General Milley Back in the Center of a Political Battle

WASHINGTON — Nearly 16 months after he walked across a Lafayette Square aggressively cleared of protesters with then President Donald J. Trump, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is still trying to make amends.

He has apologized in a video that infuriated Mr. Trump.

He has stood up against Republican lawmakers who accused the Pentagon of being too “woke,” issuing a historically expansive rebuke that referenced Mao and Lenin before a head-shaking Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida.

And he has talked, to a succession of authors, about his efforts during the last tumultuous months of the Trump administration to protect the military and American democratic institutions from a president who was searching for avenues to remain in power. Those moves, as described in one book, culminated with General Milley twice calling to reassure his Chinese counterpart and extracting promises from the military chain of command not to launch a nuclear weapon on Mr. Trump’s orders without first alerting him.

In so doing, General Milley has prompted demands from some Republicans to resign and rekindled discussions about the ways that Mr. Trump put the military where the country’s founders said it was not supposed to be: at the center of politics.

On Tuesday, General Milley will appear before the Senate Armed Services Committee in what could be the most significant televised congressional hearing involving senior military leaders since Gen. David H. Petraeus was grilled by lawmakers on the stalled war in Iraq in 2007.

Halfway through his four-year term as the nation’s top military officer, General Milley is certain to face sharp questions about another contentious topic: Afghanistan, including his advice to President Biden not to withdraw all U.S. troops from the country. (Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III, who will also be at the hearing, offered the same advice.)

The general is also likely to be asked about declaring a U.S. drone attack in Kabul last month “a righteous strike” even after military officials said they were investigating reports of civilian casualties. The Pentagon acknowledged a week later that the strike was a tragic mistake, killing 10 people, including seven children. General Milley tacitly conceded that he spoke too soon, calling the error “heart-wrenching.”

In normal times, the tumultuous Afghanistan withdrawal punctuated by the tragic errant drone strike would be enough, by themselves, to dominate any congressional hearing with senior Pentagon leaders. But the recent revelations that General Milley may have inserted himself into the chain of command to check Mr. Trump’s capability to launch a nuclear strike raise questions about the limitations of a doctrine traditionally viewed as sacred: civilian control of the military.

Today’s polarization means that anything that smacks of either a critique or an endorsement of Mr. Trump is suspect. So now, a little over a year after Mr….