Right-wing populist leaders love soldiers (especially fallen ones) and the trappings of military life. But their love affair with the military rarely endures. Ron Krebs discusses how romanticizing and mythologizing the military solves a political problem for populists: how to mobilize people power without actually granting power to the people.
Guests: Ron Krebs is Distinguished McKnight University Professor and Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota.
International Security Article: Ronald R. Krebs, “Why Populists Love Dead Soldiers and Hate Live Officers,” International Security, Vol. 50, No. 3 (Winter 2025/26), pp. 7–54, https://doi.org/10.1162/ISEC.a.397.
Originally released on April 29, 2026
Jeff: Hello and welcome to the International Security Podcast. We are produced by International Security, a quarterly journal edited at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and published by MIT Press. Each episode of the podcast highlights a piece of research from the journal, drawing out its implications for understanding the theory and practice of international politics. I'm Jeff Friedman from Dartmouth College. Today our guest is Ron Krebs. Ron is Distinguished McKnight University Professor and professor of political science at the University of Minnesota. His recent International Security article is titled “Why Populists Love Dead Soldiers and Hate Live Officers.” It argues that populist leaders often venerate militaries while at the same time seeking to undermine the autonomy of their officer corps.
The article describes how that behavior creates recurrent patterns of civil military relations in countries that include Poland under the Law and Justice Party, Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro, Turkey under Erdogan, India under Modi, and the United States under Donald Trump. Ron, thank you for being here.
Ron Krebs: Thanks so much for having me. It's a real pleasure.
Jeff: Okay, Ron, just to start off, how do you define populist regimes for the purposes of this article?
Ron Krebs: So populism, of course, is one of those terms that gets thrown around a great deal without much specificity as to what exactly it means, and it becomes the source of a projection of a lot of our anxieties about politics. Populism in the literature really refers to both a set of ideas and discourses that lead very naturally into a common political strategy. As a matter of ideas and discourse, populism is about the projection and the claim that there is a morally pure people, right? Always in contrast to corrupt elites, sometimes in contrast to some internal enemy within, but always corrupt elites. And the people is unified, the people is homogeneous, it's the people in the singular. And it is the populist leader, those populist leaders you mentioned in your introduction, Jeff, this populist leader who speaks on behalf of the people and knows their interests better than the people themselves do.
And because of course, the populist is identified with the people themselves, then to criticize the populist leader is to criticize the people, that morally pure people, and to place oneself outside the boundaries of the people. That set of ideas, that set of discursive pillars is part and parcel, or leads directly into, a populist, a common populist political strategy, which is that everywhere that we see populism, whether it hails from the left or the right, we see populists attacking elites and the institutions that they inhabit and that give them their power, and seeking to weaken those institutions that mediate between the people and the outputs of government. Because the strategy as Kurt Weyland, who has I think written most articulately about populism as a political strategy, populism is a strategy about exercising power based on a direct unmediated, uninstitutionalized relationship between the leader and their mostly unorganized followers.
And so populism fundamentally involves, essentially, an authoritarian impulse, even though, as I understand populism, and there’s much on this one point, there's a lot of debate, populists achieve their legitimacy, they derive their legitimacy from a mandate from the people from popular elections. So it's a plebiscitarian strategy, which is why even though Xi Jinping certainly engages in populist discourse, most scholars of populism do not think of Xi primarily as a populist per se.
Jeff:Why would leaders who want to legitimize themselves in that way have particular incentives to venerate the military?
Ron Krebs: Populists have a very particular and unique political dilemma. Now, to be clear, they are not the only ones to venerate the military, right? There are plenty of non-populists who do as well, but populists have a very distinct political problem. They are drawing on the power of the people, but they have no desire to empower the people.
The scariest thing for a populist is that the people learn to speak for themselves, and so populists have extremely strong incentives to venerate the military because that's a cultural solution to their political problem. In a nutshell, populists would love a nation of soldier-like citizens, because what soldiers do at the end of the day is they march off into battle. In the kind of classic, militaristic narrative, they march off willingly,cheerfully, and without protest. And populists, as the article's title puts it, they especially love dead soldiers because dead soldiers cannot talk back. Dead soldiers cannot say “we didn't really march off particularly cheerfully.” Dead soldiers cannot say that “we died for the vain glory of our completely feckless commanders,” right? They are easily mobilized into and conscripted, if you will, into that populist political agenda.
And so by venerating dead soldiers and saying these are the exemplars of good citizenship, what populists are also doing is holding that out as a model for what it means to be a citizen in their ideal polity.
Jeff: What are some examples of populists doing that? I mean of course you mentioned that lots of political parties venerate the military and surround themselves with soldiers, talk about how much they support the troops. So what's an example of where populists do that in a distinctive way?
Ron Krebs: Yeah, so I think there's a number of examples, we'll talk about several over the course of our conversation, but let me start with, I think with some of the really striking examples, which is when the Law and Justice Party, or PiS as I will call it, is the Polish acronym. When the PiS Party came into power in Poland in 2015, they had already, in the opposition, put a tremendous amount of pressure on their centrist predecessors to honor and venerate this group known as the “cursed soldiers.” The “cursed” or “doomed” soldiers, as they are sometimes known in Poland, these are the partisans who fought the Nazis and then proceeded to fight the communists in the 1940s through the early 1950s when their efforts are finally squelched.
The PiS put the “cursed soldiers” at the very center of civil religion in Poland. They built new museums. They built multiple new museums. They established whole units and schools. They named units of the territorial forces, like their version of the National Guard. They created this new territorial force and they named its units after the units of the “cursed soldiers.” And on and on and on. You would not think that, you know, long dead soldiers could be the subject of rap. And yet, hip hop artists in Poland have centered the “cursed soldiers,” right? Because this lies at the center of completely commonsensical Polish culture. No one challenges, right, the discourse of the “cursed soldiers,” including the centrists, which is the mark of a really successful hegemonic project.
Now, right, the center had no problem centering as well the “cursed soldiers,” right? They even tried to get ahead of this by even reinterring the “cursed soldiers” and creating a central mausoleum for them in the main Polish military cemetery. But of course, they did not succeed in doing so because it was the PiS that owned that particular political agenda.
Is it inherently different from what others could have done? No. But of course they were the ones to do it, right, and a marked difference from their centrist predecessors. And also keep in mind, right, they were not accidental about which Polish soldiers they were centering. These were anti-communist partisans. And in the PiS’s narrative, the great tragedy, the sin of post-communist Poland has been the ways in which the liberals who had controlled the government in the 1990s did not sufficiently purge the communists from Polish government, right? And so that you see essentially former communists continuing to be in charge of major political institutions in Poland.
And so this is central to the PiS’s political agenda. We see something similar going on with the ways in which who gets highlighted in Turkey, and we're happy to talk about that later as well.
Jeff: Why if populists are so inclined to venerate the military, did then often come in conflict with the military's officer corps?
Ron Krebs: Yeah, great question, right? They love dead soldiers and even live soldiers, but they tend to hate live officers. Look, at the beginning, populists are often not very strong, they can be quite weak, and of course, the strongest institution in society is very often the military. Around the world, typically the most trusted central state institution, and often the most trusted institution in society, is the armed forces.
And so smart populists go and they take on relatively weak actors at the start. We've seen a lot of right wing nationalist populists, so they take on progressive civil society. They take on judges, they take on universities. Nobody loves an egghead, right? They take on bureaucrats, the deep state, which we see across so many populists. They eventually come to the military, because, at the end of the day, the military poses an always latent threat to the populist regime. Even when we see officers and generals coming on board, right, and taking advantage of that relationship with the populist to gain political power for themselves, populists necessarily, like authoritarians around the world, have to fear that eventually the military officers care more about the institution, if not the constitution, then they do about the populist themselves, right? They want, as we'll talk about with regard to Donald Trump, they want the personal loyalty of those generals and yet they don't have it.
And let me give you the clearest example of this. Jair Bolsonaro comes into power and he appoints more generals into his cabinet, retired and even active duty, than the military junta had in its later years. There are military officers appointed to civilian posts up and down the entire bureaucracy. You have more active duty military officers running for office all over Brazil under Bolsonaro. The military was completely bought in and onboard. This was an opportunity for them to get back in the political game, but of course there was a danger there. And within a year, the military starts to realize, wait a second, this Bolsonaro, he's a bit of a clown, right? We're faced with a pandemic and he is not really a serious manager. Our reputation for competence and professionalism is at stake, and so within only a year, there starts to be an emerging rift that grows into a schism between Bolsonaro and the professional military, both active duty and retired, over the course of his years in office.
Jeff: And how do populist leaders normally handle that? When officers confront them or push back, how do they respond to those situations?
Ron Krebs: Yeah, great question, right? We have lived through part of that here in the United States, and so I know we'll talk more later in our conversation about the U.S. but let me say a little bit about the U.S. right now because I think that it is such a powerful example. If you're faced, like Donald Trump was in 2020, with a powerful and recalcitrant professional military, at some point the best thing for you to do is attack the military. You can no longer delay. And so, one seeks to delegitimize the military in two particular ways, right? That is to suggest that the military is fundamentally political and politicized, and that is the reason that it is no longer successful.
And so Donald Trump, after the summer of 2020, after George Floyd's murder, after Mark Milleyapologizes for walking across a cleared Lafayette Square, or beginning to anyway, after the Atlantic breaks its story in early September 2020 that Trump has, views those who died in war as losers and suckers, Trump lashes out at a press conference at the generals, right? Those who he had called “my generals” from “central casting” when he comes into office in 2017. And Trump lashes out at them and says they don't love him. The enlisted, the grunts love him, but the generals don't. Why? Because they are corrupt and all they want to do is fight more and more wars.
And that kicks off four years of incessant attacks on the “woke” military by right wing pundits and by Republican politicians, right? Laying the groundwork for sort of a understanding that if the military is simply politicized, and is simply a political actor like any other, then generals can be fired and can be dismissed just like any other political actor in Washington.
So the first thing you do is attack the military. The second thing, of course, you do is, and that lays the groundwork for purging the armed forces of those you do not like. We see this as soon as the PiS comes into power, they purge the military. Hundreds of colonels and generals. So many, that the PiS in Poland is compelled to create a quickie, a program for general staff training on the weekends alone, right? We see it in Turkey where of course there, Erdogan faced a legitimate coup, but he fires so many colonels, so many members of the Air Force, that they literally cannot field an air force for years afterwards. So you attack. You purge. And the final thing is, you create new structures andprocesses to make the military insecure and to send clear signals that you have to play ball with the politicians. This is what Modi does very effectively in India.
Jeff: The consequences of that for society as a whole. So, you in part mentioned degrading competence of the Officer Corps, that has clear, consequences for military effectiveness. Outside the military, can you talk about some of the ways in which that affects country's politics more generally?
Ron Krebs: So one thing that I don't talk about much in this piece, but actually in other research that I have done, we have found that when, the more the military is thought to be politicized, the more trust in the military declines, public trust in the military, around the world, on average. And not only that, and to be more specific, it's not just that public trust in the military declines, but the more central the military is to politics, the more the military comes to be judged, just like any other political institution, and that is on the basis of its performance.
Look, most militaries around the world just don't do a whole heck of a lot. The public has no way of knowing if the military is very good at its job, they're not really engaged in kinetic operations. The military enjoys a default presumption of trust. But when people think the military is highly politicized, then they start to look for evidence of the military's performance.
But more importantly, it becomes judged like any other part of government. So, when the government is doing a good job with the economy, or not violating, in other words, when it's upholding people's rights, when it's not torturing and killing people, then, even if the military is politicized, trust in the military is higher.
However, when the government is doing poorly, and if it's violating lots of human rights, we find in this other article that appeared in Comparative Political Studies, then ifthe military is politicized, trust in the military is significantly lower. And when trust in the military is lower, that has all sorts of implications for the military's ability to give honest political advice. It has implications for recruitment to the armed forces and for the quality of the kinds of folks who will enter the armed forces.
Jeff: I want to segue now to the U.S. case. You've mentioned it a few times, but I want to give that, see what your research and your theory applies to that. And I should just note for listeners that we are recording on April 7, which is very much at the height of the U.S. conflict in Iran. You mentioned earlier that President Trump was actually pretty friendly to officers early in his first term, he very consciously surrounded himself with people like General James Mattis, or General John Kelly. You called them “his generals.” H.R. McMaster was another one. Does that conflict at all with the patterns that you've seen elsewhere, given how Trump actually seemed to embrace the live officers as it were in his first term?
Ron Krebs: You know, this is a great question. In this sense, Trump, of course, publicly, Trump venerates dead soldiers with the best of them. I don't think that he does it any more than any other American politician, but that's because we live in a highly militaristic culture already. Now we do have lots of media reports, including informed by John Kelly himself, who had been Trump's Secretary of Homeland Security and then his White House Chief of Staff. You know, Kelly reported, first secretly, and then more openly, that Trump did not show respect to those who were injured. He thought it was a bad look for him to appear alongside them. Trump did not show respect for those who died. He therefore did not, when he was in France in 2017, he did not want to go to the World War I cemetery and did not go.
But for four years, Trump had the good sense to deny all those allegations in public. Those claims were made in private. There were private reports in the media that he had berated the generals in the tank in the Pentagon. Trump denied all of that.
Now, there were some episodes in 2017 when Trump really did seem to break with him. He didn't seem to honor dead soldiers. He got into a spat with a gold star family. He got into, of course, a very public spat with John McCain, where he openly says, “I like my soldiers not to be captured,” right? And John McCain being the closest things that we had to a walking, living hero in America. But overall, Trump played nicely with the military at first, as we would expect. Like Bolsonaro, he brings, by American standards, an unusual number of generals into his cabinet. And he turns against the military only in the fall of 2020 when it is clear that all of his efforts to basically bend the professional armed forces in the United States to his will have failed. And then Trump openly breaks with the military, and then proceeds to set the groundwork for the second Trump administration.
Jeff: Say a bit more about that. One of the things you touch on the article is that the second Trump administration has been quite different, both with respect to President Trump and Secretary of War Hegseth and their dealings with the military. I think you quote someone calling that “a war on the military,” what are some of the things that that entails?
Ron Krebs: There's sort of really two marked things that the second Trump administration has done. And we could have a whole 30 minute conversation just about that. So let me just sort of touch on this at a 10,000 foot level. One is that, and this is of a piece with what Trump tried to do in some ways in his first term, which is that Donald Trump has gone to unusual lengths, even by bipartisan standards of politicizing the armed forces, he's taken this to a whole new level. The military has served, of course, a critical role for Trump in advancing his domestic political agenda, both at the border and within America's cities, through the use of the Marines in L.A. and the National Guard in a number of cities. But even more importantly, in pursuing the “war on DEI”, the war on what they would call DEI ideology.
And that politicization of the military, I think has really been brought home in the episode at Quantico, where a couple of months ago, Trump and Hegseth on a moment's notice basically demand that every U.S. general and those who immediately report to them, including their senior NCOs, show up at the military base in Quantico, Virginia, for what essentially is a very public dressing down, and a deeply political speech about the kind of culture that Hegseth wants to bring into the military. And Trump, of course, gives kind of a classic Trumpian, highly politicized speech, just like he often has in front of any military audiences. Strikingly, every general, every officer and senior NCO sat there utterly stone faced. The second thing the Trump administration has done, of course, has been a kind of a purge. This is not a purge based on anyone's obvious political inclinations. Most generals are actually figures on the political right, right? We know from lots of public opinion data. It is not even based clearly on their refusal to implement anything the Trump administration has done. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs C.Q. Brown Jr. was actually fired while he was at the border trying to implement the Trump administration's policies.
But that is, in fact, I think precisely the point. We have lots of speculation in the media. Lots of internal speculation from within the military and within the Pentagon about why particular figures fell afoul of Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump, but they have said almost nothing publicly about those individuals. And I think that is fundamentally the point because if you are a general, and you want to advance in your military career and you do not know exactly what the red lines are, then you sure as heck are going to steer very clear of them.
And I think that is what we have seen as well, right? Which is why we saw lots of pushback in the first Trump administration. Lots of leaking from within the Pentagon and even from active duty, uniformed officers, and lots of comments from both identified and anonymous retired generals who were often seen as speaking for their colleagues who were still in active duty. We're seeing a whole lot less of that this time around.
Jeff: The next question I'm going to ask you is admittedly a bit of a normative one, less than an empirical one, but I wonder how you, in your research, draw the line between, I guess what you'd call a purge, and what some people might say is the right of a democratically elected commander in chief to insist on proper loyalty.
So, you know, leaking is illegal. I could see how you'd want to insist that officers not do that. And of course, as long as orders are legal, military officers should follow them. So, up to a point, you can understand why a typical leader would want those things. And then of course in your article you say that President Trump and Secretary Hegseth have gone past that point. How do you draw that line?
Ron Krebs: There is no question then when it comes to firing these senior officers or compelling them to retire early, these are lawful actions. The generals serve, in these positions, at the pleasure of the president. And it is legal, though quite unusual, for their roles to be terminated. Trump's not the first president to terminate them. However, one, we don't have them particularly being let go obviously because these are leakers or because they're standing in the way of opposing the president. As far as we know, they are in fact implementing legal orders. They're showing their loyalty to the law, to the constitution, and to the presidency. What they may not be doing is showing loyalty to the president as a person, to Donald Trump and to Pete Hegseth themselves. And that may be what it is that they want. And that's of course the clear dividing line.
Look, Barack Obama, when the Rolling Stone article came out a number of years ago, showing that some of Stanley McChrystal's officers were speaking ill of the president, and that McChrystal had basically tolerated this within his chain of command, Obama fired McChrystal, but everybody knew why, right? They'd done something wrong, and McChrystal didn't really contest it. This is very different in the Trump administration. So one line is, are you firing folks for the wrong reasons or for no reason? It's lawful, but it falls into the category of what others have called lawful, but awful. Because it sets very, very dangerous precedents.
The other requirement, and this is, you know, Eliot Cohen has famously said that the proper civil military relationship should be seen as an unequal dialogue at the end of the day. And I agree with that. At the end of the day, the presidents, the civilian leaders who are elected officials who are accountable to the public, they are the ones who must make these fundamental decisions, but, right, that is in dialogue with the expertise that the professional military brings to the table. It is a dialogue, but an unequal dialogue. This means that you want normatively to cultivate a relationship where the military feels comfortable pushing back behind closed doors.
The question that the Trump administration raises is, is there ever a time when the military must go public with their opposition, which is, generally speaking, contrary to the norm of civilian supremacy? Is there ever a moment when democracy, which is the highest value at the end of the day, demands that the military not follow the orders of civilians?
We saw a lot of discussion about this back in the fall of 2020 when people were very concerned that Donald Trump might pull an October surprise. We saw a lot of conversation about this with regard to use of nuclear weapons with regard to North Korea. And I think you're seeing in certain more lefty circles, where people are now, in our very moment, very presentist moment, will Donald Trump as he threatens to end a civilization, as he put it in Iran, would he turn to the use of nuclear weapons and should military officers refuse to obey those orders? Really important and difficult questions.
Jeff: Just to pick up on that, in terms of what militaries can do to resist the kind of politicization you document in your article, did you find that there were some militaries that were more resilient in the face of populist challenges than others, or just generally speaking, what's the toolkit for loyal but principled officers to resist politicization?
Ron Krebs: You know, I think that the first and most important thing that military officers can and shoulddo is continue to be true to their professionalism. That is, don't allow yourself to be converted into a yes man, and instead to resist and to push back behind closed doors.
We know that a lot of what Mark Milley did fell into precisely this category in the first Trump administration, that is Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley. And where the professional military has been stronger and more resilient, and I would identify the United States generals in the first Trump administration and the Israeli security establishment in pushing back over many times over Benjamin Netanyahu's long career as Israeli prime minister, they have done so fairly effectively. Why some militaries have done so more effectively than others, I think is a really important question that I don't explore in the article, but I hold out as an agenda for future research.
Now we do know there's a fair amount that the US military did behind closed doors that may have gotten them over their skis with regard to really not being in line with norms of civilian supremacy. So we know that there was a lot of slow rolling and slow walking, implementing certain things. There was, for example with regard to, you sort of stand on ceremony, which is of course a standard bureaucratic tactic, right? Make sure all i's are dotted and t's crossed. Trump issues his command to ban trans soldiers from the military back in 2017, and Jim Mattis says, well, until we have a formal order that is not by tweet, a formal order that comes down from the White House, we're not implementing that. And of course it takes time to do that, and then they have to study it, et cetera, et cetera. That's all kind of classic slow walking. We know that Mattis as Secretary of Defense refused to participate in certain kinds of war gaming that was being led by Mike Pence because he simply thought it was a really bad idea.
Now Mattis was Secretary of Defense. He was not, of course, wearing the uniform at the time, and that is quite significant. General Jim Mattis, active duty, would've probably behaved quite differently. So at the end of the day, right, we generally see that the uniformed military generally falls into line, right? For the most part, right? What they can really do is slow walk. They can argue back, but at some point, when the order is clear, when it is given in conventional fashion, they generally do follow those orders.
Now the other thing that you can do is mobilize external constituencies. And this the military has always been very good at, in the United States at least. It's constituencies in Congress, and this is why we saw so much of the opposition coming from very vocal retired generals because it is presumed, and they are often cast that way explicitly by journalists, that they are speaking on behalf of their colleagues in the Pentagon who cannot speak. And that is also sort of a very potentially effective way that militaries can remain true to their oath while at the same time slowing down the process and the freedom of action of a president whose policy preferences they do not share.
But I would say sort of the big picture view here, Jeff, is we should not look to the military to save American democracy. All that conversation in the wake of the summer of 2020, I think really was misplaced. And since, by the way, the military is not in the business of saving American democracy, because the more it gets into that business, the more we may come to regret where the military ends up in the long run. Let's not forget that almost every coup or silent coup around the world is done in the name, not of military power, but in the name of higher principles, saving the nation from venal politicians, in the name of defending the constitution. And the more we look to the military to save American democracy, the more we may come to regret that.
Jeff: Here's one last substantive question for you, so it builds off what you just said and circles back to a point you made earlier when you pointed out that when this unequal dialogue is functioning properly, a lot of it happens behind closed doors. And one challenge that poses to us as external observers is you can't observe what's going on behind closed doors, or at least it's very hard to do that in real time. So at the risk of asking you to speculate about that, I justwonder how you view where the United States is at with civil military relations in light of the events of the past year. Are there other cases that seem from your research that they're running parallel to the U.S. case or just generally speaking, as an outside observer who's thought carefully about the issue, how do you know where we're at?
Ron Krebs: We know that Donald Trump loves a good nickname. Jim Mattis did not like being called “Mad Dog Mattis,” but that's part of what made him sound appealing to Trump, till Trump realized he was more like a scholar monk than he was actually a mad dog. And he was obviously attracted, as we know, to current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Dan Caine for his call sign “Raizin Caine.”
Everything we can tell seems to indicate that Dan Caine is a general's general. He is a professional, he is competent. We know from some reporting, for instance, that he called all those generals who came to Quantico and told them, no hooting, no clapping, sit there stone faced, right? Regardless of what Secretary Hegseth and President Trump have to say. And that is exactly I think the advice that Mark Milley would've given. We have observed Caine at numerous press conferences when the political figures get out over their skis and make claims that he does not feel can be defended, he is very measured in his language, in his assessment of the effectiveness of the U.S. operations last June against Iran's nuclear program, and in the many press conferences that we've seen over the last several weeks of the campaign against Iran in February, March, and now into April.
So, you know, what's very hard to know is how avidly has Dan Caine and have others pushed back against, for instance, when Pete Hegseth has wanted, when the Trump administration has used force in the Caribbean, right? How much have lawyers been consulted? How hard have they pushed back? It seems that the head of Southern Command was opposed and raised questions and then took early retirement, but he's been completely silent. He has not gone out in a blaze of glory. He has not said that he resigned in protest. He simply took early retirement and by many accounts, Hegseth wanted him out, right?
The real worry is if folks are basically serving as yes men, if they are essentially engaging in no pushback, and if they are engaging in blind obedience, that is, they are doing what civilians want, even if they have been told the order is illegal, or very likely illegal. Remember, lawyers very rarely tell us what's legal and illegal. What they usually say is you are running a certain kind of legal risk by proceeding in the following way, right? And if they are told there's great legal risk and they do it anyway because civilians say it, well then we're in a very bad place. We just do not know.
But I will say, right, we did have some leaks at the beginning of the Iran war about what kind of advice and what kind of concerns Caine had raised. I think that was where we see leaks, right? That's the smoke where there's a fire. That tells us that there's real pushback and that the pushback rose to the level that there are those in the Pentagon who felt that now was the time to get that out into the public.
As I said, I think we've seen much less of that this time around than we did in the first 15 months of the first Trump administration, but maybe we're beginning to see a little more of it. Maybe that tells us that there's increasing tension because the military is doing its job.
Jeff: We’ll certainly see how that unfolds over the next several weeks. In the meantime, we always close by asking guests to say what sources inspired them the most, or what they recommend reading on a similar topic. As you described, I mean, the piece brings together so much literature from such a wide range of cases. What stood out to you as you were doing the research?
Ron Krebs: I guess there's sort of two things I guess I'll say. One is not quite your question, Jeff, which is, I think it's sort of a plea for anyone doing research to take advantage of serendipity. I was not really thinking about populism and civil military relations as I'm working on my book on veneration of the military until a German colleague, invited me to present at a conference that she was hosting on the topic of populism because I'd written about populism in a grand strategy.
And so I said, I don't want to write about grand strategy, but I'm thinking a lot about veneration of the military. And lo and behold, right? Just that impetus. You know, some would say “it's a conference invitation, don't waste your time with it,” and yet obviously proved pretty darn productive. So this I discovered, of course, it's a huge lacunose.
Let say some words about what I think people should read about populism and what they might want to read about civil military relations through this angle. On populism, you know, the best person for, I think, writing on populism from an ideational standpoint is a scholar named Cas Mudde, who has just written endlessly for the last 15 years on the subject, of the sort of the ideas and the discourse of populism and Kurt Weyland on it as a political strategy. And from a serious political theory standpoint, I've really liked the work of Nadia Urbinati, who has written a couple of good books on populism. And then when we want to think about veneration of the military, we obviously all know kind of the classic civil military literature, so let me highlightthree works that people may not know. There's an old great text by a historian named Alfred Vagts called A History of Militarism. It's written first in 1939, then re-released in the fifties. Nobody's written that book since. Everyone should go back and read that book. Second, Peter Feaver back in 2023, I think it was, published a book called Thanks For Your Service, based on mounds of really careful work on trust in the U.S. Armed Forces. It's exclusively focused on the United States, but it is the most thorough, most incisive, most thoughtful and honest accounting of what we know about the causes and the consequences of trust in the American armed forces. So, you know, if you are someone interested in this, read Peter's book, read everything Peter writes. And finally, read Risa Brooks. Risa wrote a great article in International Security back in 2020 on how professionalism as obedience to civilians might be what makes politicization of the military possible. It's really thoughtful, really insightful, and really upends six decades since Sam Huntington of thinking about how to relate to the armed forces.
Jeff: Thank you Ron. And thanks to everybody for listening to the International Security Podcast produced by International Security, a quarterly journal at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, published by MIT Press. If you like the conversation, please take a moment to rate and review us or share us on social media because that helps other people find the show. I'm Jeff Friedman, the executive editor is Jacqueline L. Hazelton. Our producer is Monica Achen. Our guest has been Ron Krebs. See you next time.