On his Oct. 14, 2025 show, 12 minutes in, Mark Halperin says about his father Morton: “I interviewed a former national security official serving the Johnson Pentagon, the Nixon White House, and the Obama State Department and National Security Council and at the Pentagon, maybe the State Department. He was he’s a peacekeeping expert. He’s in charge of peacekeeping in the Clinton administration. He knows a lot about the complexities of peacekeeping. My dad.”
Morton Halperin says: “It’s very hard to put together a peacekeeping force uh especially doing outside the UN which is this seems to be uh because you have to deal with all the issues of who’s in charge, who gives orders, whether people can turn down orders. I ran peacekeeping in the Pentagon at the beginning of the Clinton administration. And so I’ve dealt with many of these issues and they a lot of them have to do with whether troops can opt out of of an order that they get from a general or senior officer of another country. Those are very hard. They’re very complicated issues and they mean that countries are going to be very reluctant to put in forces until all of those and many other issues are settled.”
I don’t buy these claims. They remind me of Mike Benz claiming he ran cyber for the State Department. I asked ChatGPT if Morton Halperin ran peacekeeping for the Pentagon under President Clinton.
ChatGPT says: No — there’s no evidence he “ran peacekeeping” at the Pentagon under Clinton.
Here’s what is true:
Clinton nominated Halperin in 1994 to be Assistant Secretary of Defense for Democracy and Peacekeeping, a Pentagon post.
But his nomination was blocked/contested in the Senate and he withdrew from consideration.
He then served as a Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Democracy at the NSC (1994–1996).
Later, he was Director of Policy Planning at the State Department (1998–2001).
So he was positioned to influence peacekeeping policy, and intended to hold a relevant Pentagon role — but he never held the Senate-confirmed Pentagon post.
