“Stauffenberg pointed the way: if your obedience requires you to do criminal, unhuman things, you are no longer bound by your oath. A soldier’s final benchmark must always, in the last instance, be his conscience, not his orders.” That’s what Jan Techau, a friend of mine with a special vantage on this matter (more about Stauffenberg in a minute), told me when I asked him what he thought about a controversy now raging in the United States.

It’s about six members of Congress who used to serve in the military or the CIA, and who made a video in which they remind active service members that “our laws are clear: You can refuse illegal orders. You must refuse illegal orders.”

The American president responded to their video by accusing the six of “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” His department of defense — or of “war,” as he prefers — is going after one of them: Mark Kelly, a retired naval aviator and former astronaut. The FBI has opened investigations into all six. They report receiving all manner of threats.

Many Americans, and especially those who have taken similar oaths, find this reaction “really disgusting, and frightening.” That’s what Rachel VanLandingham, a former military lawyer to top generals, told me. She thinks that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of war, “should be impeached for his abuse of power; threatening to court-martial a sitting senator for simply re-stating the law.” According to her, that “reminder to disobey unlawful orders needed to be said, given the current abuse of the military by this administration (ordering them to commit murder in the Caribbean with the boat strikes, for example).”

There’s another, and more historical, way to grasp how right the senators are, and how wrong Hegseth and President Donald Trump are. And for that I turned to Techau, who used to be a speechwriter in the German defense ministry (he’s now at the Eurasia Group). The speeches he wrote included addresses given by the German defense minister when she oversaw the swearing-in of German recruits in the Bendlerblock.

The Bendlerblock is a complex of buildings in Berlin. It was the headquarters of Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht during World War II, and the site where, on the second floor, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg and his co-conspirators plotted to kill the Fuehrer. It is also where — in the courtyard, lit by the headlights of trucks — they were executed by firing squad when Operation Valkyrie failed on July 20, 1944.

Starting in the 1950s, the West Germans erected a plaque, memorial and museum in the Bendlerblock, which was by then in West Berlin, not far from the Wall. After reunification, the German defense ministry made the Bendlerblock its second headquarters (the other remains in Bonn). And on July 20 of most years, newly minted soldiers, sailors and airmen take their oath to the German constitution on the parade ground, right next to the memorial to Valkyrie.

Over the years, I’ve seen Angela Merkel and other grandees of German politics (including Annegret Kramp-Karrenberger, for whom Techau wrote) in attendance. This year the current defense minister, Boris Pistorius, addressed the troops and, like his predecessors, explicitly placed the modern German army in the tradition of the heroes commemorated behind him.

At a time when freedom, democracy and the rule of law are again threatened at home and abroad, Pistorius said, the plotters of July 20, 1944, exhort modern Germany’s “citizen soldiers” always to heed their conscience, always to think for themselves, and always to protect human dignity, enshrined in article 1 of the postwar constitution.

This embrace of the July 20 legacy was far from obvious in the early years after World War II. Turning Stauffenberg, Henning von Tresckow and the other plotters from traitors (a word Trump used for the six senators) to heroes required a huge rethink of war, morality and law, not just in Germany but in the world. This legal and ethical revolution, as it happens, was led by the Americans.

Its forum was the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, and its mentor was Robert Jackson, an American supreme court justice whom Harry Truman appointed to lead the world’s first international tribunal for the purpose of prosecuting “crimes against humanity,” starting in 1945. The three other Allied Powers initially had different ideas about retribution against the Nazi leadership. But Jackson and Truman insisted on a demonstration of due process to lend credibility to new global norms, subsequently called the Nuremberg Principles.

In Principle IV, Jackson and others established that “the fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility.” This invalidated the “just following orders” defense that all the Nazi defendants attempted.

It also set the precedent for the Fourth Geneva Convention in 1949 and later its Additional Protocols, which emphasized individual responsibility in war and the duty to disobey unlawful orders. And it became the foundation for all subsequent tribunals against war crimes, such as those committed in the former Yugoslavia or Rwanda. It also led to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which the United States midwifed in the 1990s but later turned its back on.

The norm also applied in domestic law, at least in liberal democracies. Germany most explicitly spells out the duty to disobey unlawful orders (nobody has ever questioned the duty to obey lawful ones, obviously), while France, Britain, Israel and other Western countries have analogs.

So does the U.S., where the Uniform Code of Military Justice stipulates that service members must obey lawful orders, while surrounding laws clarify what is unlawful. That definition includes any order “that directs the commission of a crime (for example, an order directing the murder of a civilian, a noncombatant, or a combatant who is hors de combat, or the abuse or torture of a prisoner).” In one famous case, for example, First Lieutenant William Calley testified that he was only following orders from his captain during the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam — and was nonetheless convicted of murdering 22 infants, children, women, and old men.

Nobody is suggesting that invoking the memory of Stauffenberg to inspire modern soldiers also equates their superiors to Nazis. The point of the exhortation is to take the most extreme situation imaginable and pose a simpler question, one that Kramp-Karrenberger (in words written by Techau) put to the recruits: In the midst of an inhumane dictatorship, a reign of terror, a war of aggression and genocide, “What would I have done?”

The situation in the U.S. today is completely different. And yet some American service members are asking themselves similar questions, not least about the U.S. strikes against boats of civilians who are suspected, on unclear evidence, of smuggling drugs. (In October, the admiral who was to oversee this campaign stepped down, less than a year into his three-year term.)

Elissa Slotkin, the senator who organized the video, also worries about troops deployed in American cities. In a committee hearing earlier this year, she grilled Hegseth about whether he would obey presidential orders to shoot at protesters (an order that Trump considered giving in his first term to one of Hegseth’s predecessors). The secretary made light of Slotkin’s questions and avoided answering.

“We know you are under tremendous stress and pressure right now,” the senators say in their video to service members. Which is why they found it necessary to restate the law of the land. Slotkin considers it “most telling” that the president believes this reminder should be “punishable by death.”

Fortunately, such threats from on high seem to be inspiring more courage than fear so far. “If this is meant to intimidate me and other members of Congress from doing our jobs and holding this administration accountable, it won’t work,” says Senator Kelly, who as an aviator had a missile blow up next to his jet and, with his wife, knows political violence all too well.

The obligations of warriors in a republic are clear. They are to be loyal not to any individual leader but to their country’s constitution, and to obey lawful orders while disobeying those that are manifestly unlawful. Reminders of this bounden duty are anything but “insurrection.” At times, they amount to acts of the highest patriotism — and even heroism.

Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering U.S. diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist.

I am sure President Donald Trump and his envoys to Russia, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, sincerely want to stop the killing in Ukraine, but they are failing and will continue to fail as long as they persist in their naive view that this is just a big real estate deal and that their backgrounds in real estate give them an advantage. It is utter nonsense on multiple levels.

For starters, yes, you could say that Russian President Vladimir Putin is in the real estate business in Ukraine, but not in the way Trump or Witkoff or Kushner have been in the business. Putin is in the real estate business in Ukraine the same way Adolf Hitler was in the real estate business in Poland. Hitler coveted territory not to build a hotel or housing for profit to benefit the local residents. He, instead, coveted real estate to fulfill a nationalist fantasy. Ditto Putin. He has shown no interest in the welfare of Ukraine’s people.

In that kind of situation, having a bunch of “real estate deal guys” as America’s negotiators is a liability, not an advantage. You want a Henry Kissinger or James Baker-type statesman who understands the difference between real estate and war and peace. Real estate is a positive-sum game: Both sides can profit from a well-struck transaction. And that is the goal. In war and peace, when one side holds fascist views and is the clear aggressor, and the other side holds democratic views and is the clear victim, you are in a zero-sum game.

Or as Ronald Reagan famously put it when asked how the Cold War should end, “We win, they lose.”

America’s values and interests

Reagan understood that real estate deals are purely over value (price per square foot) and interest rates. He understood that war-and-peace deals are about advancing and preserving moral values and strategic interests. And you don’t compromise on those with a fascist aggressor.

We waged three wars, including the Cold War, alongside our allies in Europe to preserve the spread of our shared democratic values and our shared interests — namely, that no major power in Europe that did not share those values could be allowed to dominate the Continent.

I can think of no other American president who would have acted as if America’s values and interests dictated that we now be a neutral arbiter between Russia and Ukraine and, on top of that, an arbiter who tries to make a profit from each side in the process — as Trump has done. This is one of the most shameful episodes in U.S. foreign policy, and the entire Republican Party is complicit in its perpetuation.

I also can think of no other U.S. foreign policy leader who would have said about Putin what Witkoff said about this dictator whose political rivals often end up dead, who engages in vast corruption for himself and his cronies and who does everything he can to undermine free and fair elections in America and the West: “I don’t regard Putin as a bad guy.”

Russian Communists had a term for foreigners who held such views about their leaders: “useful idiots.”

Toward a ‘dirty deal’

You can imagine this retort from JD Vance isolationists: “Hey, Friedman, you and your pals just want to drag America into endless wars.”

Nope, sorry, you have the wrong cowboy. I have written since the first weeks of this war, and repeatedly thereafter, that it is only going to end in, at best, a “dirty deal.” Russia is too big compared with Ukraine, and its willingness to fight on dictates that ending the war will require Ukraine to make concessions. Sad but true — and most Ukrainians will tell you the same today.

But as I wrote last month, there is a huge difference between a “filthy deal” that maximizes Putin’s interests, profits and ability to restart the war at any point of his choosing, and a “dirty deal.” A dirty deal would allow Putin to keep the territory he’s already stolen, but with Western military forces on the ground inside Ukraine that ensure he could never restart the war, except by going to war with all of the West; it would ensure that Putin’s ill-gotten gains were never blessed with formal diplomatic recognition that would reward the acquisition of territory by force; and it would ensure that Ukraine could maintain whatever size army it needed to defend itself and could become a member of the European Union (though not NATO) whenever it was ready. That kind of dirty deal would secure Ukraine’s and America’s core interests and values.

JD Vance isolationists retort: “We don’t have the ability to pressure Putin to agree to such a dirty deal, and we don’t want to be in a nuclear war with Russia, thank you very much.”

The reason you can’t pressure Putin is that you don’t know what you’re doing, and you have a president who lurches back and forth, making different policies on his social network feeds and then requiring the Pentagon and the State Department to adjust on the fly. There is no policymaking process, and there appear to be at least five people acting as the secretary of state: Witkoff, Kushner, Vance, Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll and some guy with the official title, Marco Rubio.

Maximum leverage

What would any normal American president be doing now? He would start with the understanding that negotiations in any realm — real estate or geopolitics — are always decided by one thing: leverage. Whether you are buying a hotel or trying to halt an invasion, you want maximum leverage so your profits or interests and values are maximized in the final deal.

In real estate, leverage is measured in how much money you have on your side. In diplomacy, leverage is measured by how much military force you can bring to the battlefield; how much economic isolation and pain you can inflict on your opponent; and, last but certainly not least, how much you can turn your opponent’s population against its own leadership to force it to change course.

And what has Trump done by those measures? He has halted all U.S. funding for Ukraine to buy U.S. arms, he has refused to give it access to crucial weapons like our Tomahawk cruise missiles that could really hurt Putin close to home — and that the Europeans would pay for — and he has bald-faced lied that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that started the war and that Ukraine’s leader, not Russia’s, was the illegitimate dictator. He also quite publicly told Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, that “you don’t have the cards” without America’s help in the fight against Russia.

What if Trump behaved like a stately American president, acting on America’s interests and values? He wouldn’t be telling the brave Ukrainians that they have no cards; he’d be dealing them cards to maximize their leverage while loudly telling the Russian people that they have no future — because Putin stole all their cards.

What would that sound like?

It would sound like this:

“Hey, Putin, while you were invading Ukraine to play out your historical fantasy that Mother Russia rightly owns Ukraine, the rest of the world was participating in what will likely be called the greatest technological revolution in human history: the AI revolution. Where is Russia in that? Let’s check Stanford institute’s Global AI Vibrancy rankings.

“Is Putin’s Russia in the Top 10, where it belongs with the United States and China? No. Well, surely it’s in the Top 20! Nope. It has to be in the Top 30! Well, yes; it just sneaked in at No. 28. Far behind Luxembourg at No. 12. Luxembourg’s population? About 680,000. Russia’s population is roughly 144 million — now minus the estimated quarter-million soldiers Putin sent to their deaths on the Ukraine battlefield and at least 100,000 technologists who have fled Russia since Putin started the war.

“To the Russian people, let me offer an analogy: It is as if James Watt just invented the steam engine that helped launch the Industrial Revolution and your czar said, ‘No, thanks; we’re doubling down on horses.’”

The Russian threat

Putin is a towering fool who will be remembered for a war against Ukraine that made Russia an energy colony of China and an AI footnote to Luxembourg.

Yes, Putin likes to show off his hypersonic missiles. I wonder if they work better than the main launchpad Russia uses for sending astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station; that launchpad collapsed last week, after the launch of three astronauts. It means Russia has “lost its ability to launch humans into space, something that has not happened since 1961,” according to a Russian space expert quoted by The New York Times.

The Russian threat to Ukraine will not end until Putin is gone. But getting rid of him is the job of the Russian people. The job of an American president and vice president — if they know what they are doing — is not to tell Ukraine’s president that he has no “cards.” It is to increase the pressure on Putin by, among other things, telling the Russian people — every day — that their leader is stealing all their cards and all of their futures and all of their children’s futures.

That is how we increase our leverage to get a dirty deal, not a filthy deal.

Thomas Friedman writes a column for the New York Times.

By KONSTANTIN TOROPIN, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. Southern Command announced that it had conducted another strike against a small boat in the eastern Pacific Ocean on Thursday, following a pause of almost three weeks.

It is the 22nd strike the U.S. military has carried out against boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean that the Trump administration claimed were trafficking drugs.

There were four casualties in Thursday’s strike, according to the social media post, bringing the death toll of the campaign to at least 87 people.

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In a video that accompanied the announcement, a small boat can be seen moving across the water before it is suddenly consumed by a large explosion. The video then zooms out to show the boat covered in flames and billowing smoke.

The strike was conducted the same day Adm. Frank “Mitch” Bradley appeared for a series of closed-door classified briefings at the U.S. Capitol as lawmakers began an investigation into the very first strike carried out by the military on Sept. 2. The sessions came after a report that Bradley ordered a follow-on attack that killed the survivors to comply with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s demands.

Bradley told lawmakers there was no “kill them all” order from Hegseth, but a stark video of the entire series of attacks left some lawmakers with serious questions.

Legal experts have said killing survivors of a strike at sea could be a violation of the laws of military warfare.

Bradley spoke to lawmakers alongside the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Dan Caine, in a classified session. His testimony provided fresh information at a crucial moment as Hegseth’s leadership comes under scrutiny, but it did little to resolve growing questions about the legal basis for President Donald Trump’s extraordinary campaign to use war powers against suspected drug smugglers.

Lawmakers offered differing accounts of what they saw on the video.

Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas said he saw the survivors “trying to flip a boat loaded with drugs bound for United States back over so they could stay in the fight.”

Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said, “What I saw in that room was one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my time in public service.”

“You have two individuals in clear distress, without any means of locomotion, with a destroyed vessel,” he said, adding they “were killed by the United States.”

Washington Rep. Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said the survivors were “basically two shirtless people clinging to the bow of a capsized and inoperable boat, drifting in the water — until the missiles come and kill them.”

Holiday shopping, seasonal eats and photos for the Christmas card can be checked off the to-do list this weekend on one of St. Paul’s historic shopping corridors.

The Grand Meander, a 20-block holiday festival along Grand Avenue, starts at 11 a.m. Saturday where visitors can shop local sales, take photos with Santa, enjoy carolers and ride the Trolley.

The annual event has something to offer even if you’re on a budget: Find free cake tasting at Nothing Bundt Cakes, free hot apple cider at mor (a new women’s boutique) and a free favor bag for kids from Emery’s Playhouse that includes a mini puzzle, crayons and an in-store coupon for parents.

Here’s a look at what else is on tap for Saturday.

Pit stops

Fire truck rides with the Winter Carnival Vulcans start at 10 a.m. at Emmett’s Public House and Saji-Ya, near the corner of Grand Avenue and St. Albans Street.

Moloney’s Irish Imports, an Irish gift shop that recently opened along the avenue, will host a bagpiping Santa until 1:45 p.m. Saturday.

Gourmet grocery store Golden Fig Fine Foods plans to roast Iowa-grown chestnuts in front of its storefront at 794 Grand Ave.

Local authors and illustrators including Karen Wirth, Sam Kalda, Eric Madsen, Mathew Zefeldt and Maren Daniels will be available to sign their books from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Wet Paint, located at 1684 Grand Ave.

To find the full calendar of events, go to grandave.com/events/grandmeander.

Summit Avenue

Another part of the Grand Meander festivities, the 16th annual Summit Avenue Artisan Festival, starts at 10 a.m. Saturday.

More than 40 artisans are on tap for this year’s market including Good Graces Paper Co., InFlux Glass Arts, Off the Hook Fiber Arts and food vendors like Egg Roll Queen, Black Roots Sauces and Seasonings, Renee’s Cooking Oils and Stacy’s Homestead Honey.

Located at St. Paul’s United Church of Christ at 900 Summit Ave., the free event draws more than 1,000 visitors a year.

“We love seeing the church filled with art, laughter and community energy each year,” said festival manager Jennifer Harris, in a news release. “This event brings people together to support local makers, celebrate the season and share in something joyful and uniquely St. Paul.”

To see a full list of events, go to www.spucconsummit.org/artisanfestival.

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