At war with ourselves, p.7
At War with Ourselves, page 7
As for U.S. support of Afghan forces, I could hear the frustration in my old friend’s voice as he described how the U.S. Army was deploying “hollow units” to comply with the arbitrary limits the Obama administration had placed on the number of troops. The State Department was not helping, either. The special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan (SRAP), Laurel Miller, was pursuing negotiations while U.S. forces were disengaging and executing the Obama policy for a scheduled withdrawal. The SRAP and others in the U.S. government seemed unaware that the Taliban had no incentive to negotiate. We needed to change course. The Afghan war effort was like a plane on autopilot in the process of crashing while the pilot, crew, and passengers paid no attention.
Other calls confirmed how existing policies and strategies—ranging from North Korea to China to Russia to Iran and the Middle East—rested on flawed assumptions.
That Sunday, back on Air Force One for the flight to Washington, I reviewed my notes. We had work to do.
* * *
ON MONDAY morning, March 6, my thirteenth day on the job, I made the first of several visits to Capitol Hill. National security advisors do not spend much time on Capitol Hill. The appointment normally does not require Senate approval, but the Senate had to approve my reappointment to the rank of lieutenant general in my new position.
Over the following nine days, I met with senators in advance of my confirmation. The White House legislative affairs team assigned Virginia Boney to help me through the process. Virginia, who had been director of appropriations for Sen. Lindsey Graham, was competent and well-versed in the personalities and politics on the Hill.
Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee hosted me for lunch in the Senate Dining Room and pledged his assistance in pushing initiatives important to the president. Corker and the Democratic ranking member of the committee, Sen. Ben Cardin, would be helpful as we tried to forge bipartisan support for policies.
I then met with members of the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC), the committee that had to approve my reappointment before a full Senate vote. Sen. Tom Cotton smiled as he explained how he had taken the lead in advocating for me with Trump because endorsements from Senators John McCain and Graham would have torpedoed me. I had met and briefed other members of the SASC many times in Washington, Kabul, and Baghdad, including Senators Graham and McCain, and Democratic senator Jack Reed. Sen. Dan Sullivan, then a major in the Marine Corps, had served on a task force I directed in 2008–9 to develop a sustainable strategy for the greater Middle East. How could my reappointment be hard? These senators knew me, and we respected one another.
But Boney urged me not to take my reappointment for granted. Given the slim majority, if even one Republican voted against me, “Democrats will sense blood in the water and vote against you just to complicate things for Donald Trump.” I received a phone call from Senator McCain, who confided that Mattis was urging him and others to force my retirement from the Army. Mattis had told McCain that he was going to “give me a talking to like a four-star gives a three-star” and direct me to retire. Boney heard later that Mattis had made similar calls to Sen. Joni Ernst and other senators.
My office call with Ernst validated Boney’s concerns. Ernst, a fellow Army officer, had served in the Iowa Army National Guard from 1993 to 2015, retiring as a lieutenant colonel. She had commanded a battalion in Kuwait and southern Iraq during the early months of the Iraq War. She worried that my serving as national security advisor while on active duty might drag me and, by connection, the military into partisan politics. Her concerns were legitimate. But I explained that I was confident that I could transcend partisanship.
A few days after those first meetings, Vice President Pence asked me how my engagements on the Hill had gone. I told him they had gone well, but I also related, without mentioning Mattis, Senator Ernst’s unease and said that one Republican vote against me could precipitate an avalanche of Democratic “nays.” I discovered later that Pence had called Ernst to persuade her to vote “yea.”
The hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee was amicable. Thanks to Senators McCain, Sullivan, Cotton, Reed, Ernst, and Graham, and the hard work of Virginia Boney and the support of the vice president, the Senate voted nine days after the first meeting on the Hill. The tally was 86 to 10 in favor of my reappointment.
As newcomers to Washington who had lived in Army communities that were studiously apolitical, Katie and I found Washington’s pervasive partisanship perplexing. The two Democratic senators who thanked me most effusively in private for taking the job, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, voted against my reappointment.
Months later, at the annual Alfalfa Club Dinner, Katie ran into Democratic senator Cory Booker and, before he knew who she was, asked him what he thought of the new national security advisor. Booker said he was very happy I was in the position. Katie asked, “Then why did you vote against him?” He replied that he had to “protect his political capital.” Katie jokingly punched him in the arm and said, “My husband is not political capital.” Booker laughed and hugged her. He and the majority of those ten Democrats who had voted against me would become candidates for their party’s presidential nomination in the 2019 primaries.
The partisanship in Congress is maddening, but Congress would be critical to resourcing any of President Trump’s foreign policy, defense, and national security initiatives. My philosophy for engaging members of Congress was consistent with the adage “If you want them with you at the landing, they had better be with you on takeoff.” In addition to securing needed resources, bipartisan support would, I hoped, generate a higher degree of consistency in foreign policy, especially on challenges like the long war against jihadist terrorists and the long-term competition with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
* * *
ON MARCH 6, the same day I traveled to Capitol Hill for my first pre-confirmation meetings, Kim Jong-un had launched four ballistic missiles that landed off the coast of Japan. The United States would need to coordinate the response with South Korea and Japan.
Trump had given me clear guidance on North Korea. During my first Oval Office meeting with him on February 22, he had told me to make sure Kim Jong-un and his regime know that “if they threaten us and our allies, they will face a response that is overwhelming.” The president would remain consistent on this point. Six months later, he stated that if North Korea made any further threats against the United States, they would be met with “fire and fury like the world has never seen.” Although his statement was strident and unconventional—like his tweet that the button on his desk was “bigger and more powerful” than the button on Kim Jong-un’s—his comments were consistent. Moreover, it was not as if past “conventional” statements had worked.
During an Oval Office discussion with Matt Pottinger, senior director for Asia, and Secretaries Tillerson and Mattis, we discussed the potential motivations behind Pyongyang’s pursuit of the most destructive weapons on earth. Pottinger and I believed—as did the director for Korea, Allison Hooker—that the idea that the regime wanted nuclear weapons only for deterrence was wrong.
We disagreed with pundits and government officials who argued that the least risky and least costly course of action would be to accept North Korea as a nuclear power and then deter its use of nuclear weapons. If North Korea was concerned mainly with deterring South Korea and the United States, it did not need nukes. Its vast conventional weapons and munitions included more than 21,000 artillery and rocket systems able to bombard the city of Seoul, which lies only thirty-one miles from the demilitarized zone (DMZ). That is sufficient firepower to deter South Korean aggression. Kim, we thought, really wanted to reunify the peninsula under Pyongyang’s control.
The picture we painted for Trump was not pretty. Across several meetings on North Korea, he agreed that we had to base our approach on the possibility that Kim’s dictatorship wanted the most destructive weapons for more than deterrence or defense and that North Korea would become more aggressive and prone to initiate a war once the regime had its weapons.
There were other reasons that a nuclear-armed North Korea would be a grave danger. As with Iran and the Middle East, accepting and deterring a nuclear-armed North Korea would create strong incentives for the further proliferation of nuclear weapons in the region. If North Korea were in a position to strike the United States with a nuclear weapon, South Korea and Japan might doubt the reliability of America’s “nuclear umbrella” and pursue their own nuclear weapons. And soon enough, other countries across Asia and beyond might conclude they needed them, too.
In addition, the Kim regime would likely try to sell its capabilities abroad: Pyongyang sold a nuclear reactor to Syria that Israeli jets destroyed in 2007. Kim would likely share his missile and nuclear technology with Iran. It was not unreasonable to envision North Korea selling nuclear devices to the highest bidder, even if that bidder was a terrorist organization.
With Tillerson and Mattis present in the Oval Office, Pottinger leaned over the Resolute Desk to show Trump a time line with photos to illustrate the historical pattern of previous efforts to denuclearize North Korea. Trump enjoyed these discussions—especially if they entailed challenging the conventional wisdom of the “stupid people” who had preceded him. The graphic depicted the cycle of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) provocation: U.S. concessions to get Pyongyang to the negotiating table; long, frustrating negotiations during which the United States and others made concession after concession resulting in a weak deal that included more payoffs and locked in the nuclear status quo; and, finally, North Korea’s violation of that agreement to restart the cycle.
The contours of what would become the strategy of “maximum pressure” were coming into view. We would try to convince Kim Jong-un that his regime would be safer without the most destructive weapons on earth. Trump directed us to “fully isolate North Korea” and to make Chinese leader Xi Jinping “pay a price for backing Kim Jong-un.”
Over dinner that evening in the Blue Room in the Residence, Tillerson, Gary Cohn, and I summarized for the president the three “don’ts” we had agreed to in a principals committee meeting earlier in the day. First, don’t rush to the negotiating table or accede to weak initial agreements just to talk with North Korea. In the past, we had agreed to a “freeze-for-freeze” in which the United States and South Korea suspended military exercises in return for flimsy North Korean promises to stop testing nuclear weapons and missiles. Second, don’t view diplomacy and the development of military options as separate, sequential efforts. Successful diplomacy depends on demonstrated will and the capability to employ force against North Korea if necessary. Third, don’t lift sanctions prematurely to reward the DPRK government just for talking. We needed to keep sanctions in place until there was irreversible momentum toward denuclearization. The president agreed with those guidelines, and they would help shape our approach over the next year.
Trump asked if Xi Jinping would help on North Korea. Tillerson and I doubted it. Cohn argued that China was “weaker than we think” and might pressure Pyongyang if CCP leaders faced economic or financial consequences. Trump said he would confront Xi on North Korea and for not honoring Beijing’s commitments on trade. The topic of trade led, as it often did, to a diatribe on NAFTA and the Korea–United States (KORUS) Free Trade Agreement.
Trump saw China’s exploitation of the “free trade system,” with its statist, mercantilist model, as a threat to American prosperity. I was not unsympathetic to his belief that Washington’s political and foreign policy elites had failed to compete effectively and advance U.S. interests. He saw the loss of manufacturing jobs and the trade imbalance in goods as the result of “stupid people” allowing others to prosper at Americans’ expense. That is the primary lens through which he viewed not only China, but also U.S. allies (for example, the European Union, South Korea, and Japan) that used protectionist trade policies and subsidized industries to gain unfair economic advantage.
* * *
I WAS learning that Trump was open to new ideas and perspectives, but he was also prone to changing his mind based on whoever had his ear last. For example, after reviewing the draft of his first address to Congress, I had suggested that the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism” was inaccurate and counterproductive. “Mr. President, we should call these people what they are. Jihadist terrorists are criminals who use a perverted interpretation of Islam as cover for their criminal and political agendas.” I suggested that he make a subtle change from “Islamic,” which describes the entire religion, to “Islamist,” which focuses on their political agenda and does not reinforce the terrorists’ narrative of a clash of religions. Trump agreed.
But Steve Bannon went to the president and Stephen Miller to ensure that “Islamic” remained in the address to Congress. And the press, oftentimes more enthralled with machinations in the White House than the substance of policy, was happy to keep score. After the speech, the Washington Post reported the president’s use of the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism” and described it as a rebuke of my position and an indication of a growing divide in the administration.1 The next day, Bannon’s assistant, Sebastian Gorka, said the phrase was “the clearest three words” in the speech.
I had been in the job two weeks and was starting to understand how members of the staff persuaded Trump. The phrase “radical Islamic terror” appealed to Trump’s self-described persona in his book The Art of the Deal, which is “a little different or a little outrageous.”2 I was also learning about his character, personality, and worldview.
I do not consider myself a pop psychologist, but I believe that personalities and relationships have a strong influence on the course of history. And understanding how Trump’s personality and experiences shaped his worldview was necessary for me to help him consider alternatives, overcome rigid patterns of thinking, and make good decisions.
I saw in Trump traits similar to those in Lyndon Johnson. As with LBJ, Trump’s insecurities and desire for attention left him perpetually distracted and vulnerable to a mainstream media that was vehemently opposed to him. Also, like LBJ, he had a loose relationship with the truth and a tendency toward hyperbole.
On one of my first days in the White House, as we were walking to the Residence, he stopped next to the Secret Service desk just inside the West Wing, by the door that opens to the Colonnade, the walkway past the Rose Garden. He pointed to a photo taken of the Mall during his inauguration ceremony and said, “Look at that, General, unlike what you saw in the fake media, there were many more people at my inauguration than Obama’s.”
Trump also shared LBJ’s belief that the media were making “a concerted move to discredit him.”3 Besides portraying himself as a victim and believing the narratives he created, Trump shared with LBJ the tendency to belittle others to make himself seem bigger and to hide his own insecurities, fears, and flaws. While LBJ employed the famous “Johnson treatment,” which included using his large frame to invade people’s personal space, Trump preferred verbal means, often employing mimicry to belittle his target of intimidation—whether it was a disabled reporter in 2015; Sen. Elizabeth Warren, whom he nicknamed “Pocahontas” after she made dubious claims of Native American heritage; or Attorney General Sessions, with whom he was angry because Sessions had recused himself from the Russia collusion investigation. In 2018, when Trump began to mock unnamed generals with “sir, yessir,” to insinuate that the senior military were unthinking automatons incapable of grasping his unconventional approach to foreign and defense policy, I knew that my time with him had almost run its course.
As with LBJ, Trump’s insecurities made him distrustful and short-tempered, and inspired behavior in others that undermined teamwork. Trump, a real estate developer, often pitted parties against one another to get the deal he wanted. On his reality-TV show The Apprentice, he would pick people apart, divide them, and watch them undermine one another. If he sensed weakness or reticence in someone, he would bully them—particularly the contestants who were eager to ingratiate themselves with him and undermine the other contestants. I had already begun to see this behavior with Bannon and me. Trump had told me, for example, that he did not think Bannon should be a formal member of the NSC principals committee, but he told Bannon that the decision to remove him had been mine alone.
Trump and LBJ both wanted to play the role of unrivaled protagonist in an opera they created. I had written about how many of LBJ’s advisors were intimidated by him and afraid to give the president advice contrary to his preferred course in Vietnam. I knew that to fulfill my duty, I would have to tell Trump what he didn’t want to hear.
* * *
JOHN POINDEXTER, who served as President Ronald Reagan’s fourth national security advisor until he was forced to resign due to his involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal, told me that the first year of the Reagan administration was “very chaotic,” observing that the White House under Reagan was “at war with itself and with the secretary of state.”
Poindexter recalled how Chief of Staff James Baker allied with longtime trusted Reagan aide Mike Deaver against Ed Meese III, whom Baker described as “counselor to the president for policy.” But the tension was greatest between the White House and Reagan’s first secretary of state, Gen. Alexander Haig, who had declared himself the “vicar of foreign policy.”4
Poindexter contrasted that first year with the teamwork among Reagan’s second secretary of state, George Shultz, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, Director of Central Intelligence William Casey, and him. Poindexter even set up a monthly lunch for the four of them in the Family Dining Room in the Residence.
I was confident that, like Poindexter, I would have a good relationship with the secretaries of state and defense. When I told Kissinger and Brzezinski of my intention to work cooperatively and implement a process that amplified the voices of key cabinet officials, they cautioned me never to allow the State Department and the Defense Department to control the policy process. Both of them had clashed with secretaries of state and prevailed in competitions for influence with the president. Kissinger was adamant that if the national security advisor was weak, the secretaries of state and defense would try to determine the president’s policy themselves.
