He’s certainly correct about ours

By Herbert Rothschild

Quakers don’t have a credal religion. We aren’t required to believe in propositions about divinity, personal salvation, life after death, and such. But we do share certain beliefs about human beings and the ways we should relate to one another.

One is that there is something of the sacred in each person, which leads us to refuse to participate in state-sanctioned killing. Our conscientious objection to war is the only thing most people know about Quakers. A related belief we share is that every person has at least some piece of the truth about human matters, and so we must listen respectfully to each other, even to those who mostly utter opinions we’re fairly certain are wrongheaded.

Probably these aspects of my faith life were what conditioned me to think hard about something Tucker Carlson said earlier this year.

As most of you know, Carlson is a rightwing political commentator who hosted a nightly talk show on Fox News from 2016 to 2023. During those years, he was probably the country’s most influential proponent of Trump-styled opinions. After he got crosswise with Rupert Murdoch and was fired, he migrated to Elon Musk’s X social media platform.

Like Trump, Carlson admires Vladimir Putin, and he secured an in-person interview with Putin on Feb. 6 in Moscow, the first interview the Russian leader had given to a Western journalist since he invaded Ukraine in 2022. A week later, Carlson spoke with Egyptian journalist Emad El Din Adeeb at the World Government Summit in Dubai. Adeeb faulted Carlson for going so easy on Putin in the interview and asked him why he hadn’t pressed him on such matters as the assassinations of his political opponents.

What Carlson said in his own defense — and Putin’s — struck me. He said, “I have spent my life talking to people who run countries in various countries (sic) and have concluded the following: That every leader kills people, including my leader. Every leader kills people, some kill more than others. Leadership requires killing people, sorry, that’s why I wouldn’t want to be a leader.”

Carlson’s statement is a mixture of truth and falsehood. Every national leader doesn’t kill people. Furthermore, while every killing is dreadful, there is a meaningful distinction between killing foreign opponents and domestic opponents. Despite the pain that our government’s incessant depredations abroad cause me, if it began a reign of terror at home, conditions for us all would change enormously.

Such a prospect for America wouldn’t faze many of Trump’s supporters, and perhaps Carlson was justifying the likely crimes of a second Trump presidency avant le fait. In Trump v. United States, the most damaging decision to this country a U.S. Supreme Court ever handed down, the six Republican justices made it even more likely that Trump will use the power of his office to destroy his domestic opponents.

May we be saved from that gruesome prospect. But if Kamala Harris prevails, she won’t be among the exceptions to Carlson’s declaration that “every leader kills people, including my leader.” You can’t preside over an empire without killing people, because people resist subjugation by foreign powers. No U.S. president in this century, in the last century, and perhaps in any century has been an exception. Herbert Hoover may have come closest. Also, FDR, his successor. Our engagement in World War II was not an imperial project. That’s why people keep pointing to it to justify military actions that bear no resemblance to it whatsoever.

Carlson said he wouldn’t want to become a national leader because he wouldn’t want to kill people. This raises the question of whether any person averse to killing should serve as president. It would be stunning if the candidates were asked during a debate whether they are disturbed by the prospect of leaving office with blood on their hands. Because inevitably they will. Jimmy Carter, that good man, killed at least 100,000 East Timorese.

Richard Nixon was a Quaker, but that doesn’t help answer the question, since neither religion nor morality hampered his exercise of power. Hoover was a Quaker and, in his case, it made a difference. While he didn’t end the U.S. military occupations of Haiti and Nicaragua, which were started by prior administrations, he opposed such interventions. He famously declared that “the time has passed when we can act with arbitrary force in Latin America.” (How wrong he was!) He initiated the Good Neighbor policy that FDR fully implemented later.

Since Hoover’s presidency, the U.S. empire has expanded enormously in geographic scope and power. As I’ve noted before in Relocations, we have military bases in at least 80 countries and are in acknowledged active combat in at least five countries with covert operations occurring in numerous others. The success Hoover achieved in restraining U.S. imperial ambition in 1929 would be much harder to repeat now, even if a president had the will to undertake it.

Clearly, though, our killing can be moderated. Carter wasn’t as appalling as LBJ or George W. Bush. A difference of degree, if large enough, would be almost as welcome as a difference in kind.

Even achieving that, however, would require an unshakeable determination from the start to resist the culture of death that is our national security state, because the character of that culture, not the character of the individual, is determinative. Gender and race make no difference in this regard, as the performances of Jeane Kirkpatrick, Madeline Albright, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Hillary Clinton, Lloyd Austin and others who’ve been prominent in our foreign and military affairs amply testify.

Donald Trump’s erratic, irresponsible and exclusively self-referential decision-making is more likely to moderate our lethal behavior abroad than Kamala Harris’s rational and responsible decision-making. Then again, he may blow up the world. Neither is likely to be a blessing to those beyond our borders.

Herbert Rothschild’s columns appear on Friday in Ashland.news. Opinions expressed in them represent the author’s views. Email Rothschild at [email protected].