Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos

Veteran journalist Peter Bergen’s new book, Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos, is a deeply reported account of the politics and personalities of the Trump administration’s foreign policy. Bergen focuses on the major military-turned-bureaucratic personalities of the Trump administration: former Secretary of Defense and retired Marine General, James N. Mattis; former Secretary of Homeland Security and Chief of Staff, as well as Retired Marine General John F. Kelly; and former National Security Advisor and Army Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster.

Below is a condensed and lightly edited account of my interview with Mr. Bergen.

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NH: Describe what the President’s affinities for staffing military officials in his administration tell us about his foreign policy views and commitments?

PG:   President Trump went to a military style boarding school, the old military academy; it made a big impression on him, and he’s always sort of been attracted to the ceremonial aspects of the military.  Two “Never Trump” letters were signed by more than a hundred leading Republican national security officials or national security experts; that’s pretty much the usual pool of people that would staff the administration. Those individuals counted themselves out by signing these letters.  The President could not draw from the usual group of people that would be ready to join the administration. Active military officers, in particular, and also even retired senior officers hadn’t taken political positions publicly either for or against President Trump, and so that was a pool of people that he could draw on.

Also, this is the first American president who has neither served in public office nor served in the military.  Every other president has done one or both, and so he needed people who knew how the levers of national security work, particularly when he first went into office.  Michael Flynn, a retired three star general, was in office for 21 days as his first National Security Advisor, and then the President turned to Mattis and McMaster and Kelly, and, as I say in the book, at one point, he was seriously considering David Petraeus as Secretary of State. That was nixed by Kelly and Jim Mattis on the basis of the fact that Petraeus had shared classified information with his photographer at the time when he was CIA Director.  The Trump team didn’t think that was a problem, but [Mattis and Kelly] certainly did.

PB:  [Retired Army General Stanley A.] McChrystal, who had run special operations command in the Afghan war, received a call on November 16, 2016, where he was offered the position. McChrystal turned that down because he thought that Trump was kind of erratic and ignorant, and he just didn’t want to work for him.  So he was the first person to turn him down as Secretary of Defense.

The second person was [Retired Army General] Jack Keane, who turned down the job as Secretary of Defense twice, for different reasons, which all relate to his wife.  The first time he was offered the job was shortly before, around the time that Stan McChrystal was offered the job, and his wife had just recently died after a decade and a half of being seriously ill.  And then when Jim Mattis resigned, Jack Keane was offered the job again, but he turned it down because he, just recently, was about to get remarried, so he turned it down for personal reasons. 

And then Jim Mattis, of course, got a call when he was soup kitchen in Washington State where he was volunteering. Vice President Pence called and said: “Hey, we’d like you to consider Secretary of Defense," and Mattis, says “Look, I’m in the middle of things in this soup kitchen.  Can I call you back?”  Which he does, and then two days later, he goes to Washington, D.C. and is offered the job.

President Trump and Mattis had two serious disputes when they were talking about the job.  One is the use of torture on suspected terrorists.  Mattis says, “Look, the most effective way to get a terrorist to talk is a coffee and a cigarette.” The President and Mattis had serious discussion and disagreement about NATO, Jim Mattis’ view being NATO is arguably the most successful alliance in history, and President Trump’s views on that being very different.

And of course, that particular dispute, which began in their first discussions, this was the first time they’d ever met, over time grew more profound and was one of the reasons that Jim Mattis resigned.

NH:   What comes through in several different points throughout the book is that one major policy commitment of the President is what would be charitably described as scrutinizing United States’ spending on collective defense arrangements …

PB:  I think that’s a very nice way of putting it.

NH:  Thank you. The other way to put it would be the United States is being ripped off by other countries and alliances, such as with NATO, Korea, and in the Middle East.  Describe where this policy commitment originates and what the implications are.

PB:   In the book, I point out that in 1987 Trump spent a fair amount of money to take a full page ad out in the New York Times essentially saying that Japan and Saudi Arabia are ripping us off and they should pay down our federal deficit, which at the time was only $200 billion.  So this idea that we’re being ripped off by our allies is actually a very old one for Trump.

There’s a great scene in the book where every NATO country has agreed, and they did this under President Obama, to pay up to 2% of their GDP on defense spending.  This is their own defense spending; it’s not payments to NATO.  Trump has always interpreted that like they’re ripping off the United States, and they’re not spending up to 2% of GDP on defense.  And so when Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, first arrived in the United States for her first visit with Trump, he presented her an invoice for $600 billion, which of course, makes no sense at all and Angela Merkel said that this is not real, this is not how it works. The President treated the Germans like they were late on their rent, and he was the landlord collecting the late rent.  And this is something he raised with South Korea.

Will it last?  I’m not sure it necessarily will.  Certainly, President Obama was pressing NATO to spend more on its own defense, but he wasn’t berating them.  And part of this is really just a question of style.  Yes, the United States wants NATO allies to spend more on their own defense, where they aren’t getting to the 2%, but that’s an agreement that has until 2024 for everybody to reach that point.

I don’t think this is a huge sea change, but we are seeing changes of a more nationalistic flavor in all the countries in Europe.  But, it is likely event-driven; if you have a 9/11, everything changes. If you have a Pearl Harbor, everything changes. 

NH: You write about an interesting vignette when McMaster takes over as National Security Advisor, where he is speaking to his staff, and he references Halford Mackinder, the geopolitical strategist.  In your mind, is there a kind of turn to competition among nation states such as Russia, China, Turkey, Iran, and the United States.

PB:  I think Steve Bannon, H.R. McMaster and Jim Mattis agreed on one big thing, which was the threat posed by China, or the peer competition from China.  As I say in the book, when historians come to assess the Trump foreign policy, they will say that Trump largely got China right, even though they disagree on the tactics on the trade negotiations. The idea that there was a lot of wishful thinking about the Chinese, that somehow if they became part of the global economy that they would liberalize roles, the reverse has happened here, and a million plus Uighurs are now in these detention camps.

If you read the National Defense Strategy overseen by Jim Mattis, it’s focused on China.  If you read the National Security Strategy, it’s also focused on China, and that was overseen by H.R. McMaster.  I think the Trump administration has put down a marker in the South China Sea by doing a lot more freedom of navigation exercises and is pushing back against the Chinese in a way that wasn’t the case in previous administrations.  So, yes, I think there is a much greater state peer competition focus. Does that mean, by the way, that the threat from Jihadist terrorism groups is receding?  Not necessarily, but it is probably seen as a kind of a second order problem now at the Pentagon.

NH:  You note in your book that thus far in this Administration, there hasn’t been a Cuban missile crisis moment.  You write that “[w]hen it comes to the use of actual force, Commander-in-Chief Trump was an impulsive but generally cautious about American military operations despite his often hyperventilating public rhetoric.”  And so, when that Cuban missile crisis moment comes, where do you think the President’s instincts are? 

PB:  I would say, from what we know so far, it’s cautiousness.  I mean, we got very close to an attack on Iran, which was called back, and “Planes Were Leaving” is the title of that chapter in the book, and Trump did call that back.  But overall I think his instincts are similar to President Obama which is, not to get involved in a big conventional war and go anywhere around the world to kind of allow special operations, special forces, psycho-warfare, drones, and that’s was kind of the Obama playbook; it’s one of the big similarities between them.  Once you take away the kind of rhetoric around it, they both kind of see themselves being elected to get out of America’s endless wars, and I think they’re trying to do that.

Jim Mattis is shown in the book to repeatedly slow roll military operations on Iran and on North Korea because he was concerned about the impulsiveness of the President. But when it comes to the exercise of American military power, the President seems to want to withdraw and be somewhat cautious about it.

Now, I also want to give President Trump his credit where credit is due.  I mean, on the Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi operation, he took a risk, and it worked out.  It didn’t rise to the level of the Bin Laden operation in terms of the stakes, which I think were higher in many different ways.  But he took a risk, and it paid off.  So I think he’s increasingly comfortable becoming his own general. Hopefully, he would, if a major crisis arose, exercise some of the caution he’s shown already.

NH:   You write that when John Bolton takes over at the National Security Council as National Security Advisor, the interagency process became less face-to-face focused and more memorandum focused.  And you attribute this to the fact that, in part, Bolton, “[d]espite his fearsome reputation, was a classic shy introvert.” That seems at odds with his public persona.

PB:    Well, it’s not my opinion; that’s based on the assessment of people that have worked with him.  H.R. McMaster ran a very kind of classic process where there were plenty of meetings, not as many as under President Obama, but where the deputies and also the principals would hash things out in order to present options to the President.  Under John Bolton, that process has ceased; there were far fewer meetings, and there was much less of a formal process.

Neil Hassler is a contributor to RealClearDefense. Neil is an attorney with the Fraser Stryker law firm in Omaha, Nebraska.