Military parades in and of themselves are not problematic.

Were it not for President Donald Trump’s history of stolen valor — taking the prestige of the military and converting it to political popularity — this weekend’s Washington, D.C., military parade on the U.S. Army’s 250th (and Trump’s 79th) June 14 birthday would simply be an opportunity to celebrate the achievements of an intrepid fighting force. That parade could also help address gaps in civil-military relations, including the worryingly small percentage of citizens who have meaningful exposure to the military.

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This parade, however, raises legitimate questions about the proper relationship between military and political power in a liberal democracy. It would not be the first time that Trump has crossed this line. One such example came when Trump had former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley walk in uniform, under false pretenses, with him through Lafayette Square to make a political statement and conduct a politically charged photo shoot. In doing so, Trump was trying to convert military valor into political coinage.

Trump revels in the brandishing of military hardware and is awed by bombastic displays of military might. But it’s not mere childish delight or patriotic fervor that drives his thirst for military spectacle. This parade is also an opportunity for Trump to do the same thing he was doing striding across Lafayette Square, dialed up to 11.

Other republics hold military parades without the same charged partisan implications, so why should this one be different? 

In France, for example, whose annual Bastille Day military pageantry inspired Trump in 2017, the military parade serves the state rather than politics. The French president doesn’t boost his popularity with any particular military parade. Rather, it’s designed to show the unity of military and state power, with the president presiding over that function.

In contrast, Trump is trying to convert the military parade into political capital; for him, this parade merely masquerades as a function of the state.

In post-war America, major military parades have been uncommon outside of specific national holidays, such as Independence Day, Memorial Day, and Veterans Day, or after a victorious war, such as in 1991 to celebrate victory in the first Gulf War. The major military parades during Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower’s and John F. Kennedy’s inaugurations were held in the penumbra of the Cold War. 

That is why this parade is suspect on the administration’s part and ripe for critical political interpretation: without a major state holiday, war victory, or looming spectre of nuclear annihilation, a major military parade seems indulgent at best.

Ironically, the Army parade would be less problematic if the United States had more military parades. Regular military procession in service of the state, with the president simply officiating a function of the state, would make each one less fraught with partisan purpose and more acceptable for a liberal democratic republic.

The question for the U.S. is whether there is a reason to make this a practice, rather than some other civic ritual. The French notwithstanding, grandiose military parades are still too often associated with police states and totalitarian regimes.

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Yet, there could be an appropriate public, shared, and unifying way via a parade for the nation to honor the U.S. military, whose great victories should be celebrated. One of the most important parts of the commander in chief’s job is managing the tricky civil-military relations of a liberal democracy. 

An American president attentive to promoting the martial function of a state and bridging rather than degrading the civil-military gap would start with a different parade on July 4, a mere three weeks later. That would be the appropriate day to begin a civic ritual of a military parade, if there were to be one: on the occasion of a birth of a nation steeped in the ideals of liberal equality, including the civil-military values established at its founding, that a “free people ought not only be armed, but disciplined” and that when those people “assumed the Soldier, [they] did not lay aside the Citizen”.

Yvonne Chiu is a Jeane Kirkpatrick Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and Associate Professor of Strategy & Policy at the U.S. Naval War College. She is the author of Conspiring with the Enemy:  The Ethic of Cooperation in Warfare. Views are her own and do not represent anyone else’s.