Peter D. Feaver
Americans are used to seeing military service get politicized in presidential campaigns. They have seen this politicization on full display in recent weeks, with the campaign of former President Donald Trump criticized for the way that Trump turned the gravesites of soldiers who died in the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan three years ago into a campaign photo-op that apparently violated Department of Army regulations. The campaign had intended the event as a way of criticizing Trump’s rival in the upcoming election, Vice President Kamala Harris, on the anniversary of that withdrawal, but did so in a ham-handed way that exploited the grief of the Gold Star families who were remembering those who died in the incident. When members of the Harris campaign pushed back with criticisms of their own, the Trump campaign pounced with video from some of the Gold Star families who were politically aligned with Trump.
In addition to this ugly back-and-forth, we are also witnessing the weaponization of military service, in which a candidate’s association with the military is turned from a positive into a negative. Both vice presidential candidates served in the enlisted ranks—Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance, as a junior enlisted Marine and Harris’s, Gov. Tim Walz, as a senior enlisted noncommissioned officer in the Army National Guard. What should have been a positive—that both VP candidates volunteered to serve in the country’s all-volunteer force at a time when most Americans did not—has instead become a potential negative, with partisans on both sides casting aspersions on their service.
No comments:
Post a Comment