On the New Year’s morning of 2019—not traditionally a time for recrimination—a presidential tweet denigrated retired general Stanley McChrystal, the commander of the Afghan War who had resigned because of the disparaging remarks that officers on his staff had made to a reporter about senior Obama administration officials.
Trump tweeted, “‘General’ McChrystal got fired like a dog by Obama. Last assignment a total bust. Known for big, dumb mouth. Hillary lover!”
This tweet followed an interview that McChrystal gave to ABC News in which he had described Trump as immoral and dishonest. Trump was known for being a counterpuncher, so on one level it wasn’t surprising he reacted this way to McChrystal’s withering criticism, but when you stepped back, the degree to which Trump was now battling America’s generals was startling, considering how he had begun his presidency.
Trump came into office besotted by military brass, appointing Generals Flynn, Kelly, Mattis, and McMaster to key roles. A year and a half later, Trump was at war with the four-star officers he had once embraced. That war was sparked by former CIA director John Brennan, who tweeted after Trump’s Helsinki summit with Putin that “Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki rises to & exceeds the threshold of ‘high crimes & misdemeanors.’ It was nothing short of treasonous. Not only were Trump’s comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin.” A public charge by a former CIA director that Trump was committing treason was a serious matter.
Trump, of course, fired back. Former CIA directors traditionally kept their security clearances, which allowed them to continue to give advice in classified settings to current intelligence officials. A month after the Helsinki summit, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders announced that Brennan’s clearances were going to be yanked because he had made “a series of unfounded and outrageous allegations.”
Admiral Bill McRaven, the architect of the SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011, was on vacation in a remote part of Colorado with scant access to cell phone or internet coverage when he heard the news that Brennan’s clearances had been revoked. McRaven rarely made public statements of a political nature, but it stuck in his craw that Trump was bullying Brennan who had, among other services to the United States, played a key role in the decision to green-light the bin Laden operation.
When he found a spot where he could make a call, McRaven phoned Karen Tumulty, a columnist at the Washington Post whom he had known since high school. McRaven dictated a short but withering open letter to Trump that soon appeared in the Post that read, “Dear Mr. President: Former CIA director John Brennan, whose security clearance you revoked on Wednesday, is one of the finest public servants I have ever known. Few Americans have done more to protect this country than John. He is a man of unparalleled integrity, whose honesty and character have never been in question, except by those who don’t know him. Therefore, I would consider it an honor if you would revoke my security clearance as well, so I can add my name to the list of men and women who have spoken up against your presidency.”
McRaven piled on: “Like most Americans, I had hoped that when you became president, you would rise to the occasion and become the leader this great nation needs. A good leader tries to embody the best qualities of his or her organization. A good leader sets the example for others to follow. A good leader always puts the welfare of others before himself or herself. Your leadership, however, has shown little of these qualities. Through your actions, you have embarrassed us in the eyes of our children, humiliated us on the world stage and, worst of all, divided us as a nation.”
There was arguably no American military officer more revered than McRaven because of his key role in avenging the 9/11 attacks, so when McRaven’s letter appeared, Trump managed only an uncharacteristically tepid response, saying, “I don’t know McRaven,” as if the fact that he didn’t know the retired admiral therefore invalidated McRaven’s criticisms.
Three months after McRaven published his letter in the Post, Chris Wallace of Fox News asked Trump to respond to comments that McRaven had made that Trump’s attacks on the news media “may be the greatest threat to democracy in my lifetime.” Trump responded that McRaven was a “Hillary Clinton backer and an Obama backer.” In fact, McRaven had taken no position on the 2016 presidential election. After Trump’s interview, McRaven told CNN, “I did not back Hillary Clinton or anyone else. I am a fan of President Obama and President George W. Bush, both of whom I worked for.”
Few who worked at senior levels in the administration of President Trump left with their reputations unsullied. Even fewer left on their own terms. Jim Mattis was one of the latter. The break between Mattis and Trump represented the most consequential split between those in the Trump administration who valued the United States’ international alliances and commitments and those, like Trump, who did not. Others had gone before Mattis; McMaster also valued American allies, having served alongside them in Afghanistan and Iraq. But Mattis was the longest-serving senior cabinet official to leave the administration, and he resigned on principle, in particular regarding how Trump treated America’s international alliances.
Trump’s split with Mattis was a long time coming. For much of his tenure as secretary of defense, Mattis had performed the neat trick of keeping some independence from Trump but also not pissing him off. Mattis avoided the spotlight, giving almost no interviews or press conferences. When the New York Times Magazine ran a major profile of Mattis in March 2018, he wouldn’t sit for an interview or even a photograph. The Trump administration had only one star and that was Trump.
Yet Mattis also didn’t perform North Korean–level flattery of the Great Leader. When Trump convened his first full cabinet meeting on June 12, 2017, cabinet officials outdid one another to flatter the president as the TV cameras rolled. Chief of Staff Reince Priebus told Trump, “On behalf of the entire senior staff around you, Mr. President, we thank you for the opportunity and the blessing that you’ve given us to serve your agenda and the American people.”* Mattis took a different tack, thanking the “men and women of the Department of Defense” rather than thanking Trump.
Mattis and Trump had fundamental policy differences that began to add up over time. The blockade of Qatar was one of the first. Anyone who understood the Middle East even superficially understood that the United States had a variety of frenemies in the region who sometimes worked to help American interests by, for instance, maintaining a predictable and reasonably priced supply of oil and gas, but that the same countries also supported jihadists in some manner. Singling out Qatar, which was home to arguably the most important US military base outside the United States, made no sense when it was the Saudis who had kicked out large numbers of American soldiers from their country after 9/11 and who also had done so much to export jihadist ideology around the world.
After the blockade of Qatar, the Saudis told White House officials that they would be willing to host a base similar to Qatar’s Al Udeid Air Base on their soil.
American officials laughed at the notion, saying, “No, we already did that, and you kicked us out. We’re not doing that again.”
In 2003, the George W. Bush administration had pulled almost all US troops out of Saudi Arabia and turned over to Saudi control the massive Prince Sultan Air Base, which had once housed tens of thousands of American servicemen. The long-term presence of those American soldiers on the “holy land” of Saudi Arabia was the central reason that Osama bin Laden and his followers had turned against the United States. That’s why the key American base in the Middle East was now in Qatar.
A month after the beginning of the Qatar blockade, the Pentagon was blindsided by a Trump tweet ordering the banning of transgender individuals serving in uniform. This tweet came less than a month after Mattis had announced a six-month review of the matter.
For their part, White House officials became increasingly frustrated with what they believed to be Mattis’s efforts not to provide a range of military options to the president, in particular for any kind of potential showdown with Iran. They learned that Mattis had instructed his generals not to provide such options. Mattis was focused on the wars against ISIS and in Afghanistan as well as the challenge posed by China, and the message he sent to his team was that there should be no more commitments in the Middle East that might draw the United States into a larger war, especially with Iran. Mattis refused to acknowledge a cabinet memo about the situation in Iraq’s Kurdistan region, which was a legitimate order from the president. Mattis refused to even do information operations in Iraq on the basis that it might provoke the Iranians to attack American bases in Iraq.
Mattis’s caution was underlined by his reaction to the Assad regime’s continued use of chemical weapons against its own people. In late February 2018, the regime used chemical weapons in a rebel-held suburb of Damascus. McMaster, Tillerson, and Trump all wanted to take action against Assad, but Mattis slow rolled the military options.
A little over a month later, on April 7 the regime unleashed a chemical weapons attack in a rebel-controlled area of Damascus, killing dozens of civilians. This attack was going to be hard to ignore. The video of the victims foaming at the mouth as they died was disturbing and affected Trump in much the same visceral way that the similar attack in Syria had affected him a year before.
Just four days earlier, Trump had met with his top generals and national security officials and had railed against the continuing US military presence in Syria and how much it was costing. They pushed back, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Joseph Dunford, who said it would be premature to withdraw, as it would leave Syria to the Iranians and Russians.
Mattis felt that the US needed to be in Syria long after the defeat of ISIS in order to stabilize the country.
Trump regularly told his war cabinet that the US needed to “get out” of Syria. An argument against that position that seemed to resonate with Trump was not to replicate the mistake that Obama had made when he pulled out all American forces from Iraq at the end of 2011, which had made the country vulnerable to the rise of ISIS.
Three days after the chemical weapons attack, the emir of Qatar, Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani, visited the White House. Trump’s views about the Qatar blockade were shifting. The intelligence community had produced an assessment that said the last time that Qatar had had any role in financing terrorism was in 2014. Trump realized that the Saudi claims about the perfidy of the Qataris were massively overblown.
The emir urged Trump to take real action against Assad as opposed to the largely symbolic cruise missile attacks that the president had authorized a year earlier that had damaged a Syrian airfield that the Syrians had quickly repaired. The emir told Trump, “If the action is like last year it will be useless. Assad only understands force. If you do something only symbolic it will make him even stronger.”
Trump didn’t disagree with the Qatari emir. He also felt that any military operation against the Assad regime shouldn’t be merely symbolic. Trump tweeted that American missiles “will be coming, nice and new and ‘smart!’”
The initial assessment of the April 7 chemical weapons attack in Damascus was that the Assad regime had used the nerve agent sarin together with less lethal chlorine gas. As the assessment went on, American analysts came to doubt that sarin was used, determining instead that chlorine was used in high concentrations in a closed space that produced symptoms in the victims that were similar to those caused by sarin.
In response, Bolton wanted to strike not only targets in Syria that were producing chemical weapons, but also targets associated with Assad as well as his “enablers,” the Russian and Iranian forces in Syria that were helping to prop up the Assad regime. Mattis and Dunford were horrified. Mattis made it very clear that any American operation in Syria had to be done in such a way that it did not kill Russians because he was convinced that if that happened, the United States would be at war with Russia. For Mattis, a military operation that spiraled out of control in Syria could spark a wider conflict.
White House officials considered whether there should be a sustained campaign against Assad’s regime as well as attacks directed against targets associated with Assad himself. Some officials wanted to destroy Assad’s air force and render all of his airfields unusable so that he couldn’t launch chemical weapons attacks from the air. But Mattis did not provide the military options necessary for those kinds of operations and instead offered a plan to attack sites where the regime was manufacturing or storing chemical weapons.
Unlike McMaster, Bolton had, at least initially, a good relationship with Trump. Bolton, only a week into his new job as national security adviser, told Dunford that the relatively limited military option the Pentagon was offering was not the robust response that the president wanted.
Pentagon officials pushed back on the White House, saying there wasn’t time to “develop” other targets. This was disingenuous. There were well-known targets, such as the headquarters of Assad’s elite Fourth Armored Division, which was responsible for protecting the regime, but the Pentagon wanted to avoid any Iranian casualties and Iranian advisers might be embedded with such a unit. Mattis also wanted to avoid the possibility of killing any of the Russian forces that were helping to prop up Assad. Mattis was additionally concerned that a really big strike against Assad’s regime might force the Russians to move to protect Assad.
A senior Trump administration official recalled that Mattis and Dunford “did one of the best rope-a-dopes I have ever seen as they used the whole military planning process to just drag this thing out and really socialize the idea that if we’re not careful, we’re going to be at war, and that war could become a world war.”
Mattis made the point that as awful as deploying chemical weapons was, it was used at a tactical level by a local commander in response to a situation that the commander felt had gotten out of hand, and the casualty numbers were actually relatively small. It wasn’t as if a strategic interest of the United States had been fundamentally threatened.
In the end, Mattis carried the day and the plan for the military operation consisted of a little more than one hundred missiles aimed at Assad’s chemical weapons production and storage facilities.
The exact timing of the strike was highly classified. There was a deception operation to suggest that the strikes would happen three days later than they actually did.
When the operation was carried out, nobody was killed. After the strikes, Mattis gave a press briefing in which he emphasized, “We used a little over double the number of weapons this year than we used last year. It was done on targets that we believed were selected to hurt the chemical weapons program. We confined it to the chemical weapons-type targets. We were not out to expand this. We were very precise and proportionate.” Mattis was not going to do anything that might precipitate a wider war in the Middle East.
The second US military operation against Syria in April 2018 was the beginning of Mattis’s undoing with President Trump because by the end of the process the president understood that Mattis was “managing” him, which Trump deeply resented. For his part, Mattis believed that at any moment the president could do something irrational, so he had to be the force for reason.
Mattis often said, “We have to make sure reason trumps impulse.”
White House officials realized that Mattis believed Trump was a loose cannon and that Mattis didn’t want to enable any bad decisions by providing military options that Trump could then seize upon. White House officials started to refer to “Mad Dog” Mattis as “Little Baby Kitten” Mattis.
In fact, the premise behind Mattis’s view of Trump was questionable. When it came to the actual use of force, Commander in Chief Trump wasn’t impulsive, but generally cautious about American military operations despite his often hyperventilating public rhetoric. Trump ramped up the US troop presence in Afghanistan in 2017 only with the greatest reluctance, and in 2019 he authorized a significant drawdown of those troops. The US strikes against Syrian regime targets in 2017 and 2018 were well calibrated not to lead to a wider conflict. As soon as ISIS’s geographical “caliphate” was largely eliminated, Trump routinely told his advisers that he wanted to pull American forces out of Syria and he withdrew the bulk of those forces in early 2019. Beginning in the spring of 2018, Trump went out of his way to embrace Kim Jong Un and to avoid any moves that might lead to war with the North Koreans.
Trump’s America First foreign policy gathered steam during the spring and summer of 2018 and it created further tensions between the president and his secretary of defense. Trump told his senior advisers that he was thinking of pulling the United States out of NATO. Trump also feuded publicly with allies at a NATO summit in Brussels in July, calling them “delinquent” in their defense spending and making the false claim that “many countries owe us a tremendous amount of money for many years back.” That’s not the way NATO worked. As mentioned above, each country in the alliance had agreed to spend 2 percent of their GDP on defense by 2024. None of that spending was “owed” to any other country.
This all contrasted with Mattis’s deep support of NATO. At his confirmation hearing, Mattis described it as “the most successful military alliance probably in modern world history and maybe ever.” On his first day in office, Mattis made it a point to call the NATO secretary-general, the British defense secretary, and the Canadian defense minister to emphasize the continuing American commitment to the alliance.
Trump had kowtowed to Putin at the Helsinki summit in July 2018. Several months later, Mattis said publicly at the Reagan Defense Forum in California, “We simply cannot trust” Putin.
In June 2018, Trump attended a much-ballyhooed summit in Singapore with Kim and later declared, “We fell in love.” This love affair had scant impact on the dictator’s nuclear ambitions. The North Koreans accelerated their ballistic missile program at more than a dozen secret bases, yet Trump had canceled joint US–South Korea military exercises, a staple of the alliance for decades. The move blindsided Mattis and was a gift to the North Koreans.
Mattis was also frustrated with the management style of the new national security adviser, John Bolton. Where McMaster had convened relatively frequent meetings of the National Security Council, Bolton dealt with few officials on the NSC and kept his own counsel. Instead of conducting “principals” meetings in person, Bolton convened “paper committees” where he would send around papers with which the principals could “concur” or “non-concur” with a particular course of action by a certain date. Some of this was because Bolton—despite his fearsome reputation—was a classic shy introvert.
Mattis complained to Bolton about the collapse of a formal national security review process because of the lack of NSC meetings chaired by Bolton. Bolton ignored Mattis.
When mortar attacks landed in the US embassy compound in Baghdad on September 6, 2018, likely launched by a Shia militia with ties to Iran, Bolton asked for a range of military options against the Iranians. Mattis was alarmed by the request. Bolton then tried to go directly to CENTCOM to ask for options that he believed were completely legitimate for him to be able to provide to Trump. Mattis blocked Bolton.
Another point of tension was the deployment of active-duty soldiers to the United States–Mexico border in late October 2018 just before the midterm elections. Trump made “the crisis at the border” a central theme of that election. Trump ordered more than five thousand troops to the border to deal with the purported “invasion” of asylum seekers that were then approaching.
Mattis knew that soldiers weren’t trained to act as Border Patrol agents and he remembered the tragic incident when President Bill Clinton had ordered marines to the border to hunt for drug smugglers in 1997. The marines had accidentally killed an eighteen-year-old American kid who was grazing his family’s goats near the border. The marines simply hadn’t trained to do domestic law enforcement.
The border deployment of troops also looked like the military was being used for a political stunt. Even on Fox there was some skepticism about Trump’s claim of an invasion. Fox News anchor Shepard Smith noted, “Tomorrow is one week before the midterm election, which is what all of this is about. There is no invasion. No one’s coming to get you. There’s nothing at all to worry about.”
A sign of the fraying relationship between Trump and Mattis came when Trump told Lesley Stahl on CBS’s 60 Minutes in an interview that aired on October 14, 2018, that Mattis was “sort of a Democrat.” This was not intended to be a compliment. It was also wildly off the mark, as Mattis was not affiliated with any party.
Trump, who had a schoolboy penchant for nicknames, also began to refer to his secretary of defense not as “Mad Dog” Mattis, but as “Moderate Dog.”
What especially irked Mattis was Trump’s decision in the first week of December to ignore his recommendation that the air force chief of staff, General David Goldfein, become the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Mattis’s view was that he got to choose his own chairman, who was both the top officer in the US military and his principal military adviser. Trump instead chose General Mark Milley, who was the army chief of staff. Milley presented a gruff, tough-guy persona of the type that appealed to Trump, but he was also a Princeton grad who thought carefully about strategy. Mattis felt that Trump was blithely ignoring his advice on an issue that Mattis thought was of critical importance.
Days after the decision to appoint Milley as chairman was announced by Trump—by tweet—President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey started threatening to launch attacks against Kurdish forces in Syria that were advised by some two thousand American troops. By then the US-backed Kurdish forces known as the Syrian Democratic Forces had largely defeated ISIS on the ground in Syria. Trump’s advisers wanted him to tell Erdogan that American forces in Syria would fire on the Turkish military if they attacked the Kurdish forces. Trump told his advisers, “I’m not gonna do this: start a war with a NATO ally which has the biggest army in Europe.”
Trump also was annoyed that the Saudis had reneged on what he believed was an agreement that they would secure $4 billion to pay the costs of US military operations in Syria, operations that after all benefited the Saudis against two of their archenemies, Iran and ISIS.
Trump’s attitude was “Why are my people dying so that we can then turn the country over to Iran and Russia when Assad doesn’t leave? It’s not our neighborhood. This isn’t our fight. If you want us there, you pay for it.”
Trump told King Salman, “It doesn’t all have to come from you; it could come from other Arab states, but we’re counting on you guys on bringing this home for us if you want us to stay in Syria because it’s going to cover our operational costs in Syria.”
King Salman made some polite “Inshallah” (“God willing”) responses to Trump about the $4 billion. Inshallah can mean a wide range of things in the Middle East, from “Hmmm, interesting idea. Let me think about it” to “Likely this won’t happen in our lifetimes,” but Trump thought he had secured a deal with the Saudis.
Trump spoke with Erdogan in a phone call on December 14 during which the Turkish leader reminded Trump that he had repeatedly said that the US troops were in Syria only to defeat ISIS and now that that had happened wasn’t it time for them to leave? Turkey could handle any residual ISIS problem. Trump surprised Erdogan and Bolton, who was also on the call, when he suddenly pledged to withdraw all American troops from Syria. Trump told Erdogan, “It’s all yours. We are done.”
The CENTCOM commander, General Votel, knew that the Turks, in fact, didn’t have a realistic plan to defeat ISIS. “We had spent quite a bit of time looking at the various options that the Turks had proposed, and it was hard to see one that was feasible that would be better than what we had with the Syrian Democratic Forces,” recalled Votel.
Bolton, Mattis, and Pompeo met Trump at the White House to try to persuade him not to pull out the troops in Syria. Such a move risked the return of ISIS and also handed a victory to the Iranian forces in Syria who were backing Assad.
Two days after Trump’s call with Erdogan, Brett McGurk, who managed the global coalition to defeat ISIS, publicly warned against a withdrawal from Syria at the Doha Forum in Qatar, an annual gathering of national security officials from around the world. While McGurk described ISIS as a “significantly degraded organization,” he warned that “no one who does this day to day is naive enough to know you can just declare victory and walk away. We have to maintain pressure on these networks really, for a period of years.”
McGurk was traveling to Iraq when he received a call from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo telling him that Trump was indeed declaring victory and walking away from Syria. Against the advice of his national security advisers and with no consultation with key allies such as the Saudis, Trump made the troop withdrawal announcement via a tweet on December 19. Trump wrote, “We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency.” In a video also posted on Twitter, Trump declared, “Our boys, our young women, our men—they’re all coming back, and they’re coming back now.”
There was no way McGurk, who coordinated the efforts of the many dozens of countries that made up the coalition against ISIS, could sell the new Syria policy to American allies who had long been assured that the United States would remain in Syria to ensure that ISIS didn’t stage a comeback. McGurk told colleagues, “Listen, my legs got chopped out from under me. I can’t stick around and do this.” McGurk resigned.
General Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, called Votel to inform him that the United States was pulling out of Syria. Votel then had the difficult job of informing the Syrian Democratic Forces about what was happening. Within a couple of hours, Votel had the commander of the SDF, General Mazloum Kobani Abdi, up on a secure videoconference.
Votel told Mazloum: “The President has directed us to withdraw all our forces from Syria. We just received the orders so have not had a chance to fully assess how it would be done, but I wanted to ensure you heard about it from me and not through the media.”
Votel had visited Mazloum in Syria repeatedly and had gotten to know him pretty well. Votel found that Middle Eastern commanders such as Mazloum tended to take bad news better than their American counterparts, but still this was tough as they both knew that now the SDF could be exposed to the much larger forces of the Turkish military that were seeking to destroy them. Votel emphasized to Mazloum that the Americans would be as deliberate as possible with their withdrawal. Votel saw no strategic rationale for the withdrawal and would have recommended against it if he had been consulted, which he hadn’t been.
What was particularly odd about Trump’s policy shift was it did exactly what Trump repeatedly had warned against during his campaign. It gave America’s enemies an early heads-up about US military plans. During the campaign, Trump also had critiqued the total American troop withdrawal from Iraq under Obama as helping pave the way for the rise of ISIS. Why risk any kind of repeat of this in Syria?
The announcement of the precipitous pullout of the American soldiers from Syria was an early Christmas present to Assad and his allies Putin and Iran, as well as to ISIS and al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria. It also left the US-backed Kurdish forces that did almost all the fighting against ISIS vulnerable to attack by the powerful Turkish military. In effect, Trump’s decision risked abandoning an American ally on the battlefield.
At 7:30 am on December 20, the day after Trump had tweeted about pulling out of Syria, Mattis decided to go to see the president. Mattis was livid about abandoning the Kurdish forces to their fate. At 3:00 pm Mattis met with Trump in the Oval Office and tried to persuade the president to reverse his decision. Trump wouldn’t budge, so Mattis pulled out a two-page resignation letter.
Mattis’s letter called out Trump on the need for “showing respect” to longtime allies. Mattis reminded Trump that twenty-nine NATO countries had fought “alongside” the US since 9/11. Mattis also took Trump to task for his mollycoddling of Russia and its “authoritarian model.” In a final dig, Mattis reminded the president that he based his critique of Trump’s policies on “over four decades of immersion in these issues.” That was a not-so-subtle reminder that Trump was a national security neophyte and the first president who had neither served in the military nor ever held political office.
After Mattis announced his resignation, he said that he would stay in the job until the end of February to allow for an orderly transition.
Trump canceled his Christmas trip to Mar-a-Lago due to the government shutdown he had precipitated because Congress, in his view, hadn’t funded his border wall sufficiently. So Trump was stuck at the White House watching a ton of cable news. Trump gave CNN the Stalinist appellation “the enemy of the people,” but he watched hours of the network. Trump seethed over the laudatory coverage of Mattis’s resignation on principle. Some of the coverage focused on the fact that Mattis was the last of the “axis of adults” to leave the administration, a group that also included Cohn, Kelly, McMaster, and Tillerson, all of whom had tried to moderate Trump’s often-petulant policy choices.
Trump called Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and asked him to tell Mattis he was being pushed out two months early. (Trump never did his own dirty work.) Mattis was out of his job at the end of December.
Trump turned again to one of his most trusted military advisers, Fox News analyst and retired general Jack Keane, and asked him if he would take the secretary of defense job. For the second time in two plus years, Keane turned down Trump’s offer. After the decade-and-a-half-long illness of his wife and her subsequent death, Keane was now remarrying at the end of 2019, and he preferred to be an informal outside adviser rather than taking on the top job at the Pentagon.
Mattis was replaced by Patrick Shanahan, a longtime Boeing executive who had no previous military or government experience before he was appointed to be Mattis’s deputy in 2017. Trump nominated Shanahan to be the next secretary of defense. As the confirmation process moved forward, reporters found out that almost a decade earlier Shanahan had had a domestic violence dispute with his wife and in a separate incident his seventeen-year-old son had attacked his wife with a baseball bat, causing her serious injuries, an action Shanahan had defended at the time. Six months after assuming the position of acting secretary of defense, Shanahan dropped out of consideration for the top Pentagon job to “devote more time to his family,” according to Trump. This was one of the oldest euphemisms in Washington, DC. There was scant chance Shanahan was going to survive what would surely have been a brutal confirmation hearing.
What was mystifying was that Shanahan had spent six months as the secretary of defense—in many ways the most important cabinet post—despite his limited qualifications for the job and also a history of violence in his family that might have disqualified most officials from obtaining the most sensitive of security clearances.
After Mattis resigned, Trump tweeted, “When President Obama ingloriously fired Jim Mattis, I gave him a second chance. Some thought I shouldn’t, I thought I should.” It was true that Mattis’s term as commander of Central Command was wound up early by the Obama administration, but far from giving Mattis a “second chance,” Trump was quite eager to install Mattis as his secretary of defense. Trump had publicly compared Mattis to one of his heroes, General George Patton, shortly after he tapped Mattis for the Pentagon job.
Following his resignation, Mattis largely maintained an eloquent silence about his time in Trumpworld. Mattis took seriously what the French term the devoir de réserve—the duty of reserve—meaning that public officials should keep silent about their time in office.
Mattis went back to his quiet retirement in Washington State and renewed his fellowship at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. Mattis’s office was not far from that of H. R. McMaster, who also was a fellow at Hoover. They occasionally bumped into each other in the hallways, but other than exchanging the briefest of greetings, the two veterans of Trump’s war cabinet didn’t spend any time together.
Just as Trump’s relationship with Mattis had soured, so too did it with Mattis’s friend John Kelly. For Mattis, Kelly had been a great source of information, guidance, and atmospherics about what was happening at the White House. In late July 2017, Trump had tweeted, “I am pleased to inform you that I have just named General/Secretary John F Kelly as White House Chief of Staff. He is a Great American.” Over time the bromance fizzled—as it so often did with Trump—and Kelly left the White House at the end of December 2018.
Kelly saw his tenure in the White House best measured by what he had prevented President Trump from doing—for instance, from pulling out of Afghanistan, as was the president’s first instinct, or withdrawing from NATO, or pulling American forces out of South Korea.
Trump, who had become famous for a TV show in which his trademark line was “You’re fired,” set records for the level of turnover at the White House and in his cabinet. Kelly was one of the four top generals that Trump had brought in to run his administration. Flynn was fired within a month of Trump assuming office. McMaster resigned under pressure after just over a year as national security adviser. Mattis resigned after two years as secretary of defense. Trump then claimed, incorrectly, that he had fired Mattis. Kelly resigned when he was no longer on speaking terms with the president, which made his job as chief of staff untenable.
The differences between Trump and US military leaders were more than merely stylistic, although Trump’s lack of decorum and rudeness were certainly at odds with the military’s honor-based values. Military leaders tended to want to sustain overseas military commitments, which they saw as vital to securing world order, whether that was to defeat ISIS, or to contain a nuclear-armed North Korea, or to prevent Afghanistan from reverting to control by the Taliban. Trump believed he was elected to end foreign entanglements and that alliances like NATO were ripping off the United States. The generals knew that NATO allies had fought shoulder to shoulder with them since the 9/11 attacks.
Two weeks after Trump had said that the withdrawal of US troops from Syria would happen immediately, the Pentagon and the president came to an agreement to pull them out over a period of four months.
John Bolton was dispatched to the Middle East to provide some kind of ex post facto cleanup for Trump’s hasty decision on Syria, which wasn’t coordinated with American allies. On January 6, 2019, Bolton muddied the waters further, saying on a visit to Israel that the US would only withdraw from Syria if ISIS was completely defeated and if the safety of America’s Kurdish allies fighting ISIS was guaranteed, a process that could take years.
This produced a furious response from Erdogan, who thought he had made a deal with Trump. Erdogan said on TV, “Bolton’s remarks in Israel are not acceptable. It is not possible for me to swallow this. Bolton made a serious mistake.”
Trump weighed in, tweeting about Syria: “We will be leaving at a proper pace while at the same time continuing to fight ISIS and doing all else that is prudent and necessary!”
It was hard to keep track of all the zigzagging on Syria. Leaving immediately! Leaving in four months! Leaving in, maybe, years!
Keane visited Trump at the White House on February 12, 2019. Keane thought that a total US pullout from Syria was a serious strategic error. He also believed that if you gave Trump the same old arguments, he would quickly tune you out, but if you came to him with new information, the president would give you a fair hearing.
Unfurling a map of Syria in the Oval Office, Keane showed Trump where the Iranian presence in the country was the strongest, where al-Qaeda still maintained a fighting force, and where the US coalition had destroyed the ISIS safe haven. Keane pointed out that the oil fields, most of which were in the east of the country, toward the Syrian border with Iraq, were under the control of the US coalition forces.
Keane told Trump, “If we just walk away and pull the troops out, the Russians and the Syrian regime will own the airspace, the Iranians will own the ground, and the Iranians will take control of the oil fields. The money they make out of this will then fund their proxies in Syria and Yemen as well as reduce the impact of US sanctions on Iran.”
Trump said, “That’s very interesting. That’s a big deal.”
In the end, the real “deep state”—retired senior generals such as Keane and officials at the Pentagon and State Department—managed to keep many hundreds of American soldiers in Syria indefinitely to ensure that ISIS didn’t return in force and also to maintain some kind of American leverage over events in Syria.
But like so much else in Trump’s consistently inconsistent foreign policy, he then changed his mind again. Trump green-lighted the invasion of Syria by the Turks on October 9, 2019, exposing America’s Kurdish allies to the wrath of the second largest military in NATO. This came after a call between Trump and President Erdogan in which Trump said he would be pulling American forces out of northeastern Syria, where their presence was effectively preventing a Turkish invasion. Trump also tweeted “it is time for us to get out of these ridiculous Endless Wars, many of them tribal, and bring our soldiers home.”
Then Trump shifted gears again, threatening on Twitter to “obliterate” the Turkish economy if the Turks did “anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits.” The United States hadn’t ever threatened a longtime NATO ally in this manner. Could anyone make sense of President Trump’s Syria policy, other than Donald Trump?