General McChrystal’s Dolly Parton Doctrine

The name Stanley McChrystal might bring a few things to mind: the U.S. Army general who led NATO forces in Afghanistan; a legendary Special Forces operator; a decorated military career cut short by reported tactless remarks about a vice president; a daily food intake of just one meal—a “reward” dinner after a hard day. One thing that might not come to mind: a Dolly Parton fan.

But yesterday, in conversation with The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, at the New Orleans Book Festival, the retired four-star general not only revealed himself to be a devotee of the country-music superstar, but turned to the lyrics of one of her most renowned songs to express his view on President Trump’s second-term foreign policy.

“How would you define looking not only at Iran, but Venezuela, Nigeria, Greenland, and so on? How do you explain the Trump Doctrine?” Goldberg asked. “I’m a big fan of Dolly Parton,” McChrystal replied. “Do you remember her song ‘Jolene’?”

Well, yes, general, why do you ask?

“This poor wife says, ‘Jolene, please don’t take my man; don’t take him just because you can,’” McChrystal explained. “And that’s what worries me. I think we might be in a period where we think what we can do, we should do because we can. And I think the world is starting to view us that way.”

Not the allegory one might have expected to hear from a man who former Defense Secretary Robert Gates described as “perhaps the finest warrior and leader of men in combat I had ever met,” though perhaps it’s a testament to the song’s widespread appeal. The song, Parton has said, came from her observation of a redheaded bank teller with a crush on Parton’s then-new husband. “I’m begging of you, please don’t take my man,” she sings of the beauty beyond compare, with flaming locks of auburn hair. “Please don’t take him just because you can.”

The Jolene Doctrine, as McChrystal coined it, might just cut through the noise—as only Parton’s twangy soprano can—to deliver a succinct assessment of what many observers of the White House and Pentagon have already offered in less lyrical form. To wit: Despite many justifications offered by Trump and other officials, there is little evidence of a thought-out rationale for the Iran war or a plan for its aftermath—only a sense that because the U.S. military has the capability to execute these “combat operations,” as some official communications have referred to them, it therefore should. “We have unparalleled firepower, unlimited ammunition, and plenty of time,” Trump posted on Truth Social today. “They’ve been killing innocent people all over the world for 47 years, and now I, as the 47th President of the United States of America, am killing them. What a great honor it is to do so!” (We might call this the I’m Free Doctrine, based on some 1965 Rolling Stones lyrics: “I’m free to do what I want any old time.”)

The commander in chief’s language in that post, and many others like it, is a departure from past presidents’ rhetoric. “U.S. military action cannot be the only—or even primary—component of our leadership in every instance. Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail,” Barack Obama said in 2014 during a West Point commencement address. Trump, at least according to McChrystal, seems to have taken the inverse approach: Because I have a hammer, I might as well go hit some nails.

[Read: The fuck-around-and-find-out presidency]

The Jolene Doctrine sounds like the corollary to the way a senior administration official described the president’s approach to Goldberg back in 2018: “The Trump Doctrine is ‘We’re America, Bitch.’”

Asked for comment on the Parton analogy, the White House spokesperson Anna Kelly, in an email, said, “President Trump’s priority is putting America First and protecting our homeland, which he is doing by stopping drugs and criminals from entering our country, enabling an era of historic economic cooperation with Venezuela, and eliminating the national security threat posed by the rogue Iranian regime.” She added, “Thanks to his leadership, America’s place as leader of the free world is restored.”

So the Jolene comparison doesn’t quite work for the White House. What do the experts say?

“I think the Trump team is acting like an unbridled Jolene—they’re doing things because they can—but the bummer is to carry the metaphor: Jolene is likely to regret doing what she thinks she can,” Jay Sexton, a historian of American foreign relations at the University of Missouri, told me. Like a romantic tryst gone awry, Sexton said, Iran is turning out to be “a messy affair with all kinds of costs.”

If Jolene is the Trump administration, who is the narrator—Dolly, if you will—asking her to back off? “The rest of us? Or the Iranian people? The people that are buying gas in East Asia? Who knows?” Sexton said. (McChrystal’s analogy reminded Sexton of the Sinatra Doctrine—Mikhail Gorbachev’s Soviet policy in the late 1980s that alluded to Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” and loosened Moscow’s grip on Eastern European countries.)

Some analysts say the White House’s bravado can be traced to the dramatic midnight special operation that ousted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January, without any fatalities among U.S. service members. “I mean, I watched it, literally, like I was watching a television show,” Trump said. (Maybe that qualifies as the Bohemian Rhapsody Doctrine: “Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?”)

“A stunning success like we saw in Venezuela, it naturally breeds hubris,” Dan Grazier, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center, a think tank in Washington, D.C., told me. “As soon as I saw what happened in Venezuela, I was like, This is bad. It’s great that it was successful, but this is going to encourage the whole national-security establishment to say, ‘Huh, I wonder what we can do now?’” Overall, to Grazier, the Jolene Doctrine seemed like an apt way of putting it: “I agree with McChrystal this time.”

To others, the Just Because We Can Doctrine has lined up with reality for quite some time. “I’ve been arguing this for over a decade,” Barry Posen, a professor of political science and security studies at MIT, told me. “What McChrystal is observing, this is not a sudden thing or a quality of the Trump administration per se—and I’m not defending them, by the way—this is part of a deeper pattern.” (The Here I Go Again Doctrine? Thank you, Whitesnake.) He cited a quote from Senator Richard Russell, who warned during the Vietnam War that availability of military equipment would influence military decisions: “If it is easy for us to go anywhere and do anything, we will always be going somewhere and doing something.” The distinction that Posen drew about the present operations is the administration’s casual consideration and impulsivity around making war.

Some found the whole Jolene analogy more misleading than useful. “It’s a funny line, but I think I do disagree,” Matthew Kroenig, the senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, told me. “If you take it literally, just doing things that you can, there are easier targets than Iran. Why not invade Jamaica or the Bahamas or something?” In his view, Trump has picked his targets with care, selecting countries that are threatening but also relatively weak, and “that have bedeviled U.S. presidents for years.”

In the meantime, the list of nations that the administration seems to believe it can militarily interfere with seems to be growing. Immediately after attacking Iran, the White House was already eyeing Cuba as a possible next target. Today, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel confirmed that his regime has held talks with the United States.

Onstage yesterday in New Orleans, Goldberg—hearing the metaphor for the first time—told McChrystal, “If in the next 24 hours, The Atlantic doesn’t have a piece called ‘The Jolene Doctrine,’ I will have failed as editor of The Atlantic.” Here’s to filing with minutes to spare—a deadline met, I acknowledge, in part by having “Jolene” on loop the whole time.