When The Commander in Chief Is ‘Unfit,’ What’s a General to Do? Jim Mattis’ Resignation Was Just a Beginning.

Source: Daily Beast | March 9, 2019 | James Kitfield

Now Trump wants alliances to be protection rackets. The Mattis resignation in protest last year reflected disgust among officers trying to defend the U.S. That’s only gotten worse.

In light of the reported Trump plan to make America’s longtime allies pay what amounts to protection money, this is an important moment to revisit the resignation in protest last December of Defense Secretary James Mattis. It was a milestone in modern U.S. history that put in bold relief an avalanche of criticism from top national security officials, all with a common theme: the commander in chief is unfit.

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Defense Secretary Mattis’ resignation-in-protest may have sunk quickly beneath that tsunami of headlines, but it is viewed as an important marker by some of the nation’s most respected former flag officers and national security officials precisely because the issues it highlighted put the current chaos and rapidly mounting crises into context. Their willingness to break with the nonpartisan tradition of even retired U.S. military and intelligence officials and speak out is due in part to the historic nature of the resignation and the respect accorded Mattis as one of the preeminent warrior intellectuals of his generation of military leaders. But his resignation is also notable for the critique of the commander-in-chief that accompanied it, and the belief by many stewards of U.S. national security that it largely explains why America and the alliance of free peoples that it professes to lead feel so dangerously unstable right now, with worse very likely to come.

“If we have someone who is as selfless and committed as Jim Mattis resigning his position, walking away from all the responsibility he feels for every service member in our forces, and he does so in a public way like that, we ought to stop and say, ‘Okay, why did he do it?’” said retired General Stanley McChrystal, former commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, and a Special Forces pioneer who was behind the 2006 killing of arch terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Speaking to ABC News’ Martha Raddatz, McChrystal suggested that “we ought to ask what kind of commander-in-chief he had that Jim Mattis, ‘the good Marine,’ felt he had to walk away.”

In the interview, McChrystal left no doubt that he believes the commander Mattis walked away from is not only fundamentally dishonest, but also “immoral.” That assessment provides a “pretty good summary of what most generals think about the President’s character,” Admiral James Stavridis, a former Supreme Allied Commander at NATO, wrote recently in Time Magazine. Stavridis attributes the exodus of Mattis and the other generals in Trump’s inner circle to the president’s chronic lack of discipline, indifference towards preparation and expert opinion, impulsive decision-making even on matters of great consequence, and instinctively dismissive attitude towards allies.

“I think Secretary Mattis clearly felt that Trump’s attitude toward our allies hurt the U.S. position in the world, but the Syria pullout–done without benefit of a coherent interagency process–was the final straw,” Stavridis wrote me in an email.

Retired Lt. General Mark Hertling formerly commanded the U.S. Army Europe, and he was an assistant division commander in Iraq. “I was not really surprised by Mattis’ resignation, because I had been wondering what was taking him so long given how frequently Trump was walking his top advisers to the edge in terms of ethics and morality,” he said in an interview. “What worries me now is that Trump has created an absolutely toxic leadership environment that has driven good people like Mattis away, and the replacements and those who remain have shown no courage nor inclination to push back against the president’s worst impulses. Instead Trump has created a cabal of like-minded people who share his worldview and are loyal only to him, and I am very concerned how that dynamic will play out if the administration confronts a real crisis not of its own making.”

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The critique also highlights Trump’s belittling and transactional approach that has badly undermined venerable alliances, even as Trump maintains chummy and inexplicably obsequious relations with murderous dictators, including Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean strongman Kim Jong Un.

Taken together, Defense Secretary Mattis’ first ever resignation-in-protest and the issues it has surfaced represent the worst crisis in civil-military relations since the 2006 revolt of the generals against former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s mismanagement of the Iraq War.  In that instance eight senior retired generals made headlines by publicly calling for Rumsfeld’s resignation on the grounds that he was on the cusp of losing a major war, with potentially devastating consequences for U.S. national security. Given that the target of today’s critiques is the commander-in-chief himself, the stakes are exponentially higher, and the warnings even more dire.

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“We now have an impulsive and ill-informed president who routinely exhibits fantastical thinking on a host of major national security issues, surrounded by a lot of ‘acting’ cabinet officials who have never even been confirmed by the Senate, to include the acting Secretary of Defense, and senior aides who are beleaguered and frequently publicly humiliated by their boss,” said McCaffrey. “And for whatever reason, Trump has repeatedly insisted on meeting in private with the likes of Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un, and refusing afterwards to share notes or even talking points with his own top aides. So you have a rogue President of the United States, and we as a country are actually in serious danger.”

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The performances in Brussels and Helsinki highlighted a fundamental point driven home in Mattis’ resignation letter: Trump embraces a worldview that often aligns him closer to American adversaries than its closest allies. “Helsinki just added to enormous questions surrounding President Trump’s relationship with Putin and his outlook on Russia more generally, elements of which just seem inexplicable and are very concerning from a national security point of view,” said a former very senior intelligence official, speaking on background.

Secretary Mattis tried to counter Trump’s favoritism towards Russia, said this former official, by supporting policies like the deployment of more U.S. and NATO forces to Eastern Europe, and the provision of anti-tank missiles to the Ukrainian armed forces. “But it was clear that Mattis harbored major concerns about Trump and Russia.”

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“What really leaps out at me in my discussions with European officials is their belief that Trump no longer supports a democratic future for Europe, but rather embraces these right-wing, pro-Russian populist movements,” said Burns. “He has thus reversed American policy by consistently picking fights with democratic allies, while cozying up to autocrats like Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.”

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Uniformed leaders know that the U.S. military’s position as far and away the most respected institution in America is founded on its nonpartisan status and ethos, and they see that tradition being steadily eroded by the commander-in-chief’s frequent attempts to expropriate the military as one more cudgel in hyper-partisan battles with his political opponents. Historically that is a step on the road to autocracy, wherein the military becomes loyal to the autocrat it serves rather than the Constitution and rule of law the U.S. military is pledged to defend.

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When Trump broke with decades of tradition last summer and revoked the security clearance of former CIA Director John Brennan, a frequent critic, many senior intelligence and military officials saw it as further evidence that Trump was politicizing dissent in national security circles and abusing the powers of the presidency to stifle free speech. Thirteen former intelligence chiefs signed a statement decrying Trump’s actions as an “ill-considered” and “unprecedented” assault on free speech, including former CIA directors General David Petraeus, Robert Gates, Leon Panetta, Michael Hayden, Porter Goss, George Tenet and William Webster.

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Mattis’ resignation was also probably foreshadowed with the September 2018 publication of Fear, in which Woodward describes Mattis leaving a meeting with Trump on the nuclear standoff with North Korea exasperated and alarmed, telling close associates that the president “acted like–and had the understanding of–a ‘fifth- or sixth- grader.’” Mattis denied the account, but the die was probably cast. In an interview in October, Trump branded Mattis with an ominous expletive, calling him “sort of a Democrat.”

In retrospect, the fatal flaw in the “axis of adults” narrative was the assumption that Trump himself was willing and able to change fundamentally.

If the generals and other “adults” among his close advisers could just establish a disciplined decision-making process, the thinking went, then surely the best arguments and policies would win most of the time.

In the end, Trump proved that his impulses and the chaos that inevitably ensues from them cannot be governed, and that dynamic is only likely to get worse now that the generals have left the building and the White House increasingly mirrors the dysfunction of the administration’s very earliest days.  

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As he heads into the third-year stretch before next year’s reelection campaign, Trump is a decider-in-chief in full bloom, confident in the righteousness of his own counsel and instincts, or in Trump’s own recent words, “I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.”

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The biggest “wild card” in the summit was the possibility that Trump would once again threaten to withdraw U.S. troops from South Korea, or even announce a pullout now that Defense Secretary Mattis is not around to dissuade him. While that didn’t happen during this summit, many experts remain concerned it still might be offered as a future bargaining chip given Trump’s oft-stated desire to bring the troops home, and his view that allies habitually take advantage of the United States.

“A U.S. troop reduction or withdrawal would be a very big blow to South Korea and Japan, but Kim Jong Un knows that Trump is the only American president in history who might be willing to put our alliances on the negotiating table,” said Sue Mi Terry, a former senior Korea analyst at the CIA, and currently the Korea chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “That’s why Kim keeps writing Trump love letters.”

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This month it was reported that the White House plans to transform America’s alliances into a protection racket with a “cost plus 50” plan that would require allies to pay 150 percent of the cost of hosting U.S. troops, with a good behavior discount for those countries willing to take their marching orders from Washington, D.C.

“If you had told me that in just two years the Trump administration could convince our closest allies and friends that the United States was not the champion and leader of the liberal, international order, but rather a threat and danger to it, I wouldn’t have believed it. But that’s the conclusion the Europeans have clearly come to,” said Kori Schake, a former National Security Council staffer in the George W. Bush administration, and currently the deputy director general of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.  “The question that dominated the Munich Conference was whether the United States would once again lead the Western democracies after Trump is gone, or whether the Europeans need to protect themselves further against a disruptive America.”

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Whatever clarity the Mueller report provides may come at the cost of a constitutional crisis, however, with profoundly dangerous implications for the nation’s security. At a similar culminating moment in the Watergate investigation, for instance, then Defense Secretary James Schlesinger admitted to taking the extraordinary, extra-constitutional step of telling senior U.S. military leaders to ignore orders from an embattled and increasingly paranoid President Richard Nixon–including a potential nuclear launch order–unless Schlesinger had signed off on them first.

“From the beginning there has been a cloud of distrust hanging over the Trump White House because of the Russian question, and we’re about to finally get some answers,” said former Defense Secretary Bill Cohen in our interview. “For instance, why has Trump adopted an agenda that exactly replicates Vladimir Putin’s bucket list, including sowing dissension and confusion in the American political system, discrediting the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement communities, attacking the free media as ‘fake news,’ weakening the European Union by championing ‘Brexit,’ undermining the NATO alliance, and pulling U.S. forces out of Syria?

“What was behind Trump’s obscene performance in Helsinki, where he tore up the interpreter’s notes of his private meeting with Putin and then took a knee before the Russian leader and publicly accepted his lies, while rejecting the truth of his own intelligence community?  

“There is an elephant standing in America’s living room right now staring us in the face: the President of the United States may well be compromised by the Russians, which I truly believe is the case. And he is unfit to serve.”

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