed economies meet all their goals, emissions from China, India, Africa, and across developing economies are going to poison the world. So, it’s important that we pursue solutions and do not present what I think is a false dilemma between carbon emission reduction and energy security, because we have a broad range of solutions available, but we’re pursuing those solutions only selectively.

Advanced batteries and wind and solar, all of that is all good, but it’s insufficient. This idea that we can jump right ahead to renewables is a pipe dream, and we’ve seen that in Japan. Japan stopped nuclear power generation for reasons that are understandable after the Fukushima reactor disaster and said they were going to go to renewables. Well, now they’re burning more coal.
So, we should move to next-generation nuclear power, which is much safer, much more advanced technology that produces waste that is less toxic with a much shorter half-life.

BERGEN: The North Koreans? Where are they going?

McMASTER: Well, we don’t know. This is the only hereditary Communist dictatorship in the world, and our view into it is imperfect. But it’s quite likely that they are in a crisis that could threaten the Kim family regime in a substantive way. The crisis is one associated with food security and potential famine as well as the devastation that Covid brought to what was already a failing economy. And so I think what is important is to keep the pressure on North Korea, to convince Kim Jong-un that his regime is safer without nuclear weapons than he is with them. What you’re seeing is the regime still pouring resources into its missile program and into its nuclear program, even though it’s under severe economic duress and experiencing food insecurity.

And I think we must convince the Chinese to do more. Around 95% of trade into North Korea flows across China’s border. Almost all its fuel comes from China. One of the things President Trump used to say to Chinese President Xi Jinping, which I thought was useful was, “You know, you could solve this right now if you wanted to,” and it’s true.

BERGEN: What about Iran?

McMASTER: Iran is a great danger because we’re exuding weakness there as well, as we did in Afghanistan. We have a negotiating team that is anxious to make concession after concession as they did on the previous Iran nuclear deal that would result in a weak agreement that I think will just provide cover for Iran to continue its nuclear program, but it’s even worse than that. The concessions we make in lifting the sanctions will enrich the regime. Money associated with new contracts with Iran go right into the coffers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or into the coffers of the businesses that are run mainly by the children of the clerical order, and therefore, what they do is they give Iran more resources to intensify its four-decade-long proxy war against the great Satan, the United States, the little Satan, the United Kingdom, and Israel. And so the danger to Israel and Iran’s Arab neighbors will increase, and I think a weak agreement with Iran will make the chances of war very high because the Israeli Defense Force will conclude that it has no option other than to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities.
BERGEN: What is Putin’s plan now?

McMASTER: Putin is under tremendous duress, and he’s under duress because of the stagnation of the economy, and he’s under duress because of the extremely poor Russian response to Covid and the ongoing health crisis associated with it. And he’s under duress because I think a lot of Russians are just tired of having him around.
So what will he do? He will do everything he can to maintain his grip on power because he depends on staying in power so he can reap the profits associated with all the money he’s diverted. And so what you’re seeing internationally is continuing aggression on his part, whether using Belarus as a way to weaponize migrants against Poland, for example, or the massive Russian military buildup in Crimea and on the Ukrainian border to intimidate Ukraine.

BERGEN: Should Trump run again?

McMASTER: I try and stay out of domestic politics. However, what I think is the American people need to pick somebody who can get to the politics of addition, who can convene a broader range of Americans around the issues we face and begin discussions with what we agree on, because I believe we can get a heck of a lot done if we just start with that. So, I think what we want are leaders who can help really bring Americans together, and I don’t think we’ve seen that in recent years. And that’s what we need.
BERGEN: Which brings me to the final question: The assault on the US Capitol on January 6th. Any thoughts?

McMASTER: January 6th was an assault on the first branch of government, and I think that what we must do is recognize that it was conspiracy theories that were used by the President and others used to whip up a crowd and incite an assault on the first branch of our government.

But then, also, we should be proud of our democratic institutions and how they stood up. This is often missed. We ought to be more optimistic. Think about what Vice President (Mike) Pence did and think about the speech that Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell made. (McConnell later said, “The mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the President and other powerful people.”)
The investigation that’s ongoing is immensely important to understand why that happened. I hope they take a broader approach, and they consider why people felt so disenfranchised that they thought they were so easily convinced that their vote didn’t matter. Maybe we can conclude that we can ensure that every American who should vote can vote, but also increase the transparency and accountability of our system so that there’s no room any more for these conspiracy theories and for this demagoguery.

The Vanishing: The Twilight of Christianity in the Land of the Prophet with Janine di Giovanni

Some of the countries that first nurtured and characterized Christianity – along the North African Coast, on the Euphrates and across the Middle East and Arabia – are the ones in which it is likely to first go extinct. Christians have fled the lands where their prophets wandered. From Syria to Egypt, the cities of northern Iraq to the Gaza Strip, communities are losing any living connection to the religion that once was such a characteristic feature of their social and cultural lives. In her new book The Vanishing, Janine di Giovanni writes of small, hardy communities that have become wisely fearful of outsiders and where ancient rituals are quietly preserved.

To discuss her new book, New America welcomes Janine di Giovanni. In addition to being the author of The Vanishing, Janine di Giovanni is the winner of a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship and in 2020 was awarded the Blake Dodd Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for her lifetime achievement in non-fiction. She is a Senior Fellow at Yale University, the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs and a fellow with New America’s International Security program as well as the author of eight other books on conflict and war. She has written and reported from the Balkans, Africa and the Middle East.

Speaker:

Janine di Giovanni
Author, The Vanishing: Faith, Loss, and the Twilight of Christianity in the Land of the Prophets
Senior Fellow, Jackson Institute for Global Affairs
Fellow, New America International Security Program

Moderator:

Peter Bergen
Vice President, New America

Politics & Prose Live Kati Marton | The Chancellor with Peter Bergen, online

The event Colin Powell long regretted, CNN.com

Opinion by Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

Updated 8:58 AM ET, Tue October 19, 2021

Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is the author of “The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict Between the United States and al-Qaeda,” from which this piece is adapted. The opinions expressed here are his own.

(CNN)Much to his later regret, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell became the centerpiece of the George W. Bush administration’s case for going to war in Iraq. That fact was noted in the obituaries and opinion pieces published after Powell’s death Monday at the age of 84. But the events of that era deserve closer examination.

Powell’s presentation to the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003, six weeks before the American invasion of Iraq, laid out the case Bush wanted to make. But the case fell apart following the American occupation of Iraq, which revealed that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein didn’t have an active weapons of destruction program, nor was Hussein allied to al Qaeda — as Powell had asserted at the UN.

A hero of the first Gulf War, Powell was a widely admired figure in the Bush administration and had considerably more credibility than other senior officials when it came to Iraq. A Gallup poll before his UN speech found that Powell was trusted on US-Iraq policy by 63% of Americans versus only 24% who trusted Bush on the issue.
Recognizing this, Bush asked Powell to make the case to the UN about the necessity of the Iraq War.

Powell was more skeptical about the decision to invade Iraq than other Cabinet officials such as Vice President Dick Cheney. “If you break it, you own it,” Powell told Bush in August 2002, according to Robert Draper’s authoritative account of the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, “To Start a War.”

Cheney’s office pressed for the most expansive case for the purported connections between Iraq’s leader Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda in Powell’s UN speech, which was supposed to be a replay of the kind of definitive presentation that Adlai Stevenson, the US ambassador to the United Nations, had given in 1962 at the height of the Cuban missile crisis. In that speech, Stevenson had used aerial photographs to successfully convince the world that the Soviets had installed nuclear missiles in Cuba.

Al Qaeda was responsible for the deadliest attack ever on American soil — the 9/11 hijackings that killed nearly 3,000 people, brought down the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon. Connecting Hussein to the terrorists who engineered 9/11 was key to establishing a reason to go to war against Iraq.

Powell’s deputy, Richard Armitage, remembered that the vice president’s office wrote up a submission for his boss to deliver to the UN that included “every kitchen sink that you could imagine,” including the notion that the lead 9/11 hijacker, Mohamed Atta, had met in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence agent before 9/11.

But, a month earlier, a CIA report titled “Iraq Support for Terrorism” had already concluded that “we are increasingly skeptical that Atta traveled to Prague in 2001 or met with the (Iraqi official).”

Deputy CIA Director John McLaughlin recalls that the White House material about the putative al Qaeda-Iraq connections had not been cleared by the CIA. McLaughlin told Powell and his staff, “This is not our draft. There’s all sorts of garbage in here.”

Despite the good-faith efforts to exclude questionable material about Hussein’s connections to al Qaeda in Powell’s speech, much that remained in the final text would later be discounted following the occupation of Iraq.

In hindsight, Powell did his job too well. His presentation was a bravura performance that seemed to establish beyond a doubt that Hussein was actively concealing an ongoing weapons of mass destruction program and was in league with al Qaeda. Powell asserted that “Saddam Hussein and his regime are concealing their efforts to produce more weapons of mass destruction,” and he pointed to a “sinister nexus between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network.”

At one point, to show the dangers WMD can pose, the secretary of state dramatically brandished a small vial of a white powder of supposed anthrax saying “about this amount … shut down the US Senate in the fall of 2001.”

As Powell gave his speech, sitting directly behind him was CIA Director George Tenet, giving a visual imprimatur to what Powell was saying.
One section of Powell’s UN speech tried to make the case for an emerging alliance between Saddam and al Qaeda. “Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda lieutenants,” he said.

But Powell’s speech made a gossamer-thin case for the Iraq-al Qaeda nexus, even with the faulty intelligence that was then available. The relationship between Zarqawi and al Qaeda was already known to be far from clear-cut. Until 2004, Zarqawi ran an organization separate from al Qaeda, known as Tawhid, whose name corresponds to the idea of monotheism in Arabic. Indeed, Shadi Abdalla, a member of Tawhid who was apprehended in Germany in 2002, told investigators that the group saw itself to be in competition with al Qaeda.

Even after the Iraq war began in March 2003, Zarqawi was still running his own outfit independent of al Qaeda. Unlikely support for that fact came from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who said of Zarqawi at a Pentagon briefing in June 2004, “Someone could legitimately say he’s not al Qaeda.”

On October 25, 2005, the CIA released a report that finally disposed of the myth that Saddam and Zarqawi had ever been in league, assessing that prior to the war, “the regime did not a have a relationship, harbor, or turn a blind eye towards Zarqawi.”

An additional exhibit in Powell’s UN speech that was intended to prove an al Qaeda-Saddam-WMD nexus was the Kurdish Islamist group, Ansar al-Islam, which was experimenting with crude chemical weapons in its training camp in northeastern Iraq, a facility that was described as a “poison factory” by Powell in an aerial photograph of the camp that Powell displayed in his UN presentation.
However, the only reason that Ansar al-Islam could exist in that part of Kurdish Iraq was because the US Air Force had been enforcing a no-fly zone in the region for more than a decade, which meant that the Pentagon had more control over that part of Kurdistan than Saddam did.

Obviously well aware of the fact that Hussein did not control Kurdish Iraq, Powell said that the Iraqi dictator had a high-level spy in Ansar al-Islam. However, while Hussein may have had a spy in Ansar al-Islam, this hardly meant that he had control over the group.

It was Powell’s speech that will be long remembered as making the best public case for the Iraq war. And it was a speech that would later be shown to be rife with false assertions and erroneous assumptions once the United States had occupied Iraq.

The CIA director George Tenet later wrote, seemingly without irony, of Powell’s speech “it was a great presentation, but unfortunately the substance didn’t hold up.”
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In 2005, Powell told ABC News’ Barbara Walters that his UN speech was “painful” for him and a permanent “blot” on his record.

Powell’s admission came as Iraq was descending into an intense civil war. Ultimately, more than 4,400 US troops would die in Iraq, as well as many scores of thousands of Iraqi civilians.
Powell grew up in the South Bronx, the son of Jamaican immigrants. He rose from serving in the jungles of Vietnam where he was as a young officer to become former President Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser and later the first Black secretary of state.

His speech at the UN doesn’t define Powell’s extraordinary career, but he came to bitterly regret ever giving it.

Arizona State, The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden, online

Topic
The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden
Description
Peter Bergen is the author of seven books, three of which were named New York Times bestsellers and four of which were named among the non-fiction books of the year by the Washington Post. Bergen is a Professor of Practice in the School of Politics and Global Studies at ASU, Co-Director of the Center on the Future of War, Vice President for Global Studies and Fellows at New America, and a CNN national security analyst.

In The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden, Peter Bergen provides the first reevaluation of the man responsible for precipitating America’s long wars with al-Qaeda and its descendants, capturing bin Laden in all the dimensions of his life: as a family man, as a terrorist leader, and as a fugitive. The book sheds light on his many contradictions: he was the son of a billionaire, yet insisted his family live like paupers. He adored his wives and children, yet he brought ruin to his family. And while he inflicted the most lethal act of mass murder in United States history, he failed to achieve any of his strategic goals.
Time
Oct 7, 2021 05:00 PM in Arizona

In conversation with historian, Professor Sunil Khilnani, Dean, AshokaX.

Beyond The Classroom
Peter Bergen, Bestselling author, journalist, and National Security Analyst, CNN is in conversation with eminent historian and Professor Sunil Khilnani, Dean, AshokaX.
Ashoka University is delighted to invite everyone to another exciting season of Beyond The Classroom. We begin the lecture series with a conversation with the famous journalist and bestselling author Peter Bergen who also serves as CNN’s National Security Analyst and the Vice President for Global Studies & Fellows at New America. The conversation is hosted by eminent historian Sunil Khilnani, Dean of AshokaX and Professor of Politics and History at Ashoka.

In 1997, acclaimed CNN correspondent Peter Bergen conducted the first-ever television interview with Osama bin Laden–a conversation in which, for the first time, bin Laden declared to a Western audience his war against the United States. Since that history-making moment, Bergen has become not just the world’s leading expert on Osama bin Laden, but the author or editor of nine ground-breaking books on Afghanistan, Taliban, Osama bin Laden, foreign policy, and America’s War on Terror, among them two bestsellers: The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict between America and Al-Qaeda and Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden, from 9/11 to Abbottabad–a 2012 book that became an Emmy-winning HBO film.

Bergen’s latest book, ‘The Rise and Fall of Osama Bin Laden’, on the 20th anniversary of the attacks of Sept.11, 2001, is his deepest-yet exploration of how a family man became a radical jihadist and, in turn, the world’s most wanted terrorist, and how his influence continues to determine US foreign policy.

Join this lively and wide-ranging discussion on October 08, 2021 at 8 pm.

Top US generals punch holes in Joe Biden’s defense of Afghanistan withdrawal, CNN.com

Top US generals punch holes in Joe Biden’s defense of Afghanistan withdrawal

“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. Bergen has reported from Afghanistan since 1993. His new book is “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.”

(CNN)Top American generals warned President Joe Biden that the Afghan military would collapse. Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said in essence on Tuesday that both former President Donald Trump and Biden had botched negotiations with the Taliban — and the net result of the US actions was a “logistical success but a strategic failure.”

If the old joke is true — that in Washington, the definition of a gaffe is telling the truth in public — then Milley and the other military leaders who testified Tuesday on Capitol Hill committed many gaffes.

At a televised hearing of the US Senate Armed Services Committee featuring Milley, CENTCOM commander Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, and the Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin — himself a retired four-star general and former CENTCOM commander — all told a great deal of truth.

Generals Milley and McKenzie said that they advised the Biden administration that unless the US kept 2,500 troops in Afghanistan, the Afghan military would collapse. They also said that the ground commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Austin “Scott” Miller, provided the same advice.

This clearly contradicts what President Biden told ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos last month — that the US military didn’t advise him to keep 2,500 troops in Afghanistan.
In answer to a question from a senator, Gen. Milley conceded that the abrupt and complete US withdrawal had “damaged” US credibility around the world.

Milley also said that both the Trump and Biden administrations made a mistake by putting specific dates on the US withdrawal rather them making it a conditions-based withdrawal.
Relatedly, McKenzie and Austin both agreed that the Doha agreement with the Taliban that was negotiated by the Trump administration and signed in February 2020, and which laid out the timeline for a total US withdrawal, significantly undercut the morale of the Afghan military.

Milley blamed the US intelligence community for missing the “scale and scope, plus the speed” of the collapse of Afghan government, testifying, “All the intel assessments, all of us got that wrong. There’s no question about it. That was a swing and a miss on the intel assessment of 11 days in August, there’s nobody that called that.”

In fact, according to CNN’s reporting before the fall of Kabul, the US intelligence community was predicting in early August that the Taliban could take Kabul within a month to three months, which at the time seemed like a reasonably accurate assessment of how dire the situation was becoming.

Milley described the US airlift of more than 120,000 Afghans, US citizens and other nationals from Kabul as a “logistical success,” but he called the overall policy in Afghanistan a “strategic failure.”

The fruits of that failure have been starkly clear from the actions of the Taliban during just the past month.
In a highly symbolic move on September 17, the Taliban’s feared religious police commandeered the building that once housed the Ministry of Women’s Affairs.

The next day, the Taliban ministry of education summoned only teenage boys back to school, but no female teens. They remain at home, unschooled.

The following day, the mayor of Kabul decreed that women can work for the city, but only in jobs that could not be done by men, such as cleaning toilets used by women.

Then Mullah Nooruddin Turabi, a founder of the Taliban, told the Associated Press that the regime would resume the practice of amputating the hands of thieves.

And earlier this month, the Taliban appointed Siraj Haqqani, who the UN has identified as part of the leadership council of al Qaeda, as the acting Minister of the Interior.

No wonder then that Gen. McKenzie testified he was not confident that al-Qaeda and ISIS wouldn’t regroup in Afghanistan now that the US has withdrawn from the country.

The upshot of Tuesday’s hearing was that even the most senior US generals couldn’t defend the debacle that has unfolded in Afghanistan during the past several weeks, a disaster owned by President Biden, even if it was teed up by President Trump’s ill-fated “peace” negotiations with the Taliban that culminated in the Doha agreement.

Global Security Forum, Doha, Qatar.

WELCOME TO THE GLOBAL SECURITY FORUM
Established in 2018, the Global Security Forum is an annual international gathering bringing together a multi-disciplinary network of experts, practitioners, and policy-makers from government, security, academia, media, entertainment, international organizations, the humanitarian sector, the private sector and beyond to come together to discuss the world’s most pressing topics. This global event provides a unique platform for international stakeholders to convene and offer solutions that address the international community’s leading security challenges.

GLOBAL SECURITY FORUM
October 12–14, 2021
Cooperation or Competition?
Changing Dynamics of Global Security
The Global Security Forum (GSF), will take place from October 12–14, 2021, in Doha, Qatar. GSF 2021 is currently planned as a hybrid event: partially virtual and partially taking place in-person in Doha. However, should the need arise, format details may be adapted in line with the evolving impact of COVID-19 on events and gatherings.
COMING SOON
2021 AGENDA
2021 OVERVIEW
2020 FORUM

05Days20Hours52Minutes55Seconds
OPENING CEREMONY

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H.E. SHEIKH KHALID BIN KHALIFA
BIN ABDULAZIZ AL THANI

Prime Minister and Minister of Interior
State of Qatar

FULL BIO
KEY SPEAKERS

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H.E. PAUL KAGAME

President of the Republic of Rwanda

FULL BIO
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HON. SECRETARY ALEJANDRO MAYORKAS

Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security
United States

FULL BIO
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H.E. KOSTAS TSIARAS

Minister of Justice
Greece

FULL BIO
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MR. KARIM A. A. KHAN QC

Prosecutor
International Criminal Court (ICC)

FULL BIO
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H.E. SHEIKH MOHAMMED BIN ABDULRAHMAN AL-THANI

Deputy Prime Minister
and Minister of Foreign Affairs
State of Qatar

FULL BIO
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H.E. TEO CHEE HEAN

Senior Minister and Coordinating Minister for National Security
Republic of Singapore

FULL BIO
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HON. SHEIKH IMRAN ABDULLA

Minister of Home Affairs
Republic of Maldives

FULL BIO
PARTICIPANTS

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DIRECTOR GENERAL AHMED RUFAI ABUBAKAR
National Intelligence Agency
Nigeria

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DR. FATIMA AKILU
Executive Director
Neem Foundation

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MR. JEPPE ALBERS
Executive Director
Nordic Safe Cities

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COMMISSIONER GENERAL BOY RAFLI AMAR
Head of the National Counter
Terrorism Agency
Indonesia

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DR. MAJED AL ANSARI
President
Qatar International Academy for Security Studies (QIASS)

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MR. KEVIN BARON
Founding Executive Editor
Defense One
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MR. BRYAN BENDER
Senior National Correspondent
Politico
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MR. PETER BERGEN
Vice President for Global
Studies and Fellows
New America
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DR. KARIMA BENNOUNE
United Nations Special Rapporteur
in Cultural Rights

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AMB. UMEJ BHATIA
Permanent Representative to the United
Nations Offices in Geneva and Vienna
Singapore

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MR. JASON M. BLAZAKIS
Senior Research Fellow
The Soufan Center
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MS. LAILA BOKHARI
Former Deputy Minister/State Secretary in the Prime Minister’s Office and Deputy Minister at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Norway
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MR. JOHN BRENNAN
Former Director of the
Central Intelligence Agency
United States

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DR. COLIN P. CLARKE
Director of Policy and Research
The Soufan Group

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MR. STEVE CLEMONS
Editor-at-Large
The Hill
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MS. MICHELE CONINSX
Assistant Secretary-General
Executive Director
United Nations Counter- Terrorism
Committee Executive Directorate

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COL. CHRIS COSTA (RET)
Former Special Assistant to the President & Senior Director for Counterterrorism
Executive Director
International Spy Museum

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SENATOR JOSEPH DONNELLY
Former United States Senator
from Indiana
United States

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MS. JOSIE ENSOR
US Correspondent
The Telegraph
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AMB. EDMUND FITTON-BROWN
Coordinator
United Nations Analytical Support and
Sanctions Monitoring Team

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MR. DEXTER FILKINS
Journalist and Author
The New Yorker

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DR. AUDREY KURTH CRONIN
Director of the Center for Security,
Innovation & New Technology
American University

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MS. NAUREEN CHOWDHURY FINK
Executive Director
The Soufan Center

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MR. JOSHUA GELTZER
Deputy Assistant to the President
& Deputy Homeland Security Advisor
National Security Council
United States

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MR. BOBBY GHOSH
Editor
Bloomberg
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MR. ALEX GIBNEY
Award-Winning Director

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MR. JOHN GODFREY
Acting Coordinator for Counterterrorism and Acting Special Envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, Department of State Bureau of Counterterrorism
United States
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MS. KAREN J. GREENBERG
Director
Fordham Law’s
Center on National Security

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COMMISSIONER MOHAMED HAMEED
Commissioner of Police
Maldives

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DR. AHMAD M. HASNAH
President
Hamad Bin Khalifa University
Member of Qatar Foundation

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DR. BRUCE HOFFMAN
Senior Fellow for Counterterrorism & Homeland Security
Council on Foreign Relations

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MS. DINA HUSSEIN
Counterterrorism and Dangerous
Organisations Policy Head for EMEA
Facebook
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PRINCE ZEID AL HUSSEIN
President and CEO
International Peace Institute (IPI)
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MR. MICHAEL ISIKOFF
Chief Investigative Correspondent
Yahoo News
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DR. SHASHI JAYAKUMAR
Senior Fellow and Head Centre of Excellence for National Security
S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS)
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DR. MARC OWEN JONES
Assistant Professor
Hamad bin Khalifa University

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AMB. BILAHARI KAUSIKAN
Former Permanent Secretary of
the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Singapore
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MR. GILLES DE KERCHOVE
Former Counter-Terrorism Coordinator
Council of the European Union

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MS. DEEYAH KHAN
Filmmaker and Founder
of Fuuse
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H.E. LOLWAH RASHID AL-KHATER
Assistant Foreign Minister and Spokesperson for
the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
State of Qatar

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MR. RAMI G. KHOURI
Director of Global Engagement, Adjunct Professor of Journalism, and Journalist-in-Residence American University of Beirut

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MR. IOANNIS KOSKINA
Senior Fellow
International Security Program
New America

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MR. QUDUS MALIK, ESQ
Executive Director
Global Lawyers for Refugees

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MR. MICHAEL G. MASTERS
President
The Soufan Center

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MR. MARK MAZZETTI
Washington Investigative Correspondent
The New York Times

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MR. OMAR MOHAMMED
Host, “Mosul and the Islamic State” Podcast Series
Lecturer, Sciences Po University
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DR. ASFANDYAR MIR
Postdoctoral Fellow
Stanford Center for International
Security and Cooperation
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MS. MAYA MIRCHANDANI
Senior Fellow
Observer Research
Foundation
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DR. AHMAD EL-MUHAMMADY
Associate Fellow at the International
Centre for Counter-Terrorism
The Hague
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H.E. GERALDINE BYRNE NASON
Permanent Representative
to the United Nations
Ireland

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DR. PETER NEUMANN
Professor
King’s College London

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AMB. JACQUELINE O’NEILL
Ambassador for Women, Peace and Security
Canada

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DR. OLUWOLE OJEWALE
ENACT Regional Organised Crime
Observatory Coordinator, Institute for Security Studies
Senegal
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MS. IRENE POETRANTO
Senior Research Officer
The Citizen Lab
null
MR. MATTHEW POTTINGER
Former Deputy National Security Adviser
United States
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MR. MARK POWER
Deputy Ambassador
British Embassy Israel
United Kingdom Foreign Office

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THE RIGHT HONOURABLE MARK PRITCHARD MP
Member of Parliament
United Kingdom

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H.E. DR. MUTLAQ BIN MAJED AL QAHTANI
Special Envoy Of The Foreign Minister Of The State Of Qatar For Counterterrorism And Mediation Of Conflict Resolution
State of Qatar

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MR. NICHOLAS J. RASMUSSEN
Executive Director
Global Internet Forum to Counter
Terrorism (GIFCT)

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DR. KACPER REKAWEK
Postdoctoral Fellow
University of Oslo Center for Research
on Extremism (C-REX)

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MS. VIDHYA RAMALINGAM
CEO and Founder
Moonshot

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MR. ERIC ROSAND
Senior Associate Fellow
Royal United Services Institute

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MR. MAX ROSE
Former Congressman
from New York
United States

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MR. IRFAN SAEED
Acting Deputy Coordinator, Department
of State Bureau of Counterterrorism
United States
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MS. MAY SALEM
Program Manager, DDR & Preventing Radicalisation and Extremism, The Cairo International Center for Conflict Resolution

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AMB. NATHAN SALES
Former Under Secretary for Civilian Security,
Democracy, and Human Rights (acting), Department of State
United States
null
MR. DAVID SCHARIA
Chief of Branch
United Nations Counter-Terrorism
Committee Executive Directorate (CTED)

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MR. ZACHARY SCHWITZKY
Founder & CEO
Limbik

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DR. W.P.S. SIDHU
Professor
Center for Global Affairs, School of Professional Studies
New York University

null
MR. MOHAMED SINAN SIYECH
, Associate Fellow
Observer Research Foundation
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MR. CHARLES SPENCER
Assistant Director of the International Operations Division,
Federal Bureau of Investigation
United States

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MS. MEREDITH STRICKER
Senior Fellow
The Soufan Center

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H.E. HASSAN AL THAWADI
Secretary General of the Supreme
Committee for Delivery and Legacy (SC)
State of Qatar

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DR. GINA VALE
Senior Research Fellow, International Center
for the Study on Radicalisation (ICSR)
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MR. ALI VELSHI
Host of “Velshi”
MSNBC

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MS. LORI WACHS
Partner
Springboard Growth Capital

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MR. DAVID WELLS
Head of Research and Analysis, United Nations Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate (CTED)
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DR. TIM WILSON
Trustee
Airey Neave Trust
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MR. LAWRENCE WRIGHT
Author & Staff Writer
The New Yorker

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MS. ROBIN WRIGHT
Columnist
The New Yorker

A New World (Dis)Order?:
Managing Security Challenges in an Increasingly Complex Landscape

“Subtle Tools: The Dismantling of American Democracy from the War on Terror to Trump” Book event with Karen Greenberg, New America online

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In the wake of the September 11 terror attacks, the American government implemented a wave of overt policies to fight the nation’s enemies. Unseen by the public, however, another set of tools were brought to bear on the domestic front. In her new book, Subtle Tools: The Dismantling of American Democracy from the War on Terror to Trump, Karen J. Greenberg examines how this set of “subtle tools” imperiled the very foundations of democracy. The book traces the use and threat of imprecise language, bureaucratic confusion, secrecy, and the bypassing of procedural and legal norms from Ground Zero to the events of January 6th 2021 and discusses how the Trump administration weaponized these tools to separate families at the border, suppress Black Lives Matter protests, and attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

To discuss this topic, New America welcomes Karen J. Greenberg. Greenberg is the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law and a fellow with New America’s International Security program. In addition to being the author of Subtle Tools, she is also the author of Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State and The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First 100 Days.

Join the conversation online using #SubtleTools and following @NewAmericaISP.

PARTICIPANTS

Karen Greenberg, @KarenGreenberg3
Author, Subtle Tools: The Dismantling of American Democracy from the War on Terror to Trump
Director, Center on National Security at Fordham Law
Fellow, New America International Security Program

MODERATOR

Peter Bergen, @peterbergencnn
Vice President, Global Studies & Fellows at New America
Author, The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden
Professor of Practice, Arizona State University

Milley’s reasonable actions raise a serious question, CNN.com

Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is the author of “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

(CNN)In the last few months of Donald Trump’s presidency, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley made two phone calls to reassure his Chinese counterpart that the US was stable and not considering a military strike against China, according to a new book by reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa.

“General Li, you and I have known each other for now five years. If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise. It’s not going to be a bolt out of the blue,” Milley said in the October 30 call, according to Woodward and Costa.

This revelation has generated headlines around the world, prompting Republican lawmakers, including Sen. Marco Rubio, to call for General Milley’s resignation.

While some have characterized Milley’s actions as “treasonous,” current and former defense officials said the calls he made to his Chinese counterpart were conducted under protocols similar to other high-level discussions by the Joint Chiefs chairman and in consultation with civilians at the Defense Department.

Ultimately, it’s important to understand the broader context of Milley’s actions; they were the culmination of a long spell of disenchantment between Trump and senior US military officers.

What Milley did was put his country above his commander-in-chief. Given the irrational rage that Trump was exhibiting after his election loss, Milley made the right call to reassure the Chinese about the stability of the US national security apparatus. But Milley’s actions could set a dangerous precedent and we should carefully consider how high-ranking military officers in future administrations might insert themselves into the chain of command under a different president.

In 2017, Trump filled several positions in his administration with top military brass and entered office with a romantic attachment to what he called “my generals.” As a teenager, Trump had attended a military-style boarding school in New York. And although he avoided military service in Vietnam, he yearned to preside over a massive military parade in Washington, DC.

But Trump’s bromance with his generals quickly evaporated. Pentagon officials wanted to sustain overseas military commitments, while Trump believed that alliances like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) were ripping off the US. Meanwhile, the generals, who knew that NATO allies had fought bravely with them in Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks, vigorously backed the United States’ continued role in leading the alliance.

Many of these generals were confronted with tough choices, having to work with a chaotic and erratic president who could announce a major foreign policy decision on a whim. In my book, “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos,” I detailed how the Pentagon, under Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, for example, would not provide a range of military options to Trump when it came to potential operations against North Korea. Chief of Staff John Kelly also believed he had prevented Trump from making dumb mistakes like leaving NATO and pulling all US forces out of South Korea.

Eventually, a schism started to open up between Trump and former leaders of the military as well as active-duty generals and admirals, who could not openly rebuke their commander-in-chief. The research institute New America tracked public statements by current and former military leaders during Trump’s four years in office and found that 255 out of a total of 309 statements were critical of the administration.

Over time, many generals ended up leaving the Trump administration. Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster was pushed out as national security adviser after just over a year. Kelly, a retired Marine general, served as secretary of homeland security before he became the White House chief of staff, staying in that role until 2018 — when he was no longer on speaking terms with Trump. And Mattis resigned as Trump’s defense secretary after two years over the president’s plans to withdraw troops from Syria.

The first break between Trump and Milley emerged in 2017. After far-right protesters convened in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a neo-Nazi killed counter-protester Heather Heyer, Trump famously said there were “very fine people on both sides.”

Milley, who was then chief of staff of the army, tweeted, “The Army doesn’t tolerate racism, extremism, or hatred in our ranks. It’s against our Values and everything we’ve stood for since 1775.”

There was another break between Trump and Milley after peaceful protesters were violently dispersed outside the White House on June 1, 2020, following the death of George Floyd in police custody. Gen. Milley had appeared in uniform alongside President Trump, who walked across Lafayette Square and held up a Bible for a photo-op outside St. John’s Episcopal Church.

The very next day, Milley issued a statement to military commanders acknowledging that every member of the US military swears an oath to support and defend the Constitution, which gives “Americans the right to freedom of speech and peaceful assembly.”

He went on to issue an apology the following week during an online National Defense University graduation ceremony, saying, “I should not have been there. My presence in that moment and in that environment, created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics. As a commissioned uniformed officer, it was a mistake that I have learned from.”

Milley — like Mattis and Kelly before him — seems to have concluded that a key element of his job involved sidestepping the politicization of his role and preventing the impetuous president from doing anything rash. During the summer of 2020, Milley often found himself opposing Trump’s argument that the military should intervene violently in order to quell the civil unrest, according to Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender’s book, “Frankly, We Did Win this Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost.” (CNN reached out to Trump about the claims in Bender’s book and a spokesperson for Milley declined to comment.) It seems Milley was also trying to do damage control when he reassured the Chinese about the stability of the US.

It appears Milley was trying to act in the best interests of the country. Given the extraordinary circumstances of serving under a president who contested the results of the 2020 presidential election and encouraged his followers to take action, this was the right call.

But it raises some interesting questions for the future of civilian and military relations. Might a future Joint Chiefs chairman pursue policies intended to rein in a future President Kamala Harris or a future President Marco Rubio? Certainly, that seems more plausible after Trump’s strange presidency and the split that developed between the senior ranks of the military and Trump. Those who are cheering Milley’s efforts to reassure the Chinese may one day come to regret that the doctrine of civilian control of the military eroded under Trump — even if it was for all the right reasons.