The Situation: “The Highest And Best Use of Our Military”

The Situation on Sunday tried to distinguish between American targeted killings of the past and the current administration’s killing of civilian drug traffickers last week.

Yesterday, after I had written the column but before it had run and entirely unbeknownst to me, Vice President J.D. Vance, vice president of the United States and a graduate of the Yale Law School, tweeted out: “Killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military.”

Among the nearly 20,000 replies to this tweet came this one from a political commentator named Brian Krassenstein: “Killing the citizens of another nation who are civilians without any due process is called a war crime.”

The vice president of the United States responded, and I’m not making this up: “I don’t give a shit what you call it.”

Now let’s take these three tweets in order, because each—in its own way—warrants comment.

First, leaving aside whether the strike was lawful or not for a moment, Vance’s claim that “the highest and best use of our military” is the targeting of “cartel members who poison our fellow citizens” is an extraordinary one.

The highest and best and best use of the American military is not, say, defending against attack by fascist nations, as in World War II, or the defense of a free Europe, as during the Cold War. The highest and best use of the military is not keeping the United States together and ending slavery, as in the Civil War, or even establishing American independence, as in the Revolutionary War. The highest and best use of the American military, according to our vice president, is the targeting with lethal force of drug traffickers who could easily be arrested instead.

Vance’s comment strikes me as reflecting a particularly uninspired—and uninspiring—view of the country he helps lead. When I think of the highest and best uses of the military, drug interdiction with unnecessary casualties ranks well down the list. Yet note the words that don’t appear in Vance’s tweet: freedom, liberty, democracy. Literally any country in the world can use its military power to prevent unwanted smuggling. Even North Korea can do that. It interests me to know that Vance’s aspirations for the United States are so tediously common.

This shouldn’t have surprised me—and it shouldn’t surprise anyone else either. This is the man who only a few weeks ago gave a speech in which he objected to what he termed a purely “credal” conception of American citizenship and endorsed a frankly more hereditary—one might even say a more racial—conception of the country’s polity.

Yet I confess that it did surprise me, not so much that Vance might believe that blowing up small boats allegedly smuggling drugs represents the highest calling of American arms. He’s a very small man, and small men believe small things. 

But it surprises me that he would actually cop to believing such a thing.

But again, I shouldn’t have been surprised. The Trumpists have always had a weird relationship with American exceptionalism. They talk about it endlessly. They are deathly afraid of curricula or museums that might acknowledge the country’s shortcomings. That stuff is “wokeness” and strictly verboten, even though a necessary consequence of purging that material is obscuring the genuine triumphs worth celebrating of the country overcoming its darker moments. 

But they also quite casually toss away any American aspiration to higher values. Trump himself famously said to Bill O’Reilly in 2017, by way of defending Vladimir Putin of charges of being a killer, “You got a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?”

They consistently lace their performative patriotism with a small vision of American leadership. I shouldn’t have expected Vance to be able to muster a vision larger than blowing up drug boats.

Krassenstein, for his part, went straight to the criminality question. And one could pick nits with the legal analysis assumed in his tweet: “Killing the citizens of another nation who are civilians without any due process is called a war crime.”

After all, if we’re being sticklers about the law, the citizenship of the targets probably doesn’t matter for purposes of assessing the criminality of the action. If the boat were full of American citizens, that might make the matter worse for purposes of American law.

Let’s also dispense with Krassenstein’s due process point. You can’t really give someone due process in the middle of a military operation. If you’re going to kill the dudes in the boat in a military operation, you’re not giving them due process first. And if you’re giving them due process, you’re not going to end up killing them.

Come to think of it, I’m not sure “war crime” is the right rubric here either. Though I don’t doubt that the Uniform Code of Military Justice has stuff to say on the subject, the most relevant statutes may be your basic extraterritorial murder laws.

But that said, we all know what Krassenstein meant. He meant: Murdering civilians is not the highest calling of the United States military, and how dare you suggest it is, Mr. Vice President. It’s a freakin’ crime!

All of which makes Vance’s response all the more shocking. Again, accused of debasing the military by having it commit crimes and then boasting of it, Vance does not bother to deny the premise. 

He doesn’t say, with whatever level of crudeness or profanity, this was a lawful strike that comported with domestic criminal law, was authorized by the Constitution or statute, and complied with the law of armed conflict. He doesn’t say he is confident in the legal vetting the strike underwent. He doesn’t even bother to say that it’s horrifying that Krassenstein would malign our troops.

He says he doesn’t give a shit what Krassenstein calls the strike.

In other words, in two brief tweets, the vice president of the United States declared that the United States military has no higher purpose than to kill civilian drug smugglers and that he feels no need even to argue about whether such actions might be crimes—because he doesn’t care what people think who don’t instinctively agree with him think.

He is proud of the military’s targeting of civilians and he doesn’t “give a shit” if anyone calls it murder.

The Situation continues tomorrow.