“Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be,” Adams said of the nation he had represented on the global stage for decades. “But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.”
The United States, Adams explained, was “the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all” but “the champion and vindicator only of her own.” The American duty was to lead by example, and to avoid the foreign entanglements about which Washington and Jefferson had warned.
To this day, there are those who read Adams’s words and imagine they have discovered a lost isolationist appeal. But nothing could be further from the case. Adams was an internationalist, a man of science and scholarship who introduced to the United States the great ideas of the world and took to the world American ideas of equal greatness.
John Quincy Adams saw the United States as a member of the community of nations. But he warned that any attempt to aggressively command that community would diminish the ability of America to forge and maintain her own identity, and to address the inequalities and injustices that extended from a rough and imperfect founding. Adams, the fierce foe of slavery and ardent champion of education and scientific inquiry, had no desire to “make America great again.” He wanted to make America greater. And he understood that greatness would extend from honest engagement with the world rather than demands placed upon it, from diplomacy rather than war.
Adams knew that a meddling and mangling interaction with the world would divert the attention of the United States from the task of perfecting itself, and of serving as a light unto the nations. Speaking of America on that July 4 in 1821, he said: “She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.”
The world has changed a good deal since Adams uttered those words, and there are those who will tell you that it has become more complicated. In fact, the opposite is true. The world is more connected and more homogenous than at any time in history. The only complication is that leaders and nations must now, from a position of knowledge and involvement, deal with issues that were once left to chance or simply neglected. The opportunities are immense, but so are the potential pitfalls for nations that go abroad searching for monsters to destroy.
Americans are told that their country has become the essential nation, and it is certainly true that the United States is a global economic and military powerhouse. But that does not mean that the United States must define the world at every turn. Even if the only purpose of the United States is to advance its economic and political influence, a sorry history of mercantilism and bumbled wars from Vietnam to Iraq tells us that attempts to impose the will of even the most powerful nation in the world often invite blowback and a loss of prestige.
Former secretary of state Colin Powell was said to have preached the “Pottery Barn Rule” (“you break it, you own it”) when he tried to warn George W. Bush and Dick Cheney about the consequences of invading and occupying Iraq; he recalls that he told officials in the administration: “Once you break it, you are going to own it, and we’re going to be responsible for 26 million people standing there looking at us. And it’s going to suck up a good 40 to 50 percent of the Army for years. And it’s going to take all the oxygen out of the political environment.” That was a very John Quincy Adams observation, a very Dwight Eisenhower observation. But Powell got no buy-in from Bush or Cheney for his commonsense assessment. And there is no evidence to suggest that historical perspective and common sense will guide Donald Trump.
The election of Trump was a jarring event for not just the United States but for the world. This presidency will change U.S. foreign policy, and it will change the policies of other countries toward the United States. Unfortunately, Trump arrived in the White House with a convulsive and convoluted worldview that mixed the crude “Know-Nothing” dogmas of the 1840s with the empty-headed “America First” dogmas of the 1940s, and stirred in a military schoolboy’s obsession with generals and bombs to blend the worst of isolationism with the worst of interventionism. Apocalyptic on one turn, usually after he’s spent some time with Steve “American Carnage” Bannon, and naïve on the next, Trump speaks casually about the use of nuclear weapons (“Somebody hits us within ISIS — you wouldn’t fight back with a nuke?” “The last person that wants to play the nuclear card believe me, is me; but you can never take cards off the table either,” “I use the word unpredictable; you want to be unpredictable with nuclear weapons”) and about nuclear proliferation (“Wouldn’t you rather in a certain sense have Japan have nuclear weapons”) and about exiting NATO (“obsolete”) or not (“We strongly support NATO”).
When Trump’s worldview is not frightening, it is incoherent. He throws opposite camps together—anti-war isolationists and neoconservatives, multinational corporatists and opponents of free trade—and then cannot figure out why they won’t coalesce. He answers the siren calls of charlatans like General Michael Flynn, his disgraced former national security advisor, puts people he barely knows and doesn’t necessarily agree with (CIA director Mike Pompeo) in charge of powerful agencies and lets people he knows too well (Bannon) take seats at the tables where questions of war and peace are debated.
The one constant is Trump’s adoration of generals. The New York Military Academy cadet captain cannot get enough of them, especially the ones who want to wage overwhelming, no-holds-barred wars. It is true that Trump studiously avoided actual military service during the Vietnam War. And it is true that he said during the 2016 campaign that “I know more about ISIS than the generals do, believe me.” But after his election, Trump assembled what Politico called “the most military-heavy White House and civilian administration since at least World War II.” As retired U.S. Army colonel Andrew Bacevich, the great historian of American diplomatic and military history, says: “Suddenly we have a romance, an infatuation, with generals.”
“Trump has a particular fascination with swashbuckling World War II Gens. Douglas MacArthur and George Patton. Four sources close to Trump said that ‘Patton,’ the 1970 film starring George C. Scott that depicted Gen. Patton, is among the president-elect’s favorite films—one he has watched repeatedly over the years. ‘Trump,’ one of the people close to him said, ‘loves this movie,’” wrote veteran DC reporter Shane Goldmacher in an essay titled “Why Trump Is So Obsessed with Generals.”
“Frankly, he’s way too impressed in the generals,” a Trump confidante told Goldmacher. “The more braid you have on your shoulders and the more laurels that you have on your visor, the more impressed he is.”
Some bright-siders, like David Graham of the Atlantic, imagine that the more sober of the generals (perhaps Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, perhaps National Security Advisor General H. R. McMaster) might temper Trump—or, at the very least, avert catastrophe. “Democrats, a beleaguered minority, have little means to slow the White House down. With some notable exceptions, most Republicans in Congress are unwilling or unable to mount any serious opposition to Trump’s policies, both because they have other areas where they hope to work with Trump and also because the White House is reportedly drafting congressional staffers into service without their bosses’ knowledge,” wrote Graham as the new administration entered its second crazy week. “That leaves few people in a better position to push back than Trump’s generals. They’re within the administration, and they were chosen in part to give the president some credibility: Their military experience made them respectable, and imparted competence that Trump needed to borrow. And while Trump’s critics worried that they would either lean toward an authoritarian model or else follow commands in the military manner, a series of reports suggests that they’re already frustrated with the president and feuding with his aide
s.”
The problem, of course, is summed up by that last line. As Bacevich notes, even the most sound of the generals are competing with other circles of Trump influencers inside the White House, including the one led by Bannon, who, as a former surface warfare officer in the Pacific Fleet and onetime special assistant to the chief of naval operations at the Pentagon, is quite confident elbowing aside the generals in a White House where he is the superior officer. “Of course, with Trump, we have the additional question, and that is: Can anybody really influence him?” notes Bacevich. “To what degree is he a person who will be amenable to taking counsel of advisers? We were pretty sure previous presidents were willing to do that. We can’t be certain about this president.”
As the Trump presidency gathered steam in March, Fred Kaplan, a savvy observer of the White House and international relations, was already commenting on the powerlessness of Mattis, McMaster and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, writing in Slate: “The few grown-ups in Trump’s Cabinet are getting sidelined, their expertise goes ignored, and the pledge that they could choose their own teams—an assurance they were given upon taking their jobs—lies in tatters.”
But there is one area where these men and Trump can find common ground, and that is with regard to the military-industrial complex about which Dwight Eisenhower warned almost six decades ago. Trump’s generals, and the civilians aligned with them, share the current president’s passion for massive military spending, for a pumped-up Pentagon, for war preparation on an unprecedented level and for the waging of wars with a no-holds-barred aggressiveness that could unsettle Dick Cheney. As for diplomacy, they’re barely respectful. It is perhaps true that Trump’s generals are more worldly in their views than the president and Vice President Mike Pence. But you will not find the contemporary equivalent of the risk-taking yet often successful diplomats of the past, a George Kennan or even a Jim Baker, in this crowd.
This creates a dangerous calculus. Trump is surrounded by men who might actually offer him some good advice but whose vision for engaging with the world draws more from George Patton or George Bush than from John Quincy Adams or Dwight Eisenhower. “At some point,” says Phillip Carter, an Iraq War veteran who is now the director of the Military, Veterans, and Society Program at the Center for a New American Security, “you worry about it being an echo chamber in the [situation] room.”
“No doubt these men bring tremendous experience. But we should be wary about an overreliance on military figures,” argues Carter, who has written with former Pentagon and National Security Council official Loren DeJonge Schulman about the dangers of a general-heavy administration. “Great generals don’t always make great Cabinet officials. And if appointed in significant numbers, they could undermine another strong American tradition: civilian control of an apolitical military.”
America has always been at its best when it has a clear vision of how it will engage with the world, and when that vision has been based on an awareness that the military is a tool rather than a driving force in American foreign policy. “What we’ve learned over the last 15 years is that the U.S. military, as capable as it is, is not great at bringing political reconciliation to other parts of the world,” explains Senator Chris Murphy, the Connecticut Democrat who serves on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “I generally worry about a foreign policy that is heavily dependent on U.S. military when we have so many other tools at our disposal.”
The wisest of our forebears proposed to assemble administrations that would guard against foreign entanglements and against the corruptions of empire at home and abroad. They wanted to err instead toward “the light of reason in the human mind.” In the Trump administration, unfortunately, that light is extinguished.
— 9 —
THE “MAD DOG”
General James Mattis (ret.)
Secretary of Defense
“Even when there is a necessity of military power, within the land,” wrote Samuel Adams in 1768, “a wise and prudent people will always have a watchful and jealous eye over it.”
Eight years later, Adams signed his name to a declaration of independence that included among its complaints against King George III a notation that “he has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.”
The founders of the American experiment well understood the danger of ceding control over the military to generals. When they wrote a constitution in 1787, they sought to chain the dogs of war by requiring that Congress declare the intent of the United States to engage in military conflicts and by empowering an elected president to serve as commander in chief.
Americans have understood, as a basic value of their national experience, the equation detailed by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor Richard Kohn when he wrote that “for democracy, civilian control—that is, control of the military by civilian officials elected by the people—is fundamental. Civilian control allows a nation to base its values and purposes, its institutions and practices, on the popular will rather than on the choices of military leaders, whose outlook by definition focuses on the need for internal order and external security.”
That’s not an anti-military construction. It is an articulation of the essential balance that is as old as the American experiment. Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies says of civilian oversight of the nation’s armed forces: “That’s a principle, not just a suggestion.”
This understanding of the need to maintain civilian control has extended and deepened over time, with the enactment (as part of the 1947 law creating the Department of Defense) of a requirement that a military officer must be out of uniform for ten years before assuming the pivotal position of secretary of defense. The waiting period was eventually reduced to seven years in 2008, but the principle remained.
For retired marine general James Mattis, however, that principle was a problem. Having only retired in 2013 as commander of the U.S. Central Command, Mattis needed a congressional waiver to get around the law that was written to keep civilians in charge of the Pentagon.
Most members of the Senate and House rushed to provide it, as Mattis was widely regarded within the military and within the corridors of power in Washington as an able commander with an intellectual bent. “He knows the Middle East, South Asia, NATO and other areas and has evinced both a nuanced approach to the wars we’re in and an appreciation for the importance of allies,” explained Richard Fontaine, the president of the Center for a New American Security.
This was not, of course, what drew the new president to General Mattis.
What Trump seemed to really like about the general was his nickname, “Mad Dog.”
“We are going to appoint Mad Dog Mattis as our Secretary of Defense,” Trump announced dramatically to a campaign-style rally in Cincinnati a month after his election. “But we’re not announcing it ’til Monday, so don’t tell anyone—Mad Dog. He’s great. He is great.”
The nickname was never a favorite of the general, who fashions himself as something of a “warrior monk,” encourages recruits to read widely and deeply about military strategy and once told a group of marines: “The most important six inches on the battlefield is between your ears.” Mattis preferred to be remembered as the strategist who told troops in Iraq, where he was a key commander: “Engage your brain before you engage your weapon.”
But he was also remembered for telling marines: “Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.” And for his message to Iraqi leaders in a region occupied by his troops: “I come in peace. I didn’t bring artillery. But I’m pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you fuck with me, I’ll kill you all.” Mattis earned the “Mad Dog” moniker with warnings like these and with an infamous appearance at a 2005 San Diego forum where he said: “You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn’t wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway. So it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot the
m. Actually it’s quite fun to fight them, you know. It’s a hell of a hoot. It’s fun to shoot some people. I’ll be right up there with you. I like brawling.”
That swagger appealed to Trump. It had also earned Mattis occasional encouragement to watch his words during a marine career that saw him command the First Battalion, Seventh Marines, during the Persian Gulf War, command the Seventh Marine Regiment during the Afghanistan War and command the First Marine Division during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Even if he did sound off now and again, however, Mattis was generally seen as “a general’s general.” And the fact that Mattis rejected torture, decried anti-Muslim rhetoric, sought to appoint women to key positions and respected the reality of climate change distinguished him as a general’s general who was far more thoughtful than the Fox News “military analysts” who had won Trump’s favor in the past.
It was harder, however, to make the case that Mattis, a career military man not long out of uniform, was a civilian’s civilian.
That worried a handful of legislators who still embraced the wisdom of the founders. The members of the House and Senate who challenged the Mattis appointment did not do so out of disdain for Mattis, who they freely acknowledged would be one of the more reasonable members of Trump’s cabinet. They did so out of respect for historic American values, and out of concern, as Connecticut senator Richard Blumenthal noted, about “the precedent that [a recently retired general] assuming this office would set.”
Ultimately, the Senate voted 81–17 on January 12 to grant the Mattis waiver. Greater opposition was seen in the 235–188 vote for the waiver by the House. Many House members expressed frustration after Trump’s transition team canceled a planned appearance before the House Armed Services Committee in which Mattis was to address the waiver issue and to speak about civilian-control concerns. That cancellation drew rebukes from not just Democrats but also from House Armed Services chairman Mac Thornberry, a Texas Republican, who correctly complained that “there are major principles of government involved with this exception, which has been requested for the first time in 67 years. Unfortunately, shortsightedness prevailed.”