The day began well enough. Six months into his young presidency, Donald Trump arrived at the front steps of the Pentagon on a muggy Thursday morning in late July. Alighting from “the Beast,” the heavily armored presidential limo, Trump was greeted by his favorite general, Secretary of Defense James “Mad Dog” Mattis. Mattis didn’t care for this nickname, but Trump, whose experience of the military was limited to a stint at a military-style boarding school, reveled in the four-star generals on his team, especially the “killers.” Trump respected the raw power embodied by the US military.
As Trump ascended the front steps of the Pentagon on the morning of July 20, 2017, a reporter shouted, “Mr. President: Are you sending more troops to Afghanistan?” An intense and largely hidden battle was then consuming Trump’s war cabinet about precisely this question.
At the top of the Pentagon steps, flanked by an honor guard and towering over his secretary of defense, the president responded with one of his favorite lines, saying, “We’ll see.”
Trump was at the Pentagon for a briefing that was planned by Mattis; Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon; Trump’s national security adviser, Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster; the secretary of state, Rex Tillerson; and Trump’s chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn. They all felt it would be useful for Trump—the first American president not to have served in public office or the military—to receive a briefing about what exactly the United States was doing around the globe as well as its economic relationships and security arrangements. They also wanted Trump to understand the tools at his disposal as the commander in chief, from the eleven US aircraft carriers to American nuclear weapons capabilities.
Trump’s key advisers all had quite different goals for the briefing. Bannon was the standard-bearer of Trump’s “America First” populism and he hoped that the briefing would show Trump how overextended and overcommitted the United States was overseas. Mattis and Tillerson wanted to make the case for the United States’ alliances that had shaped the world order since World War II. Those alliances, in their view, had benefited the United States tremendously, not only by hastening the peaceful implosion of the Soviet Union, but also more recently when a US-led NATO force had formed after 9/11 to oust the Taliban from power in Afghanistan. Cohn wanted to make the case for the economic rules-based international order that was built on free trade and had created unprecedented prosperity around the world.
On the surface, Bannon and Mattis didn’t have much in common. A laconic, publicity-shy general and lifelong bachelor, Mattis had enlisted in the US Marines when he was eighteen and had spent his entire career in the military. Bannon, a voluble ringmaster of a man who had landed on the cover of Time for his role in guiding the Trump administration’s strategy, had served an eight-year stint in the navy and then gone to work at Goldman Sachs and later as a Hollywood producer. More recently he had run the far-right media site Breitbart News.
Despite their different temperaments and experiences, both men shared a love of books and military history. If Bannon wasn’t discussing American politics, he was almost a different person talking knowledgeably about Asia, financial markets, and Alfred Thayer Mahan, the American historian who was the most influential naval strategist in the world in the run-up to World War I.
A four-star general was likely to move around some two dozen times during the course of a long career. Typically, the general would move his family and household effects from one posting to the next. General Mattis instead moved his books—all seven thousand of them. In 2003 during the Iraq War, Mattis explained in an email to a fellow officer why deep reading about the history of warfare could help to save American lives on the battlefield: “By reading, you learn through others’ experiences—generally a better way to do business—especially in our line of work where the consequences of incompetence are so final for young men.”
Bannon met with Mattis and two of his top aides, senior adviser Sally Donnelly and chief of staff retired rear admiral Kevin Sweeney, in Mattis’s Pentagon office at 7:00 am on Saturday, June 24, to discuss the United States’ military posture around the world. During the course of a several-hour discussion, Bannon said to Mattis, “We’re talking about putting in Special Operations Forces from North Africa to the Saudi Peninsula to Asia. You’re all over the place. And there’s no strategy to back it up. It feels like we’re in something like seventy-three countries. We’ve got to pull the camera back and we’ve got to set a strategic framework.”
Bannon was obsessed by the long-term threat posed by China. He drew a diagram on a piece of paper for Mattis and his staff showing how China posed a rising challenge to American global supremacy, in particular, because of its ambitious “One Belt, One Road” policy that was designed to build transportation infrastructure that intertwined China deeply with the Middle East, Africa, and Europe.
The solution, Bannon said, was to build up “the Quad,” which was an emerging alliance between the democratic Pacific powers: Australia, India, Japan, and the United States.
Bannon kept a dog-eared, marked-up copy of Unrestricted Warfare, a treatise that was published by two Chinese army colonels in 1999. It laid out a surprisingly prescient strategy about how China could undercut the militarily far-superior United States through economic warfare and information operations. Bannon gave a copy of the book to Trump. At the White House, Bannon also handed out copies of Michael Pillsbury’s 2015 book The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower. A longtime scholar of China, Pillsbury argued that the Chinese were stealthily and patiently building up their economic, political, and military power with the ultimate aim to take their “rightful place” as the world’s sole superpower, but they were doing it in such a way that they weren’t, for the moment, directly challenging the United States.
Bannon also diagrammed for Mattis other key threats that he believed were in the ascendant, such as Iran. As he sketched out these threats, Bannon said, “Look, this is the dark valley. This is the 1930s all over again, right?”
In college, Bannon had studied the historian Arnold Toynbee, who argued that history was an endless cycle of the rise and decay of civilizations. Was the United States going to be the next hegemon in the also-ran category? An obscure tract published in 1997 also influenced Bannon, The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy—What the Cycles of History Tell Us about America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny. It was a work of pseudohistory purporting to have found the secret to the ebbs and flows of American history, and it prophesied a looming catastrophe for the United States. The Fourth Turning helped to confirm Bannon’s belief that the United States, and indeed the entire West, was in a phase of deep civilizational decay and was on the road to ruin until Trump had come along to save it.
Bannon was raised as a devout, orthodox Catholic and he believed strongly that “Judeo-Christian civilization” was under attack. Bannon’s apocalyptic vision du monde was underlined in an address he delivered via Skype to a group of conservative Catholics who were meeting at the Vatican during the summer of 2014. To the group at the Vatican, Bannon asserted, “We’re at the very beginning stages of a very brutal and bloody conflict, of which if the people in this room, the people in the church, do not bind together and really form what I feel is an aspect of the church militant, to really be able to not just stand with our beliefs, but to fight for our beliefs against this new barbarity that’s starting, that will completely eradicate everything that we’ve been bequeathed over the last two thousand five hundred years.”
Back in Mattis’s vast office at the Pentagon, Bannon said that Trump should be briefed on all of America’s global commitments from “the Pacific, all the way to the Gulf, to NATO. And let’s talk about the commercial relationships, the capital markets, the trade deals, the military-security alliances, and what we have as far as weapons, manpower, and bases.”
Bannon suggested that they do these presentations in “the Tank,” a bland conference room deep in the bowels of the Pentagon where the chiefs of the various branches of the military conducted their most important, classified business.
Bannon told Mattis that Trump “loves the Tank, because that’s where FDR and General Marshall ran World War II. It’s very historic.”
Mattis replied, “That’s a great idea.”
A day before the July 20 briefing in the Tank, Mattis went to see Tillerson in his seventh-floor conference room at the State Department to prep for the meeting with Trump. Neither Mattis nor Tillerson was a Trump guy. Both in their midsixties and outsiders in Trumpland who had never met Trump before they started working for him, they had formed a tight alliance that was cemented over a weekly breakfast that took place on Thursdays in the magnificently appointed formal reception rooms on the top floor of the State Department. Both cabinet secretaries were concerned that the United States was pulling back from the world. Already Trump had pulled the country out of the Paris climate agreement and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the trade deal between a dozen Pacific countries that was designed in part to contain the rise of China. Trump was also questioning the value of having a large military footprint overseas, whether it was in Europe or Asia. Mattis and Tillerson wanted to give Trump a primer about what the United States was doing around the world and how it benefited America’s security and kept international trade flowing.
For the briefing in the Tank, they sat Trump, of course, at the head of the conference room table. Sitting next to him was Mattis, and close to him was General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the top military adviser to the president and the most senior officer in the US military. During the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, then-colonel “Fighting Joe” Dunford and then-major general Mattis had worked closely, leading their marines in the fight to seize Baghdad.
Because the briefing was also going to outline American trade deals and financial commitments, in attendance were Cohn and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, who were both enormously rich veterans of Goldman Sachs. Sitting on the “backbenches” around the wall of the room were Bannon, who placed himself close to Trump, and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as well as a slew of senior military and national security officials.
Not present to discuss this overview of American national security was the national security adviser, H. R. McMaster, who was taking some rare time off for a family vacation.
This absence suited Tillerson, who barely spoke to McMaster. When McMaster was presiding over a “principals” meeting of Trump’s war cabinet, Tillerson would routinely “table-drop” documents at the last minute that hadn’t been circulated ahead of time to cabinet officials, which was Tillerson’s not-so-subtle way of trying to take control of the meeting and to sideline McMaster.
McMaster’s absence also suited Mattis, who pointedly referred to him as “Lieutenant General McMaster” in meetings. This was understood by officials at those meetings to be an intentional reminder that Mattis was an exalted, retired four-star general, while McMaster was an uppity officer of more junior rank. Also, Lieutenant General McMaster remained in uniform while he was the national security adviser so, in a sense, the secretary of defense was his boss. Mattis’s experience of being micromanaged by the Obama White House while he ran Central Command (CENTCOM) also seemed to have influenced his thinking about the role that the national security adviser should play in managing the Pentagon, which in his view was as little as possible.
For his part, McMaster felt that Mattis “slow rolled” any of the president’s priorities he disagreed with, such as providing a range of options for potential military strikes against North Korea.
McMaster began referring to Mattis and Tillerson as the “Club of Two.”
Both Tillerson and Mattis refused to send State Department and Pentagon officials to work for McMaster, a tactic that seemed designed to weaken the National Security Council, an unprecedented effort to undermine it since it was routine in every administration for Foreign Service officers and Pentagon officials to be detailed to work there.
Trump also found McMaster—a brilliant officer with a history PhD and a penchant for making multiple carefully constructed, professorial points about any given topic—to be something of an irritant. If McMaster presented on the Middle East to Trump, he might begin with the Ottoman Empire, showing scant instinct for his audience’s zone of interest or aptitude.
Bannon had warned McMaster before he took the job as national security adviser, “Whatever you do don’t be professorial. Trump is a game-day player. Trump is a guy who never went to class. Never got the syllabus. Never bought a book. Never took a note. He basically comes in the night before the final exams after partying all night, puts on a pot of coffee, takes your notes, memorizes what he’s got to memorize. Walks in at eight o’clock in the morning and gets whatever grade he needs. That’s the reason he doesn’t like professors. He doesn’t like being lectured to.”
For Bannon and McMaster it was even simpler; they held each other in considerable mutual contempt. Bannon described McMaster as a “fucking globalist and a professor,” while McMaster could never figure out exactly what Bannon’s deal was. What was Bannon actually trying to accomplish? Bannon was the smartest and most well-read of the America First faction in the Trump administration, while McMaster was the smartest and most well-read of the internationalist bloc. The arguments between them about the United States’ proper role in the world would in many ways define the debates about American foreign policy and national security strategy during Trump’s presidency.
In the Pentagon Tank, Mattis prefaced his “laydown” of US troop deployments around the world by telling Trump, “The greatest gift of the greatest generation is the post-war, liberal, international rules-based order.”
It was Mattis’s and Tillerson’s firmly held view that the United States had greatly benefited from the post–World War II order that it had largely created. One of the legacies of that order was a substantial American troop presence in countries around the globe, from Afghanistan to Germany and from Iraq to Japan.
Using two giant screens as aids, Mattis laid out American military commitments in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the Pacific. Mattis also touched on American nuclear weapons strategy, speaking for about half an hour. Tillerson followed with an explanation of America’s alliances. Cohn emphasized the strategic importance of strong trading relationships with allies in challenging regions such as South Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait.
Trump was uncharacteristically silent during these presentations, asking no questions and making no comments. When Cohn finished, Trump finally spoke up. His voice rising to a shout, Trump harangued his cabinet, “You guys have just walked through exactly what we’re not gonna do! We’re not doing this! The whole thing is on our shoulders. We’re everywhere. It’s our dollars! We’re going bankrupt! If NATO is so afraid of Russia, somebody must stand up and write some checks! Show me an ally. Get me an ally. Get me a guy that’s really pulling their weight. You got Israel, and you got UAE, right?”
For Trump, mutual defense alliances such as NATO were largely worthless. The real estate developer from New York City saw relations with other countries as transactions in which there could only be a winner and a loser, and he fervently believed that the United States was getting stiffed by some of its closest allies.
It was a strongly held belief that Trump had nurtured for at least three decades. In 1987, Trump had even paid for a full-page open letter in the New York Times in which he claimed, “For decades, Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States. . . . Make Japan, Saudi Arabia, and others pay for the protection we extend as allies.” That same year, Trump gave a speech at a Rotary club in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, asserting that Japan and Saudi Arabia were “ripping us off” and should pay off the United States’ then-$200 billion deficit.
Trump believed that the United States had taken upon itself a mandate to maintain world order instead of looking after the well-being of Americans. The United States had ended up solving everybody else’s problems by opening up its markets and by taking on security commitments that were well beyond its ability to pay for, and ultimately had created a world in which America was providing benefits to many other countries but was getting very little in return. It was unfair, Trump thought, and he resented it.
Trump was correct that many American allies were indeed “freeriding” on the United States in the era of Pax Americana. After World War II, which had devastated much of Europe and Asia, the United States accounted for about half of all global economic output. By the time that Trump met with his cabinet in the Tank, the United States produced just under a quarter of global output. This didn’t mean that the United States was producing fewer goods and services, but rather that Europe and Asia were now producing far more after they had rebuilt their war-torn economies. Britain, France, Germany, and Japan were all now economic powerhouses, yet it was the United States that continued to be the world’s policeman.
President Obama had privately pushed for NATO allies to spend at least 2 percent of their GDP on defense, which few did. Of the twenty-nine countries in NATO in 2017, only six hit this target: Estonia, Greece, Poland, Romania, the United Kingdom, and the United States. NATO European countries collectively spent around $250 billion on their own defense while the United States spent around $700 billion. Trump publicly berated NATO allies to spend 2 percent or more of their GDP on defense.
In the Pentagon Tank, Trump then turned on Cohn, who had spent his career at institutions predicated on the belief that free markets and free trade ineluctably led to greater American prosperity. Trump was having none of it. He railed against the United States’ large trade deficits with countries like China.
Gesturing to the charts on the screens that showed American trade with the world, Trump said, “Look at this, Gary. We’re upside down everywhere! I don’t get your stuff about how trade deficits don’t count. Let’s assume these minus numbers count! They’re ripping us off, right?”
The businessman from Queens was just asking the same kind of questions that many of those who had elected him were asking.
If there was a core tenet of a “Trump Doctrine,” it was that economic power wasn’t just about prosperity, it was also a form of hard, national power, which is why Trump often focused on trade issues. Trump told his advisers, “Look, national security is a function of two things. It’s the military stuff, and I’m rebuilding the military, but it’s also economics. It’s trade. It’s finance.”
For the first twenty minutes of Trump’s tirade in the Tank, Bannon was silent. He’d never been prouder of Donald J. Trump than now. Bannon later told White House colleagues, “Fuck, this guy was so good. Their fucking heads were blowing up.”
When he saw an opening, Bannon lit into the treasury secretary, Steve Mnuchin, who would be responsible for implementing financial sanctions on Iran if, as seemed very likely, Trump decided to pull out of the Iranian nuclear deal that had been painstakingly negotiated by the Obama administration.
Bannon told Mnuchin, “The Iran deal, you know he’s ripping this fucking thing up. As soon as he puts sanctions on Iran, I want you to name me one fucking European country that is with us.”
Mnuchin tried to respond, but Bannon interrupted him, saying, “They’re not allies, they’re protectorates. Name me one meaningful country. Give me a country that’s going to support us on Iran, in particular on sanctions. Name me one country. They’re making money hand over fist in Iran. They’re supposed to be allies. Give me one name. Well, they’re not there. Fuck you. They’re not going to be there.”
This was not the kind of discussion FDR had presided over in the Tank during World War II.
Trump turned on Tillerson, who was visibly uncomfortable with the discussion of the Iranian nuclear agreement, which he was trying to preserve.
Trump said, “I told you, Rex: I want that fucking thing redone. Rex, you’re a globalist.”
In Trump’s lexicon, a globalist meant somebody who was undercutting the America First campaign that he had run on.
Tillerson, who had made a vast fortune by striking agreements with countries around the world as the global CEO of Exxon, was discombobulated by Trump’s attack. A systems-oriented engineer who had spent four decades at Exxon, Tillerson considered Trump to be quite undisciplined, and he was puzzled that the president didn’t like to read briefing books or to get into the details of things.
As Trump continued to harangue him, Tillerson conceded defeat, leaning back in his chair and saying in his broad Texas accent, “It’s your deal.” At this point, Tillerson wasn’t even looking at Trump. “It’s your deal, if that’s what you want. It’s your deal, just tell me what to do.”
During these heated discussions Vice President Pence kept his mouth shut. National security issues were not his deal either. When it came to foreign policy, Pence only really cared about one issue, which was the persecution of Christians in the Middle East.
Trump didn’t directly attack Mattis, the only member of his cabinet that he then seemed to truly respect, but he did criticize American military commitments overseas, saying, “General, I disagree with all of this.”
By now, after six months on the job, many of the “principals” in the cabinet knew the kind of roller-coaster ride they could be on with Trump, but this ride was about to get a whole lot stranger.
Trump started yelling, “Generals, I love you, but you don’t know business, you don’t know economics. We’re getting crushed. Look at this. We’re upside down. We’re fucking bleeding. Look at the fucking Chinese. They’re making money hand over fist. They’re fucking us.” Referring to the Afghan War, Trump demanded to know from General Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, “Why don’t we win anymore? Why are we not winning?” Three years earlier Dunford had been the commander of the Afghan War, a fact that Trump either didn’t know or didn’t care about.
Taking on General Dunford in the Pentagon was like haranguing the Pope in the Vatican; a certain decorum and a great respect for rank prevails at the Pentagon, and the Tank was regarded as a sacred space. Yet here was the commander in chief ripping into the nation’s top military officer in front of some two dozen of the nation’s most senior military and national security officials. It was hardly the Pentagon’s fault that some 190,000 American soldiers were deployed around the world, or that the United States was party to all sorts of global trade deals. These were the legacies of more than seventy years of bipartisan American policy making.
After a couple of hours, the meeting in the Tank ended. Trump left the room to pose for some happy snaps with a group of smiling servicemen and servicewomen who were waiting for him outside the room. Trump then left for the White House, as did Bannon, Kushner, and Trump’s chief of staff, Reince Priebus.
In the car back to the White House, Bannon was euphoric, telling Kushner and Priebus, “This is Lincoln and his generals.” A Civil War buff, Bannon thought that Trump had just fired the first volley to force his generals to follow his lead, just as President Lincoln had exerted increasingly more control over his generals as the war against the Confederacy had ground on. The meeting in the Tank marked Trump’s decisive break with the “axis of adults” such as Mattis and Tillerson who were, in Bannon’s view, constraining Trump.
The mood in the Tank after Trump left was funereal. The president had just launched a cruise missile through seven decades of American national security policy and trade agreements.
Remaining in the Tank were Mattis, Pence, and Tillerson. To no one in particular, Tillerson said, “That guy’s a fucking moron.”
A version of this observation would soon leak to the media, and it was only a matter of time before Tillerson would be fired.
In the Tank, there was a desultory discussion of redoing the briefing, which everyone agreed was a fiasco. It should have been a predictable fiasco because Trump loathed being lectured to and he also hated getting managed in any way. Trump’s professional experience before becoming president was running a relatively small family real estate company in which he was the sole and unquestioned boss. The cabinet officials briefing Trump in the Tank had treated the president like he was a schoolkid who needed remedial coaching.
Cohn walked back into the White House complex, where he found Bannon. “Well, that was pleasant,” Cohn observed drily.
Bannon replied, “When are you prepared to get real and drop all this crazy shit you believe on this free trade bullshit? Gary, the day that I can convince you and convert you about the reality of trade and what deficits really mean is the day I’ll support you to be chairman of the Federal Reserve.”
Bannon thought, “This guy has never seen a factory in his life. For him, trade deficits don’t matter.”
Trump and Bannon went to the Oval Office, where they savored their victory at the Pentagon.
Trump told Bannon, “Steve, that was spectacular. We had them on the ropes. Rex is a globalist. Rex didn’t have any idea what to say.”
Bannon replied, “He’ll never get it, Mr. President. He’s totally establishment in his thinking.”
“Totally establishment,” Trump agreed. “That’s the perfect way to put it: completely and totally establishment. Everyone in the room was completely and totally establishment.”
Trump then needled Bannon about not speaking up earlier during the meeting in the Tank, saying, “Where the fuck were you when I was getting clobbered? Where were you, tough guy?”
Bannon replied, “Hey, you had it handled. It didn’t look like you needed any help. I didn’t want it to be an unfair fight.”
The Tank meeting was one of the most important moments of Trump’s presidency. Trump had for the first time laid down a marker in front of pretty much his entire cabinet that an isolationist, protectionist America First policy really was the Trump Doctrine.
No modern president had ever appointed so many generals to cabinet posts. Trump had never served in the military or in political office and so he needed the cover of senior officers around him with plenty of fruit salad on their chests. But Trump’s romance with his generals would eventually turn disastrously sour and the meeting in the Tank marked the beginning of the end of that romance.
Trump was now six months on the job and he had heard all the highly classified briefings about national security that he needed, and he wasn’t going to get railroaded by the establishment Council on Foreign Relations types anymore. They were part of the problem, not the solution. From now on, Trump was just going to be Trump.
The “axis of adults” would just have to go along for the ride. Or be thrown off the bus.