The Atlantic

Senator to Donald Trump: Americans Deserve to Know the Costs of a North Korea Conflict

In a letter to the president, Tammy Duckworth cites the lack of debate before she was deployed to Iraq—and insists that it not happen again.
Source: Brian Snyder / Reuters

This morning, Tammy Duckworth, a Democratic senator from Illinois, wrote Donald Trump to demand an accounting of what the president and his advisers mean when they talk, with growing urgency these days, of “military options” against North Korea and its nuclear-weapons program. “We must never allow the consequences of war to be hidden from Americans,” she asserts in a letter obtained exclusively by The Atlantic.

Duckworth, a retired lieutenant colonel, lost her legs in 2004 when Iraqi insurgents shot down her Blackhawk helicopter. “When my colleagues start beating the drums of war, I want to be there, standing on my artificial legs under the great Capitol dome, to remind them what the true costs of war are,” Duckworth a couple years

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from The Atlantic

The Atlantic3 min read
They Rode the Rails, Made Friends, and Fell Out of Love With America
The open road is the great American literary device. Whether the example is Jack Kerouac or Tracy Chapman, the national canon is full of travel tales that observe America’s idiosyncrasies and inequalities, its dark corners and lost wanderers, but ult
The Atlantic8 min readAmerican Government
The Most Consequential Recent First Lady
This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. The most consequential first lady of modern times was Melania Trump. I know, I know. We are supposed to believe it was Hillary Clinton, with her unbaked cookies
The Atlantic4 min read
Hayao Miyazaki’s Anti-war Fantasia
Once, in a windowless conference room, I got into an argument with a minor Japanese-government official about Hayao Miyazaki. This was in 2017, three years after the director had announced his latest retirement from filmmaking. His final project was

Related Books & Audiobooks