Ex-Trump Adviser McMaster to Take on ‘Infected’ National Security Discourse

By Dion Nissenbaum

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WASHINGTON—H.R. McMaster, pushed out in April as President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, is joining Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, where he hopes to develop bipartisan national security ideas. Mr. McMaster, who struggled to retain influence in the fractious White House, said, as a senior fellow, he hopes his work can influence national security policy as the U.S. works to combat rising threats from rivals such as Russia and China. “Our discourse about national security has become infected by this severe form of political polarization, and it’s regrettable because I do think some really excellent work has happened across the last year-and-a-half to help frame some of the most significant strategic challenges and to craft strategic approaches to advance and protect our interests,” he said in his first major interview since leaving the White House.

While working at Hoover, Mr. McMaster said he also is planning to write a book. But those looking for a tell-all tale of West Wing intrigue are likely to be disappointed. Mr. McMaster said he plans to write a substantive book about national security.

Mr. McMaster said the U.S. has to find “new forms of deterrence” to combat Russia’s “sustained campaign of subversion and propaganda and disinformation aimed at reducing our strategic competence” and China’s “new forms of economic aggression.”

Mr. McMaster, a retired three star Army general, has stayed out of the spotlight since leaving the White House. He officially retired last month, ending more than three decades of military service.

Mr. McMaster’s 14-month tenure as Mr. Trump’s second national security adviser was challenging from the start. He took the job after Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser, former Army lieutenant general Mike Flynn, resigned a few weeks into the administrationafter being accused of misleading the White House about his talks with the Russian ambassador to the U.S.

Mr. McMaster, a decorated combat veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, never had a strong rapport with the president, according to some former administration officials. Mr. Trump complained about Mr. McMaster’s detailed briefings and chafed at his push to send more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, the officials said. Mr. McMaster clashed with Steve Bannon, a former senior strategist in the White House. And he often struggled to win support from other key members of the national security team, including Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, as he pressed the Pentagon for more muscular options to confront North Korea if needed.

Mr. McMaster declined to discuss the White House feuds, but he defended his efforts to present the president with a broad range of options on key issues.

“There are some who may have come into government to actually advance their own narrow agenda, and they don’t want to give the president options,” he said. “They want to promote their own agenda or options. At the NSC, we said we can best serve the president by providing options. And I can’t think of a moment when more options was worse than providing fewer ones.”

As with other members of the Trump team, Mr. McMaster was the target of a whisper campaign, leaving the impression that he was constantly on the verge of being fired.

It all came to a head in March, when Mr. Trump decided to replace Mr. McMaster with John Bolton, a more pugnacious Washington veteran and Fox News commentator whose views were more aligned with the president.

Mr. McMaster said historians often develop a deeper and more complete understanding of White House decisions than journalists who cover events in real time. That was one of the lessons he learned in writing “Dereliction of Duty,” a widely praised 1997 book that criticized President Lyndon Johnson’s national security team for not giving the White House candid, sobering advice about the failing strategy in Vietnam.

“There was a pretty large gap between popular perception and the reality, and there’s a pretty big gap today,” he said. “There are always going to be people who have various agendas, who give information to journalists to advance their agenda. And hopefully historians will figure it out.”

While Mr. McMaster clashed with other Trump aides, he won broad respect from members of national security staff that worked for him. When Mr. McMaster left the White House for the last time in April, he was surprised to walk out to see Vice President Mike Pence and hundreds of staff members waiting to greet him with cheers and applause—a tradition known as a “clap-out.”

“It was the most touching thing I ever experienced,” he said.

After Mr. McMaster left the White House, Condoleezza Rice, who served as national security adviser and secretary of state to President George W. Bush, urged him to join her as a senior fellow at Hoover.

“He has a unique perspective,” she said. “I think he will want to reflect on how his experience leading men and women in battle, being one of the important contributors to military strategy after 9/11, and being national security adviser, shaped his views.”

Mr. McMaster first worked at Hoover in 2002 as a national security affairs fellow and then served as a visiting fellow from 2003 to 2017. He will now become the Fouad and Michelle Ajami Senior Fellow, a post commemorating the Middle East scholar who was friends with Mr. McMaster.

“We view him as a unique find,” Tom Gilligan, the director at Hoover, said. “And we view this as a kind of a homecoming.”

Write to Dion Nissenbaum at dion.nissenbaum@wsj.com