A sickening moral
slum of an administration
Regarding
Venezuela, Ukraine and much more, Trump and his acolytes are worse than simply
incompetent.
December 2, 2025
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seems to be a war criminal.
Without a war. An interesting achievement.
In 1967, novelist Gwyn Griffin published a World War II
novel, “An Operational Necessity,”
that 58 years later is again pertinent. According to the laws of war,
survivors of a sunken ship cannot be attacked. But a German submarine captain,
after sinking a French ship, orders the machine-gunning of the ship’s crew,
lest their survival endanger his men by revealing where his boat is operating.
In the book’s dramatic climax, a postwar tribunal examines the German
commander’s moral calculus.
No operational necessity justified Hegseth’s de facto order
to kill two survivors clinging to the wreckage of one of the supposed drug
boats obliterated by U.S. forces near Venezuela. His order was reported by The Post from
two sources (“The order was to kill everybody,” one said) and has not been
explicitly denied by Hegseth. President Donald Trump says Hegseth told him that
he (Hegseth) “said he did not say that.” If Trump is telling the truth about
Hegseth, and Hegseth is telling the truth to Trump, it is strange that (per the
Post report) the commander of the boat-destroying operation said he ordered the
attack on the survivors to comply with Hegseth’s order.
Forty-four days after the survivors were killed, the
four-star admiral who headed the U.S. Southern Command announced
he would be leaving that position just a year into what is usually a three-year
stint. He did not say why. Inferences are, however, permitted.
The killing of the survivors by this moral slum of an
administration should nauseate Americans. A nation incapable of shame is
dangerous, not least to itself. As the recent “peace plan” for Ukraine
demonstrated.
Marco Rubio, who is secretary of state and Trump’s
national security adviser, seemed to be neither when the president
released his 28-point plan for
Ukraine’s dismemberment. The plan was cobbled together by Trump administration
and Russian officials, with no Ukrainians participating. It reads like a
wish-list letter from Vladimir Putin to Santa Claus: Ukraine to cede land that
Russia has failed to capture in almost four years of aggression; Russia to have
a veto over NATO’s composition, peacekeeping forces in Ukraine and the size of
Ukraine’s armed forces. And more.
Rubio, whose well-known versatility of convictions is
perhaps not infinite, told some of his alarmed former Senate colleagues that
the plan was just an opening gambit from Russia — although Trump demanded that
Ukraine accept it within days. South Dakota Republican Sen. Mike Rounds, a
precise and measured speaker, reported that, in a conference call with a
bipartisan group of senators, Rubio said the plan was
a Russian proposal: “He made it very clear to us that we are the recipients of
a proposal that was delivered to one of our representatives. It is not our
recommendation. It is not our peace plan.” Hours later, however, Rubio reversed himself, saying on social media
that the United States “authored” the plan.
The administration’s floundering might reflect more than
its characteristic incompetence. In a darkening world, systemic weaknesses of
prosperous democracies are becoming clearer.
Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell’s 1976 book, “The Cultural Contradictions of
Capitalism,” argued that capitalism’s success undermines
capitalism’s moral and behavioral prerequisites. Affluence produces a culture
of present-mindedness and laxity; this undermines thrift, industriousness,
discipline and the deferral of gratification.
Today’s cultural contradictions of democracy are:
Majorities vote themselves government benefits funded by deficits, which
conscript the wealth of future generations who will inherit the national debt.
Entitlements crowd out provisions for national security. And an anesthetizing
dependency on government produces an inward-turning obliviousness to external
dangers, and a flinching from hard truths.
Two weeks ago, the chief of staff of the French army
said: “We have the know-how, and we have the economic and demographic strength
to dissuade the regime in Moscow. What we are lacking … is the spirit which
accepts that we will have to suffer if we are to protect what we are. If our
country wavers because it is not ready to lose its children … or to suffer
economically because the priority has to be military production, then we are
indeed at risk.”
Putin has surely savored the French recoil from these
words. And he has noticed that, concerning Ukraine and the attacks on boats
near Venezuela, the Trump administration cannot keep its stories straight. This
probably is for reasons Sir Walter Scott understood: “Oh, what a
tangled web we weave,/ when first we practise to deceive!” Americans are the
deceived.
