Mark Milley is fast running out of friends. An avowed woke supremacist and Trump-deranged fraidy cat, Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is also one of the primary architects of our disastrous retreat and surrender in Afghanistan.

And now, according to a new book by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, we learn that Milley “was so fearful that [President Donald Trump’s] actions might spark a war with China that he moved urgently to avert armed conflict.” The duo write, “In a pair of secret phone calls … [Milley] assured his Chinese counterpart, Gen. Li Zuocheng of the People’s Liberation Army, that the United States would not strike.”

Apparently, Milley twice sought to reassure the communist Chinese — once just before the November 3 election and once just after the Capitol riot of January 6. If true, what would possess Milley to put China’s interests before our own, and to behave in such a nakedly insubordinate manner rather than going through proper channels?

Perhaps no one told the general that the ChiComs are our leading geopolitical foe and the single greatest threat to our way of life.

Heck, Milley probably still thinks the China virus emerged naturally, rather than having been released by a Chinese lab. In any case, he certainly seems to have professed greater loyalty to his ChiCom counterpart than to the American president. As The Washington Post reports:

“General Li, I want to assure you that the American government is stable and everything is going to be okay,” Milley told him. “We are not going to attack or conduct any kinetic operations against you.”

In the book’s account, Milley went so far as to pledge he would alert his counterpart in the event of a U.S. attack, stressing the rapport they’d established through a backchannel. “General Li, you and I have known each other for now five years. If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise.”

Here, we might remind ourselves that all this is coming from Bob Woodward, one half of the Washington Post team that broke the Watergate story and caused Richard Nixon to resign the presidency. We mention this because the “Woodward Method,” as Politico calls it, “is a ruthless drive to compress unruly real-world events into powerful, dramatic, marketable narratives.” In short, Woodward is all about selling books — and lobbing bombshells that aren’t.

But if true — and it’s hard to believe that there aren’t at least elements of truth to the story — what makes Milley think he can conduct his own foreign policy? As the editors at National Review note, Truman fired MacArthur for less.

Joe Biden: Where the heck are you?

Ducking reporters’ questions as usual, Biden issued only this elementary statement: “I have great confidence in General Milley.” At the same time, and not surprisingly, the Joint Chiefs of Staff defended Milley, saying that his phone calls were in line with his “duties and responsibilities.”

Back in June, during his testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, General Milley said he wanted to “understand white rage” and what caused “thousands of people to assault [the Capitol] and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America.”

We’re not sure where Milley got the idea that those rioters were trying to “overturn the Constitution” rather than protest an election that they believe was deeply flawed and inadequately investigated, but we do know that our nation’s military leaders aren’t permitted to conduct their own personal foreign policy. Milley’s boss is a civilian, the secretary of defense. And his boss’s boss is another civilian, the president of the United States. If Milley did what he’s reported to have done, it’s insubordination at the least.

Here, what did Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin know and when did he know it? Could it be that he was made aware of Milley’s insubordination but did nothing about it? No doubt this is why Austin refused to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this week — knowing he would not only be held accountable for his Afghanistan ineptitude but also for his failure to hold Milley accountable.

Christopher Miller, who served as secretary of defense in Trump’s final months, described Milley’s alleged actions as a “disgraceful and unprecedented act of insubordination.”

Florida Senator Marco Rubio, the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, responded to the allegations with a letter to Biden demanding that Milley be fired. Kentucky Senator Rand Paul went a step farther, calling for Milley to be court-martialed for treason.

Whether Milley’s malfeasance amounts to treason is as yet unclear, but it certainly demands investigation. He’s scheduled to appear before Congress on September 28, but regardless: This guy needs to go. Now.

As we said earlier, Milley is running out of friends. Our national security analyst, Gen. B.B. Bell, U.S. Army (Ret.), has already issued a peer-to-peer call for Milley to resign because of his disgraceful role in the retreat and surrender in Afghanistan.

Now, even a backstabbing lowlife, Alexander Vindman, he of the Democrats’ first phony impeachment of Donald Trump, has declared: “If this is true GEN Milley must resign. He usurped civilian authority, broke Chain of Command, and violated the sacrosanct principle of civilian control over the military. It’s an extremely dangerous precedent. You can’t simply walk away from that.”

When you’ve lost Alexander Vindman…