Politics & Power Quote by Bill Kristol

Kristol is doing something deceptively simple here: he’s laundering a contentious military debate through a civics lesson. By insisting that troop levels are set not by “any general or set of generals” but by “civilian leadership,” he re-centers the argument on democratic chain-of-command rather than battlefield expertise. The move is less about describing how decisions work in theory than about telling the reader what kind of disagreement is legitimate in public.

The phrasing is carefully defensive. “In any case” waves away whatever came before - leaks, testimony, media narratives, maybe generals publicly pressing for more forces - as secondary to a constitutional principle. The double emphasis (“any general or set of generals”) isn’t just clarity; it’s preemption. Kristol is anticipating the familiar rhetorical trap of wartime politics: either you follow the generals unquestioningly or you’re “politicizing” the military. He rejects that frame while still leaving room to argue for escalation, restraint, or a strategic reset - because once troop levels are framed as a civilian choice, the argument becomes moral, political, and electoral, not merely technical.

Contextually, it reads like a post-Vietnam, post-Iraq sensibility: a country repeatedly burned by the aura of uniformed authority, yet still tempted to outsource accountability to “the professionals.” Kristol’s subtext is accountability with teeth. If civilians own the decision, civilians own the outcome. That’s a rebuke to generals who drift into policymaking and a warning to politicians who hide behind them when the war goes sideways.