By Susan B. Glasser
Last Tuesday, after waking up to tweet about the previous day’s F.B.I. raid on his lawyer’s office (“a total witch hunt!!!”), President Trump called one of his outside Republican advisers to ask what to do about Syria, and its latest chemical-weapons attack on civilians. “We should bomb the shit out of them, Mr. President,” came the answer, which was exactly the one Trump seemed to be looking for. Over the weekend, the President, outraged by the photographs of dead children in the Syrian enclave of Douma he had apparently seen on TV, had tweeted vows of retaliation against “Animal Assad,” and the Syrian leader’s backers in Russia and Iran. Trump’s hawkish new national-security adviser, John Bolton, who had started work that Monday, was also pressing for punishing strikes. On the phone call, Trump listened approvingly to the hit-’em-hard advice: that, politically, “the minimum should be bigger than it was last year,” when Trump had launched a single-day strike on a Syrian airfield, designed—unsuccessfully, as it turned out—to deter future chemical-weapons use.
By Friday evening, when the American cruise missiles actually started flying, the vaunted attack had been reduced to a single predawn volley against three Syrian government chemical-weapons facilities, carefully chosen to avoid hitting known Russian or Iranian bases and thus escalating a war from which Trump himself had recently demanded an exit. The strike was bigger than last year’s, but hardly the sustained response with “all instruments of our national power” that the President promised in his televised address announcing the attack.
The reason, as it so often has been over the tumultuous first year and three months of the Trump Presidency, was Defense Secretary James Mattis.
Blunt and no-nonsense, a retired four-star Marine Corps general deemed so tough on Iran that President Barack Obama’s team often clashed with him, Mattis has turned into the secret “peacenik” of the Trump Administration, as a former government official put it to me last week. A year ago, Mattis had also been wary of the first Trump-authorized missile strike on Syria, at least in the absence of a broader strategy toward the civil-war-torn country that eludes the Administration still. In the year since then, there had been numerous other occasions—some reported, many more not—when a blustering Trump had demanded military action only to run up against the calm but implacable opposition of his defense chief. And that dynamic more or less played out again last week in the White House Situation Room. “He was inclined to a farther-reaching strike,” the Republican adviser who spoke with Trump said, “but he deferred to Secretary Mattis.”
The secretary may have prevailed this time, but, as reports of the internal debate surfaced, officials in Washington were left to wonder: At what cost? Foreign-policy veterans told me they were worried that Trump would finally tire of Mattis, as he has soured on so many other top advisers, though White House officials were at pains to deny any sense of a rift between the two. (“False,” the spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in an e-mail, when I asked about the Trump adviser’s sense that Trump had deferred to Mattis on the strike.)
Still, Syria is just one on a long list of issues, from Trump’s threat to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal to his unilateral recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, exit from the global climate-change pact, and imposition of trade tariffs, on which Mattis has now been publicly identified as disagreeing with his loyalty-obsessed boss. “Either you conclude his influence is very high because of where Syria turned out,” one of the city’s national-security eminences, who has met with many of Trump’s officials in recent months, told me, “or it’s the beginning of the end.”
The April 13th Syria attack capped what was, even in this Trumpian era, a remarkable bloodletting on his national-security team. Exactly a month earlier, on March 13th, Trump had fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and promoted the C.I.A. director Mike Pompeo in his place, setting off a purge that continues four weeks later. Nine days after Tillerson was dumped by tweet, Tillerson’s bitter internal rival, the national-security adviser, H. R. McMaster, was also abruptly replaced. Bolton, such a contentious figure that the chief of staff, John Kelly, banned him from the Oval Office last summer, was hand-picked for the job by Trump himself in what everyone took, correctly, to be a rebuke to Kelly, who was now presumed to be next to go. When Bolton arrived at the White House last week to succeed McMaster, he immediately ousted the Homeland Security adviser, Thomas Bossert; both deputy national-security advisers; the National Security Council spokesman; and assorted other aides amid the Syria war meetings. More firings are expected. Meanwhile, both Kelly and the high-profile U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley have been ensnared in the infighting, drawing fire from the President himself.
Mattis emerged from the dizzying month still seemingly intact, but he, too, has been diminished in ways that are not yet entirely clear: Will Pompeo prove to be an ally or a rival of the Defense Secretary? Will Bolton, having lost round one over Syria, be more successful against Mattis in future policy disputes? Will Trump, emboldened after firing Tillerson and McMaster, decide to jettison a Pentagon chief who is also often not on the same page? Worried Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans quickly christened the hawkish new team of Bolton and Pompeo a “war cabinet” and warned of a militaristic turn in Trump’s policy, but it’s already clear that they don’t have the actual warrior among them on board. “Mattis may indeed be the last man standing,” Julianne Smith, a former senior Pentagon official who later became Vice-President Joe Biden’s deputy national-security adviser, said, “but for how long?”
When they took office, Mattis, Tillerson and McMaster were portrayed in the press as an “axis of adults,” who, together with Kelly, the chief of staff, would serve as steady hands constraining a volatile, inexperienced President. Even now, after it has all played out, the myth persists. But that was not, in fact, the case, current and former White House, Pentagon, and State Department officials, as well as other advisers close to the protagonists, told me. McMaster had a falling out with Mattis and Tillerson that was more than just the standard political jockeying over power and access: theirs was a dispute at least in part about Trump himself, and over just how much to accommodate the demands of the capricious, often angry President they had signed up to serve. “It’s a bully’s approach to the world,” the former government official told me. The President would say, “This made me angry today. I want to punch them.’”
The factional warfare among the “axis of adults” regarding how to respond to Trump was pervasive. Should they give in to the President’s tantrums? Find a way to redirect him when he demands a plan to blow up Iranian fastboats in the Gulf? Or publicly discuss military options in Venezuela without warning? All of it, of course, was playing out against the backdrop of global events that wait for no office politics, from the escalating tensions with Russia to the drumbeat of the Syrian civil war.
On one side were Mattis, Tillerson, and Kelly, each of whom in varying degrees sought to push back against the President; on the other was McMaster, who made his natural allies furious for what they saw as his habit of trying to accommodate the President’s demands, even if they were far-fetched. “General McMaster was trying to find a way to try to execute, not to tell him no,” the former government official told me. “Every answer was a big military contingent.” For their part, McMaster’s allies largely blamed Tillerson and Mattis (the “Gang of Two,” he called them), insisting that, as one put it, “H. R. got caught in the middle. The President wants strategy; it’s hard to do it without a Secretary of State.”
How bad did it get? I heard stories of intrigue so rampant, they made me wonder how some of these officials ever had time to think about matters of state; some of it seems astonishingly petty, much of it remarkably self-defeating. Tillerson, for example, personally distrusted Heather Nauert, the former Fox News anchor the White House sent to be his spokeswoman, so much that he wouldn’t allow her to travel with him despite repeated entreaties; his close advisers believed she was informing on him back to the Trump loyalists out to get the secretary. (The White House seemed to confirm which side she was on when, within hours of Tillerson’s dumping, they fired the under-secretary nominally overseeing Nauert’s office and promoted her in his place. Nauert, Sanders told me in her e-mail, “is highly respected and liked in the White House.”)
As it all came crashing apart, Tillerson told confidants he blamed McMaster and Haley for prodding Trump to finally fire him in an Oval Office meeting the Friday before his unceremonious Monday dumping by tweet. “They thought McMaster was behind it, he and Kelly,” a former State Department official told me. But by this point Kelly had already secretly authorized a search for McMaster replacements. The McMaster side believed Kelly was responsible for Trump’s final turn against him in the days after the Tillerson firing, claiming Kelly unfairly blamed the national-security adviser for the damaging leak of talking points for Trump that warned him “do not congratulate” Russian President Vladimir Putin in a post-election phone call. Days after the firing, I ran into a Trump adviser who had just seen the President and I asked whether the leak to the Washington Post had in fact triggered McMaster’s untimely exit. “Well, that was Wednesday,” the adviser said. “He was gone on Thursday.”
In the end, Trump defied both sides in the feuding axis of adults, picking Bolton, a combative conservative so divisive, he failed to win confirmation as George W. Bush’s U.N. Ambassador from a Republican-controlled Senate. “Whatever highfalutin’ process folks thought they were going to set up was derailed by the President making a decision,” a Republican contacted as part of Kelly’s McMaster succession process said. “Talk about be careful what you wish for,” a bitter McMaster ally told me. “John Kelly didn’t think there was a chance in hell Bolton would get it. There’s no way they’re not wishing H. R. had stayed.”
Several Trump advisers I spoke with argued that the purge will end up being a positive change that results in a Secretary of State who is more in synch with his boss. “The essential skill for the job is that the world believes the Secretary of State speaks for the President. Unfortunately, that pretty quickly turned out not to be the case for Secretary Tillerson,” Senator Tom Cotton, the Arkansas Republican who has become one of Trump’s most regular advisers on foreign policy on Capitol Hill, told me. “I’m confident that will be the case with Mike Pompeo and the President.”
How will Mattis fare in this new alignment? One of the Trump advisers told me not to worry. “Look, Mattis and Pompeo will diverge more than Mattis and Tillerson did in terms of policy. It will be a healthy and professional divergence,” he told me. He paused, then added, “I don’t think it will be poisonous or backstabbing.”
The world will not wait for the resolution of the Trump team’s chaos. Amid the tumult of the last month, Trump hosted the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, the leaders of the three Baltic states bordering Russia, the emir of Qatar, and, this week in Florida, the Prime Minister of Japan, while also secretly dispatching Pompeo to North Korea. Next week in Washington, Trump is set to host the first state visit of his Presidency, repaying French President Emmanuel Macron’s red-carpet reception for him in Paris last summer with the ceremony of a White House state dinner and an address to Congress. A few days after that, German Chancellor Angela Merkel will also come to town. In May, Trump has set a deadline to decide the fate of the Iran nuclear deal. In early June, he is expected to participate in an unprecedented nuclear summit with the leader of North Korea.
For the protocol-conscious professional diplomats who generally tend to such visits, all the firings, unfilled jobs, and uncertainty about who wields power has produced a crisis all of its own. “The problem is there is nobody to work with,” a senior Western official involved in one of the trips told me last week.
With their leaders set to come to town, European allies told me they have been obsessively monitoring the purge along with everyone else, and trying to explain it to their capitals. “I have been telling them that Trump is taking the power. In a sense, McMaster and Tillerson were trying to rein him in,” one diplomat told me. “He has decided enough is enough. He is taking the power. The new team, their mission is to do what he tells them to do.”
In other words, it’s hardly the optimal time for a pomp-filled lovefest. “We are terrified of this visit,” a senior French official told a former U.S. official the other day. “It’s a lose-lose for Macron.” Trump is wildly unpopular in France, the diplomat said, and when Macron visits this week, the two sides have already agreed not to issue the standard joint statement “given all the disagreements.”
For both Macron and Merkel, their top priority is somehow, against all the evidence of where Trump is leaning to the contrary, convincing the President not to blow up the Iran nuclear deal in May. Mattis and Tillerson pushed hard to save the deal in previous rounds of the debate, and Tillerson’s State Department policy-planning chief, Brian Hook, has been trying to get the Europeans to support a tougher approach to Iran that might convince Trump to keep the nuclear deal in place.
Cotton said that he, Trump, Pompeo, and Bolton are skeptical. “For three months now in my conversations with Europeans they really have not moved very far,” Cotton, a major foe of the Iran deal since its inception, said. “I don’t think anybody should be surprised if the President declines to waive sanctions in May.”
Bolton himself has already made that clear. In a call last week with a senior European official, the new national-security adviser warned the French and the Germans not to expect the good feelings generated by a Washington visit to sway Trump on Iran. “It’s very likely the President will leave the Iran deal,” Bolton told the European. “If it was me, I would have done it three months ago.” As for Mattis, well, we already know what he thinks. He told Congress months ago in public testimony it’s not “in the national interest” to blow up the deal.
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