One attraction of being National Security Advisor is the sheer multiplicity and volume of challenges that confront you. If you don’t like turmoil, uncertainty, and risk — all while being constantly overwhelmed with information, decisions to be made, and the sheer amount of work, and enlivened by international and domestic personality and ego conflicts beyond description — try something else. It is exhilarating, but it is nearly impossible to explain to outsiders how the pieces fit together, which they often don’t in any coherent way.
The received truth, attractive to the intellectually lazy, is that Trump was always bizarre, but in his first 15 months, uncertain in his new place, and held in check by an “axis of adults,” he hesitated to act. As time passed, however, Trump became more certain of himself, the axis of adult departed, things fell apart, and Trump was surrounded only by “yes men.”
Pieces of this hypothesis are true, but the overall picture is simplistic. The axis of adults in many respects caused enduring problems not because they successfully managed Trump, as the High-Minded (an apt description I picked up from the French for those who see themselves as our moral betters) have it, but because they did precisely the opposite. They didn’t do nearly enough to establish order, and what they did do was so transparently self-serving and so publicly dismissive of many of Trump’s many clear goals (whether worthy or unworthy) that they fed Trump’s already-suspicious mind-set, making it harder for those who came later to have legitimate policy exchanges with the President.
Now, instinct, personal relations, and showmanship are elements of any President’s repertoire. But they are not all of it, by a long stretch. Analysis, planning, intellectual discipline and rigor, evaluation of results, course corrections, and the like are the blocking and tackling of presidential decision-making, the unglamorous side of the job. Appearance takes you only so far.
Despite the frequency of press lines like “I was very surprised when President Smith called me…,” such expressions of innocence are invariably only casually related to the truth. And at no point is the competition for high-level jobs more intense than during the “presidential transition,” a US invention that has become increasingly elaborate in recent decades. Transition teams provide good case studies for graduate business schools on how not to do business. They exist for a fixed, fleeing period (from the election to the inauguration) and then disappear forever. They are overwhelmed by hurricanes of incoming information (and disinformation); complex, often competing, strategy and policy analyses; many consequential personnel decisions for the real government; and media and interest-group scrutiny and pressure.
While foreign-policy labels are unhelpful except for the intellectually lazy, if pressed, I liked to say my policy was “pro-American.” I followed Adam Smith on economics, Edmund Burke on society, The Federalist Papers on government, and a merger of Dean Acheson and John Foster Dulles on national security.
Lyndon Johnson once reportedly said of an aide, “I want real loyalty. I want him to kiss my ass in Macy’s window at high noon and tell me it smells like roses.” Who knew Trump read so much history?
Charles Krauthammer, a sharp critic of his, told me he had been wrong earlier to characterize Trump’s behavior as that of an 11-year-old boy. “I was off by ten years. He’s like a one-year-old. Everything is seen through the prism of whether it benefits Donald Trump.”
As I had recounted several times with Trump, Acheson’s famous remark when asked why he and President Truman had such an excellent working relationship: “I never forgot who was President, and who as Secretary of State. And neither did he.”
Tillerson asked if I was interested in anything State other than Deputy, and I said no, having already had the second-best job as UN Ambassador.
Tillerson seemed to be uninvolved, another sign of trouble, both because he was not in the loop and because he didn’t seem to realize the potential problem for him if a Mattis ally got the job, potentially making Tillerson’s relations with the White House more difficult. Indeed, new stories were noting Tillerson’s low profile generally.
As Henry Kissinger once reportedly said, “Never take a government job without an inbox.”
They promised real influence, access to Trump, and the inevitability of Administration turnover, meaning I would eventually become Secretary of State or something. Based on my government experience, I explained that to run the bureaucracy, you needed to control the bureaucracy, not just watch it from the White House. The NSC was a mechanism to coordinate the national-security agencies, and the job required someone who had experience at lower levels on how it worked and didn’t work.
The most palpable manifestation of the problems was Iran, specifically the 2015 nuclear deal, which Obama considered a crowning achievement (the other being Obamacare). The deal was badly conceived, abominably negotiated and drafted, and entirely advantageous to Iran: unenforceable, unverifiable, and inadequate in duration and scope. Although purportedly resolving the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear-weapons program, the deal did no such thing. In fact, it exacerbated the threat by creating the resemblance of a solution, diverting attention from the dangers, and lifting the economic sanctions that had imposed substantial pain on Iran’s economy, while allowing Tehran to proceed essentially unimpeded.
He was enough of a politician not to oppose the idea publicly, but like much of the world, he wondered why Kushner thought he would succeed where the likes fo Kissinger had failed.
When Priebus and I entered, I congratulated Trump on withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement, which the “axis of adults” had failed to stop him from doing and which I saw as an important victory against global governance. The Paris Agreement was a charade, for those truly concerned about climate change. As in may other cases, international agreement provided the semblance of addressing major issues, giving national politicians something to take credit for, but made no discernible real-world difference (in this case giving leeway to countries like China and India, which remained essentially unfettered). I gave Trump a copy of a 2000 article of mine called “Should we take global governance seriously?”, not because I thought he would read it, but to remind him of the importance of preserving US sovereignty.
Neither job required full-time government employment, but my view was you were either in the Administration or not, and halfway houses wouldn’t work.
The threat of North Korea’s acquiring deliverable nuclear weapons manifests itself in several ways. First, strategy depends on analyzing intentions and capabilities. Intentions are often hard to read; capabilities are generally easier to assess (even granted that our intelligence is imperfect). But who wants to bet on what is really on the minds of the leaders in the world’s only hereditary Communist dictatorship, in the face of hard evidence of accelerating nuclear and missile capabilities? Second, a nuclear-armed North Korea can conduct blackmail against nearby non-nuclear-weapons states like Japan and South Korea and even against the US, especially under a weak or feckless President. The dangers do not come simply from the risk of a first strike but from mere possession, not to mention the incentives for onward proliferation in East Asia and elsewhere. Third, the North had repeatedly demonstrated it will sell anything to anybody with hard cash, so the risks of its becoming a nuclear Amazon are far from trivial.
It trickled out later that Seoul had paid Pyongyang’s costs of participating in the games, not from any Olympic spirit, but following a sad, well-established pattern. South Korea’s left worshipped this “Sunshine Policy,” which basically held that being nice to North Korea would bring peace to the Peninsula. Instead, again and again, it merely subsidized the North’s dictatorship.
I had put up with so much from the media over the years that I really didn’t care what their reaction was; by that point, my scar tissue had scars.
I was beyond speechless, appalled at this foolish mistake. For a US President to grant Kim a summit with no sign whatever of a strategic decision to renounce nuclear weapons — in fact, giving it away for nothing — was a propaganda gift beyond measure. It was worse by orders of magnitude than Madeleine Albright clinking glasses with Kim Il Sung during the Clinton years.
Also required was what baby boomers called the “sex, drugs and rock and roll” interview, where typically the trap was not what foolish things you had done in your life but whether you admitted them in response to questions or volunteered them if they were exotic enough.
Scowcroft said succinctly, “The world is a mess, and we’re the only ones who can straighten it out.”
Any number of NSC “models” might have been academically sound but would make no difference if they simply spun in a vacuum, disconnected, admiring themselves and lauded by the media but not actually engaging the sitting President. I was determined to have a disciplined, thorough process, but I would judge my performance on how it actually shaped policy, not how outsiders compared it to prior Administrations.
The NSC staff (roughly 430 people when I arrived, 350 when I left) was not a think tank. Its product was not discussion groups and staff papers but effective decision-making. The organization should be simple and direct.
Trump said, “My honor is at stake,” reminding me of Thycydides’s famous observation that “fear, honor and interest” are the main drivers of international politics and ultimately war.
Over the next 8 months, when we were in town, we both typically arrived at around 6am, an excellent time to sync up as the day began.
I soon realized Mattis was our biggest problem. He hadn’t produced any targeting options for the NSC or for White House Counsel Don McGahn, who needed to write an opinion on the legality of whatever Trump ultimately decided. From long, unhappy experience, I knew what was going on here. Mattis knew where he wanted Trump to come out militarily, and he also knew that the way to maximize the likelihood of his view’s prevailing was to deny information to others who had a legitimate right to weigh in. It was simple truth that not presenting options until the last minute, making sure that those options were rigged in the “right” direction, and then table-pounding, delaying, and obfuscating as long as possible were the tactics by which a savvy bureaucrat like Mattis could get his way.
Even if the President had decided on the optimal strike, the decision-making process was completely unacceptable. We’d experienced a classic bureaucratic ploy by a classic bureaucrat, structuring the options and information to make only his option look acceptable in order to get his way. Of course, Trump didn’t help by not being clear about what he wanted, jumping randomly from one question to another, and generally frustrating efforts to have a coherent discussion about the consequences fo making one choice rather than another.
Magnetic attraction to TV cameras, a common political ailment, had created the problem, but it was also a process foul: the sanctions were for Treasury to announce. The Ambassador to the UN had no role to play, except, in this case, mistakenly stealing the limelight.
I was a free trader, but I agreed with Trump that many international agreements reflected not true “free trade” but managed trade and were far from advantageous to the US. I particularly agreed that China had gamed the system. It pursued mercantilist policies in the supposedly free-trade WTO, all the while stealing US IP and engaging in forced technology transfers that robbed us of incalculable capital and commerce over decades.
Macron was a clever politician, trying to spin a clear defeat into something that sounded at least somewhat positive from his perspective.
Knowing of Trump’s penchant to deal on anything, I mentioned Eisenhower’s famous observation “If you can’t solve a problem, enlarge it,” and said I thought that was what Macron seemed to be doing.
Trump also used a line I later heard countless times, that “the EU is worse than China except smaller,” adding that the EU was set up to take advantage of the US.
The two leaders strategized about how to proceed, and Trump asked Moon to specify what we should request from North Korea, which was quite helpful. This was clever diplomacy, because whatever Moon wrote, he could hardly object if we asked for it, and if we were tougher than Moon, he could had at least had his say.
Abe stressed to Trump that he was tougher than Obama, showing clearly that Abe thought it necessary to remind Trump of that point.
The answer? More preemptive concession by the US. This was one of the oldest games in the Communist playbook: frightening gullible Westerners with tales of splits between “moderates” and “hardliners” so that we accepted otherwise unpalatable outcomes to bolster the “moderates.”
I couldn’t believe that the reason for these exercises — to be fully ready for a North Korean attack — hadn’t ben explained before. If it had, it clearly hadn’t registered. Competent militaries exercise frequently. Especially in an alliance, joint training is critical so that the allied countries don’t cause problems for themselves in a time of crisis. “Fight tonight” was the slogan of US Forces Korea, reflecting its mission to deter and defeat aggression. A decrease in readiness could mean “fight next month,” which didn’t cut it. As I came to realize, however, Trump just didn’t want to hear about it. The exercises offended Kim Jong Un and were unnecessarily expensive. Case closed.
The State Department, faced with rejection, wanted to offer a compromise, in effect saying, “You don’t like that one? How about this one?” And if the North didn’t like “this one,” the State negotiators would probably offer them “another one,” all the while, in reality, negotiating with themselves to see if they could produce a smile from the North Koreans.
The G7 opening plenary sessions were contentious, with Trump under siege for his trade policies, until he fired back: the G7 should abolish all tariffs, all non-tariff trade barriers, and all subsidies. That subdued the Europeans in particular, who had no intention of doing any such thing. The discussion really showed the rampant hypocrisy of international trade talks, where free trade was invariably good for everyone else but not for favored domestic sectors, particularly farmers in places like France and Japan, not to mention the US and Canada.
Except for POTUS, Air Force One is not designed for luxury travel, with no lie-flat seats, and many people simply stretched out on the floor.
I made the point that congressional Democrats would rip us to pieces on this text because that’s what they did, and congressional Republicans would rip us because they knew it was inconsistent with everything they and we believed.
Kim Jong Un knew just what he was doing when he asked what Trump thought of him; it was a question designed to elicit a positive response, or risk ending the meeting right there. By asking a seemingly naive or edgy question, Kim actually threw the burden and risk of answering on the other person. It showed he had Trump hooked.
Then came the catch, perfected by Joseph Stalin in his wartime summits with FDR, when “hardliners” were first discovered in the Soviet Politburo. Kim “confessed” that he had domestic political hurdles he could not easily overcome, because there were hardliners in North Korea as well as America. Kim needed a way to build public support in North Korea, he said, actually maintaining a straight face, and he bored in on the South Korean-US joint exercises, which, he said, got on people’s nerves.
Kim thought that was funny for some reason and said, “You will be warmly welcomed. You may find this hard to answer, but do you think you can trust me?”
This was tricky, one of those questions he was good at asking. I couldn’t either tell the truth or lie, so I said, “The President has a finely tuned sense of people from his days in business. If he can trust you, we will move forward from there.”
Both Japan and South Korea were confused. What exactly did the President have in mind? they wanted to know. Neither Pompeo nor I had the slightest idea, but we were also both certain neither did Trump.
Mattis said his Japanese and Korean counterparts were already calling him, understandably very concerned. He also said, which I had not heard before, that six months earlier, Trump had also almost canceled the exercises because and Russia and China complained about them, which was disturbing, to say the least.
Pompeo, Kelly, and I gave Trump another Kim Jong Un letter on September 10, which he read in the Oval, commenting as he went, “This is a wonderful letter,” “This is a really nice letter,” and “Listen to what he says about me,” followed by his reading one oleaginous passage after another.
“John, you have a lot of hostility,” said Trump, “of course, I have the most hostility, but you have a lot of hostility.”
Outside the Oval, Kelly said to me, “I’m sorry that meeting was so rough on you,” and Pompeo seemed discouraged. I said I was ecstatic at the outcome. After all, we had just gained a five-week delay in any possible Trump-Kim meeting, during which time anything could happen in Trumpworld.
As I realized during this busy July, if I hadn’t seen it earlier, Trump was not following any international grand strategy, or even a consistent trajectory. His thinking was like an archipelago of dots (like individual real estate deals), leaving the rest of us to discern — or create — policy. That had its pros and cons.
He seemed relaxed and very self-assured, more so than I remembered from that meeting in 2001. The Russian press later reported (incorrectly) that Putin was on time for the meeting, contrary to his practice of keeping visitors waiting, including the Pope and the Queen of England. I didn’t see any need to correct them.
Putin said confidently, following a long-standing Russian propaganda line, that up to 5,000 “locals” near At Tanf were, in fact, ISIS fighters, who would ostensibly follow American direction, but then betray us when it suited them. (Putin said the ISIS fighters would kiss a certain part of our anatomy, although his interpreter didn’t translate it that way!)
Then, in the meeting’s second most interesting moment, he said that Obama had told him clearly in 2014 that if Russia went no further than annexing Crimea, the Ukraine confrontation could be settled. For whatever reason, however, Obama had changed his mind, and we arrived at the current impasse.
Putin struck me as totally in control, calm, self-confident, whatever Russia’s domestic economic and political challenges might have been. He was totally knowledgeable on Moscow’s national-security priorities. I was not looking forward to leaving him alone in a room with Trump.
In years gone by, NATO summits were important events int he life of the alliance. Over the past two decades, however, the gatherings became almost annual, and therefore less than exciting. Until the 2017 NATO summit in Brussels, that is.
Article 5 is actually less binding than its reputation, since each alliance member will merely take “such action as it deems necessary.”
Of course, the US was always the overwhelmingly greatest force contributor. It was our alliance, and it was primarily for our benefit, not because we were renting ourselves out to defend Europe, but because defending “the West” was in America’s strategic interest. As a Cold War bulwark against Soviet expansionism, NATO represented history’s most successful politico-military coalition.
The list of NATO deficiencies were long, including, after the Soviet Union’s collapse, the feckless abandonment by several European members of their responsibility to provide for their own self-defense. Under President Clinton, America suffered its own military declines, as he and others saw the collapse of Communism as “the end of history,” slashing defense budgets to spend on politically beneficial domestic welfare programs. This “peace dividend” illusion never ended in much of Europe, but it ended in America with the September 11 mass murders in New York and Washington. Obama criticized NATO members for being “free riders,” not spending adequately on their own defense budgets, but, typically, had simply graced the world with his views, doing nothing to see them carried out.
Personally, I’ve never shied away from being direct, even with our closest friends internationally, and I can tell you they are never shy about telling us what they think, especially about America’s deficiencies. In fact, it was not Trump’s directness but the veiled hostility to the alliance itself that unnerved other NATO members and his own advisors.
Aggregate US defense expenses (worldwide) amounted to slightly more than 70 percent of all military spending by all NATO members, but of course, much US spending was for global programs or for specific regions.
I gave him my assessment that the now largely departed “axis of adults,” worshipped by the US media, had so frustrated Trump he was now determined to do what he wanted to do on several key issues no matter what his current advisors told him.
I asked May why the Russians did it, and Trump said he had asked the same question the night before at Blenheim, thinking it might be intended as a message. May thought the attack was intended to prove Russia could act with impunity against dissidents and defectors, to intimidate them and like-minded others.
Since we had no extradition treaty with Russia, and Russia’s “constitution” prohibited extraditions anyway, the odds these defendants would be handed over were infinitesimal. Accordingly, I advised against demanding that the Russians do so, as many Democrats and Republicans were suggesting. Asking for something we knew we couldn’t get made us look impotent. Instead, I suggested Trump to say, “I’d love to have them come to the US to prove their innocence,” which he seemed to like.
Although we covered a number of topics, Niinisto wanted to make three points on Russia, the first being how to deal with Putin. Niinisto reminded Trump that Putin was a fighter, and Trump should therefore hit back if attacked. Second, Niinisto stressed the importance of respecting Putin, and that if trust were established, he might be more discrete. Finally, again as if preparing for a boxing match, Niinisto warned Trump never to provide an opening or give even one inch. He ended his pep talk with a Finish saying, “The Cossacks take everything that’s loose.”
Worryingly, however, Putin also said he wanted Trump to win the 2016 election “because he talked about bringing the US-Russian relationship back to normal,” a significant deviation from the standard public line that countries don’t interfere in others’ internal politics and would work with whomever was elected.
“My people came to me, they said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin; he just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be, but I really do want to see the server. But I have — I have confidence in both parties… So I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.” Kelly and I, sitting next to each other in the audience, were almost frozen to our seats by Trump’s answer. It was obvious that major corrective action would be needed because of this self-inflicted wound, but what exactly that would be was far from evident. The immediate media coverage was catastrophic.
Condi Rice called to tell me she was not going to make any public comment on Helsinki, but she said, “You know, John, that Putin only knows two ways to deal with people, to humiliate them or dominate them, and you can’t let him get away with it.”
Russia had been violating the INF Treaty for well over a decade, a point made repeatedly during the Obama Administration, to no avail whatever. As with all US treaties, the Defense and State Departments were overgrown with lawyers; we couldn’t violate a treaty if we wanted to.
As usual, the Russians had a long list of alleged US violations to discuss in excruciating detail; we had an even longer list of actual Russian violations I emphatically did not want to waste time on.
Experience taught me that without action-forcing deadlines, bureaucracies could resist change with incredible tenacity and success.
In response, I laid out the reasons we felt Russia in violation and why the capabilities of China, Iran, and others made it impossible to universalize the treaty, as we had once thought possible. Former Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov best summed up the Russian reaction: “If you want to leave, go ahead, but Russia will stay in.”
He also said, however, that several countries still resisted admitting that Russia was violating the INF because they were afraid that if they agreed the Russians were in violation it might mean that one day down the road they therefore might have to accept nuclear weapons on the territory. This was crazy, in my view: NATO allies were prepared to deny reality because they feared the consequences of admitting it. Did they really believe if they didn’t admit it, it wouldn’t be true?
Obama’s strategy rested on the fallacy that cyberspace was relatively benign, even unspoiled, that the best approach was to smooth over the problems and not risk making things worse. I didn’t understand why cyberspace should be materially different from the rest of human experience: initially a state of anarchy from which strength and resolve, backed by substantial offensive weaponry, could create structures and deterrence against potential adversaries that would eventually bring peace. In realty, a defense-only strategy guaranteed more provocations, more conflict, and more damage, to both businesses and other private entities as well as to the US government.
As in many of these Cabinet-level meetings, however, several of the “principals” could only speak from prepared talking points, relying on their staff to help them. I felt there should be a rule that if it wasn’t important enough for Cabinet Secretaries personally to understand the issues, they should not be in the meeting at all.
He asked, “Whose idea is this?” and I said it was mine, whereupon he said, “Oh,” and signed the order.
These were often complex issues, since one of our adversaries’ objectives was not just to affect particular elections, but to sow fear and mistrust throughout the body politic, thus undermining citizen confidence in the integrity of the system as a whole. With uncertain, incomplete information, from which hard conclusions did not immediately emerge, it could cause more damage to disclose it prematurely and too broadly, thus risking its becoming ammunition in partisan political battles.
It was as though Trump was trying to show he had as much arbitrary authority as Erdogan, who had said 20 years earlier as mayor of Istanbul, “Democracy is like a streetcar. You ride it to the stop you want, and then you get off.”
At our weekly breakfast, Mattis said somberly to Pompeo and me, “You gentlemen have more political capital than I do now,” which sounded ominous.
All this confused press coverage reveals both the inconsistencies within Trump’s own thinking, and reporting based on second- and third-hand sources, exacerbated under a President who spent a disproportionate share of his time watching his Administration being covered in the press.
I wondered how different things might have been if Mattis hadn’t act like a “five-star general,” commanding all the four-star generals, but a real SecDef, running the entire, vast Pentagon machinery. Watching Dunford perform, it occurred to me there was a hidden wisdom in the statutory prohibition against former general officers becoming SecDef. It was not fear of a military takeover, but ironically, that neither the civilian nor the military side of the Pentagon’s leadership performed so well when both were military. The Secretary’s broader, inevitably political role ill suited someone with a military background, leaving Mattis just to supervise Dunford and other Joint Chiefs, who really didn’t need more military supervision. It also underscored how unpersuasive Mattis was in meetings in either the Sit Room or the Oval. He may have established a reputation as a warrior-scholar for carrying with him on the battlefield a copy of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, but he was no debater.
The argument I pressed again and again, regarding all the “endless wars,” was that we hadn’t started the wars and couldn’t end them just by our own say-so. Across the Islamic world, the radical philosophies had caused so much death and destruction were ideological, political as well as religious. Just as religious fervor had driven human conflicts for millennia, so it was driving this one, against America and the West more broadly. It wasn’t going away because we were tired of it, or because we found it inconvenient to balancing our budget. Most important of all, this wasn’t a war about making Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, or any other country nicer, safer places to live. I am not a nation builder. I do not believe what is, after all, an essentially Marxist analysis that a better economic way of life will divert people from terrorism. This was about keeping America safe from another 9/11, or even worse, a 9/11 where the terrorists had nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. As long as the threat existed, no place was too far away to worry about. The terrorists weren’t coming to America on wooden sailing ships.
He now didn’t want to wait for Khalilzad but wanted to announce the withdrawal of US forces prior to the end of his second full year in office, or even before. If he waited until his third year, he would own the war, whereas if we exited in the second year, he could still blame his predecessors.
I honestly do not know how Kelly and Dunford restrained themselves from telling Mattis what he could do with his withdrawal plan, but this was the “five-star general” phenomenon at work. Mattis should have worried about persuading Trump, not nitty-gritty plans on the ground in Afghanistan.
Of course, what most people found striking was that Trump’s “official” day didn’t start until almost lunchtime. Trump was not loafing during the morning. Instead, he spent considerable time working the phones in the Residence. He talked to all manner of people, sometimes US government officials (I spoke with him by phone before he arrived in the Oval nearly every day), but he also spoke at length to people outside the government. It was an anomaly among contemporary Presidents by any definition.
By contrast, President Bush began his formal day in the Oval Office with an 8:00 am intelligence briefing that would include the president, the VP, NSA Brent Scowcroft and WH Chief of Staff.
I would have thought I had died and gone to heaven to have such an orderly approach to preparing for an upcoming day.
It was largely symbolic, because having a security clearance didn’t mean Brennan or anyone else could just walk into the CIA and read whatever interested him. He had to have a “need to know,” and, for anything really important, would have to be read into the appropriate “compartments.”
This was our second emotional conversation, even more intense than the first. “I’ve commanded men into combat,” he said, “and I’ve never had to put up with shit like that,” referring to what just happened in the Oval.
Mattis is always overseas, the VP is in Mississippi talking about religious freedom, and the only thing Mnuchin thinks about is covering his ass. This whole thing could end up being the Donald, Ivanka, and Jared show!
He said Mattis had told him that “it was the bravest thing he had ever seen anyone do.” Coming from a career military man, that was indeed something. Of course, Trump could have been making it up, but, if not, it showed Mattis knew how to flatter with the best of them.
And only a fool would not assume that if he asked me questions about Mattis, he was surely asking others about me. I gave a partial answer, which was both true and important: I said Mattis was “good at not doing what he didn’t want to do” and that he had “a high opinion of his own opinion.” With that, Trump was off, explaining that he didn’t trust Mattis and how tired he was of constant press stories about Mattis’s outwitting Trump. I didn’t say it to Trump, but this was the biggest self-inflicted wound by the “axis of adults.” They thought themselves so smart they could tell the world how smart they are, and Trump wouldn’t figure it out. They were not as smart as they thought.
I explained Judge Larry Silberman’s theory about assessing leaks, namely asking, “Cui bono?” which means “Who stands to gain?”
Being in NY reminded me why UN Ambassadors should not have Cabinet rank (the traditional Republican approach). Or, if they were going to have that rank, they needed to be told by the President that there was nonetheless only one Secretary of State.
Of course, none of them were the POTUS, but the press didn’t understand that rules for US Presidents are different from the rules for 190 other leaders who don’t command the world’s greatest military forces.
Macron all but insulted Trump in his November 11 speech at the Arc de Triomphe, saying, “Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism. Nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism by saying: ‘Our interest first. Who cares about the others?’”
Kelly said he had told Trump, “Whatever you do — and we were still in the process of trying to find someone to take my place — I said whatever you do, don’t hire a ‘yes man,’ someone who won’t tell you the truth — don’t do that. Because if you do, I believe you will be impeached.”
“John’s view is my view too.” Keith Kellogg added that Pence believed we should be “going all out” against Venezuela’s state-owned oil company. That had enormous effect since Pence rarely offered his views in such settings, to avoid boxing in the President.
One ploy we considered to send signals to key figures in the regime was delisting from the sanctions people like wives and family members, a common practice in US policy to send signals to influence the behavior of selected individuals or entities. Such actions would likely get little public attention but would be powerful messages to regime officials that we were prepared to ease their paths either out of Venezuela entirely or into the arms of the Opposition as co-conspirators rather than prisoners.
As word spread within the regime’s top levels that the security of the plan had been breached, supreme court President Moreno became increasingly nervous, resulting in his failure to have his court delegitimize Maduro’s Constituent Assembly as planned, thus spooking the senior military leaders. Lacking “constitutional” cover, they hesitated, and the release of Lopez on Tuesday morning only further increased the senior military conspirators’ unease. I thought that these generals may never have intended to defect, or had at least hedged their bets enough that they could jump either way on Tuesday, depending on what course events took.
Nothing ever goes as planned in revolutionary situations, and improvisation can sometimes make the difference between success and failure. But in Venezuela that day, things unraveled.
We looked at China’s election-related efforts as part of one of the broadest influence operations ever undertaken, far broader than what Democrats and the media obsessed over in 2016. Viewed without partisan blinders, China could bring considerably greater resources to bear on this effort than Russia.
Xi ready steadily through note cards, doubtless all of it hashed out arduously in advance planning for this summit. For us, the President ad-libbed, with no one on the US side knowing what he would say from one minute to the next.
The negotiations came complete with theatricals in the Oval Office starring Trump and Liu He, broadcast live on cable news. As time passed, the March 1 deadline became clearly unattainable, so Trump blew past it, saying “substantial progress” had been made. I thought it signaled weakness, showing what he really wanted was a deal. In fact, of course, the 90-day period was always illusory; it was impossible to believe China would concede on the “structural issues” in three months, having developed its practice over decades.
Out of nowhere, Xi answered by comparing the impact of an unequal deal with us to the “humiliation” of the Treaty of Versailles, which had taken Shandong province from Germany but given it to Japan. Xi said with a straight face that if China suffered the same humiliation in our trade negotiations, there would ben an upsurge of patriotic feeling in China, implicitly indicating that feeling would be directed against the US. Trump manifestly had no idea what Xi was referring to, but said that a treaty of non-equals was not in Xi’s blood.
Trump made matters worse on several occasions by implying that Huawei also could be simply another US bargaining chip in the trade negotiations, ignoring both the significance of the criminal case and also the far larger threat Huawei posed to the security of 5G telecom systems worldwide. This is what the black-hole-of-trade phenomenon did in twisting all other issues around Trump’s fascination with a big trade deal.
At one point, he said to Mnuchin, “Steve, the Chinese see fear in your eyes. That’s why I don’t want you negotiating with them.”
We showed a film, opening with clips of Carter, Clinton, Bush, and Obama all saying they had achieved great deals with North Korea, then turning to North Korea’s actual conduct since Singapore and how they were still deceiving us. The film ended with clips of Reagan describing his 1986 Summit with Gorbachev. Reagan’s point was that when you held firm, you got better deals than when you gave in.
Flying to Washington, I concluded that Hanoi showed the US still didn’t know how to deal with North Korea and its ilk. We spent endless hours negotiating with ourselves, whittling away at our own position before our adversaries even got to it, a fine art the State Department had perfected.
But as with every success in government, this was a momentary triumph, and one I knew would not last long. The bureaucracy’s inexorable drive to keep “the process” going would inevitably ignite again, as would Trump’s deathless belief that everyone wanted to talk to him, that everyone was “dying for a deal.”
As with other military funding issues, Trump thought our allies weren’t paying enough. This fit with his notion, unshakeable after countless discussions, that we were in, say, South Korea, to defend them. We were not there for “collective defense” or “mutual security” or any of that complex international stuff.
I felt sick that a stray tweet could actually result in a meeting, although I took some solace from believing that what motivated Trump was the press coverage and photo top of this unprecedented DMZ get-together, not anything substantive.
Besides, South Korea was rapidly catching up to Japan; whereas just a few years ago, Japan’s economy had been five times the size of South Korea’s, now it was only 2.7 times larger, and per capita GDP was almost equal.
There was a legitimate concern that action against Iran could increase the risk to US forces in Iraq and across the region. But this argument proved too much. As was too often the case, the Defense Department indiscriminately deployed this objection against numerous ideas to increase pressure on Iran. The answer to the Pentagon’s worries about pressuring Iran was to increase our force-protection capabilities in Iraq, assuming you believed US forces should stay there.
As Pompeo put it, if you only want a nuclear deal with Iran, don’t care how good it is, and also don’t care about ballistic missiles, support for terrorism, or much else, that deal already existed: the Iran nuclear deal!
This was not just dodging a bullet but dodging a MIRV’ed ICBM.
“Conditions based,” in the Afghan context, was like an opiate. It made some of us (not including me) feel good, but it was merely a temporary, ultimately hollow, experience at best. I doubted there was any deal with the Taliban we should find acceptable, given the track record.
As to whether the military could live without the “protection” of a deal, Pompeo said he thought the US commander would prefer a deal but could live with it either way.
What little sense of complexity and intellectual rigor political debate in America still retains was quickly lost in the impeachment struggle, and trying to explain my views didn’t pass my cost-benefit analysis of time and effort expended, given the predictable results. Many other participants in the impeachment conflict, however, had their own agendas, often more vigorously pursued in the media than in the real world.
Democrats argued that impeachment itself would forever taint the Trump presidency, thus justifying their actions in the House. Inexplicably, they ignored the palpable reality that the inevitable consequence of a failed impeachment effort meant that Trump could claim vindication, and act accordingly, which is precisely what he did.
Don’t nobody here know how to play this game?
Of course, politics is ever present in government, but a second-term Trump would be far less constrained by politics than he was in his first term. The irony could well be that Democrats will find themselves far more pleased substantively with a “legacy”-seeking Trump in his second term than conservatives and Republican.
Second, they argue that Gates betrayed the trust of President Obama and other senior Defense and Administration colleagues by revealing their conversations, positions, and emotions…
I believe former senior officials have virtually an obligation to explain what they did while in government. It is jarringly apparent to government veterans that those have never been “inside” find it difficult, if not possible, to understand what goes on and why. Press accounts and “instant histories” are far too often lacking in insight and understanding of the government in operation. Accordingly, memoirs are critical to parting the curtain for the uninitiated.
Moreover, executive privilege’s true justification is to defend against an intrusive congress or judiciary, and its rationale is therefore different from the normal human expectation that confidences do not last forever. Except in the case of classified information, not at issue here, adults in US politics today understand that they are always on stage. There is no rule for omerta in politics, except perhaps in Chicago.