BOB CORKER, the outgoing chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in October 2017 that three members of Donald Trump’s administration “help separate our country from chaos”: Secretary of State Rex Tillerson; John Kelly, the White House chief of staff; and James Mattis, the secretary of defence. Mr Trump fired Mr Tillerson in March. Mr Kelly, whose effort to end the chaos of Mr Trump’s White House was unsuccessful, got his marching orders earlier this month. On December 20th it was announced that Mr Mattis, the only member of Mr Trump’s cabinet to have provided much restraint on the president, was also out. In a tweet, Mr Trump framed his departure as a retirement. But as Mr Mattis made clear in a devastating takedown of the president’s world view, he had resigned on principle.
It seems the trigger was Mr Trump’s impulsive and widely condemned decision the previous day to announce the withdrawal of America’s 2,000 troops in Syria. Mr Mattis is reported to have visited the White House, with his resignation letter in his pocket, in a last, futile attempt to walk Mr Trump back from a move that threatens to leave America’s campaign to crush Islamic State (IS) unfinished and Vladimir Putin with an even freer hand in Syria than he already has. Yet Mr Mattis, who has become the first defence secretary to resign as an act of protest, presented his resignation as a broader rebuke to Mr Trump’s unilateralist instincts.
“One core belief I have always held,” he wrote, in a letter distributed like confetti around the Pentagon, “is that our strength as a nation is inextricably linked to the strength of our unique and comprehensive system of alliances and partnerships.”
A retired marine and four-star general, whose exemplary reputation has been uniquely unscathed in service of Mr Trump, Mr Mattis praised NATO in particular. He also lauded the coalition of 74 nations working to defeat IS in Syria, which Mr Trump reportedly decided to undermine without bothering to notify the leaders of other member countries—or even Joseph Dunford, chairman of America’s Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Mr Mattis’s letter signalled the fundamentally self-defeating nature of such impulsive presidential behaviour. “Like you, I have said from the beginning that the armed forces of the United States should not be the policeman of the world,” he wrote. As the undergirding of American global power, America’s alliances provide a historically-tested alternative to that unaffordable and unsustainable role. Running them down, as Mr Trump has done, by decrying NATO and other cornerstones of the Western alliance and insulting their leaders, is therefore straightforwardly against America’s interest.
To signal at the same time a more isolationist American military posture—by withdrawing from Syria and also, it emerged on December 20th, planning to withdraw half of America’s 14,000 troops in Afghanistan—compounds Mr Trump’s strategic error. It represents, Mr Mattis underlined, more than a difference in outlook between himself and the president. It illustrates the incoherence of Mr Trump’s notion of America First. America’s global leadership, including the alliances it is based on, is a source of national strength. Conceding them will make America weaker.
The main beneficiaries of Mr Trump’s self-defeating course, Mr Mattis implied, will therefore be the main challengers to American dominance. “Similarly,” he wrote, “I believe we must be resolute and unambiguous in our approach to those countries whose strategic interests are increasingly in tension with ours. It is clear that China and Russia, for example, want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model—gaining veto authority over other nations’ economic, diplomatic, and security decisions—to promote their own interests at the expense of their neighbours, America and our allies.”
That pointed to another grand contradiction between Mr Trump’s instincts and America’s interest. The main innovation in Mr Trump’s own National Security Strategy and related National Defence Strategy was to identify those challenger countries and declare the need for a more adversarial American posture in response to them. “Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in US national security,” wrote Mr Mattis in a foreword to the NDS, which was published in January.
It would be naïve to give the president much credit for that strategic development. It represented more an effort by Mr Mattis and other sober members of his national security team to render Mr Trump’s talk of America First in a coherent fashion which served America’s needs. Yet from its patchwork origins the promised strategic shift has received strong bilateral support (notwithstanding the rebuke to Barack Obama’s softer instincts it implied).
There have also been subsequent flashes of evidence—for example, a strikingly hawkish speech on China by Vice-President Mike Pence in October—that the administration is serious about executing its promised shift. Meanwhile Mr Trump has emerged as perhaps the biggest risk to his own strategy. Even as he has castigated America’s allies, he has praised Mr Putin and China’s president Xi Jinping. It seems their “authoritarian model”—the threat to Western democracy Mr Mattis warned of—is something Mr Trump admires.
Mr Mattis is the fourth member of Mr Trump’s cabinet to have resigned in the past two months. Yet his departure is by far the most damaging indictment of the administration yet. “Because you have the right to have a secretary of defence whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects,” he wrote, “I believe it is right for me to step down from my position.” To allow time for his successor to be nominated and approved by the Senate, he intends to quit his position by the end of February.
Judged by the standards he set himself, Mr Mattis’s two-year tenure at the Pentagon has been at best a partial success. He identified three main objectives: to improve the lethality and readiness of American forces; to expand and deepen American alliances; and to reform the defence department’s wasteful procurement and other processes. Only the first can be said to have been significantly accomplished.
With the benefit of a large increase in defence spending this year, Mr Mattis has overseen improvements in readiness and munition supplies and also a loosening of the rules of engagement for US forces in Afghanistan and other combat zones. His ambition to improve alliances—an opening statement of his view of America’s global interest—foundered on Mr Trump’s contrary view. His reform agenda, which many defence secretaries have promised and few have delivered on, looks similarly still-born.
For his many supporters, including American allies and most members of Congress, from both parties, it was nonetheless enough that Mr Mattis represented a check on the president’s worst instincts.
He did not criticise Mr Trump openly. A former confidant of Mr Mattis says Bob Woodward’s recent depiction of him deriding the president as “a fifth or sixth grader” does not ring true. Yet, over fast-food suppers in the White House, Mr Mattis strove to inform Mr Trump about the true state of the world and, therefore, the inappropriateness of the president’s foreign-policy instincts. On occasion, as when Mr Mattis sought to slow-walk Mr Trump’s ban on transgender servicemen and -women, he also sought to foil the president’s orders. His resignation shows how unsustainable that was.
Mr Trump had long-since wearied of Mr Mattis’s lack of enthusiasm for his decisions. He is also said to resent the former general’s reputation as a saviour of the republic. Once enamoured of Mr Mattis’s image as a fire-eating war-fighter, he recently suggested he was “sort of a Democrat”. There is no bigger slur in Mr Trump’s lexicon.
Mr Mattis’s resignation should serve as an alarm-signal to Congress. Almost universally admired as a custodian of American security, he has identified Mr Trump’s worst instincts as a threat to that security, which he could no longer stave off. Underlining the seriousness of this predicament, it is reported that Mr Trump’s took his decisions to withdraw from Syria and partially from Afghanistan at least in part in a bid to deflect attention from his wider political troubles. These include various legal threats, including Robert Mueller’s investigation into his and his associates’ affairs, and also his failure hitherto to secure funding for a southern border-wall.
It was always clear that American foreign policy was at risk from Mr Trump’s character flaws and limited understanding. It is starting to look like an expression of them.
The response from Republican senators suggests that the severity of Mr Mattis’s warning has been somewhat registered. The Republican leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell, who generally refrains from anything that might look like criticism of the president, said he was “distressed” by Mr Mattis’s departure. “It is regrettable that the president must now choose a new Secretary of Defence.”
Mr Trump should take that as a warning that winning Senate approval for his next defence secretary will not be easy. His nominee cannot be another belligerent Trump apologist, like John Bolton, his national security adviser. Pentagon insiders suggest Mr Mattis’s deputy, Patrick Shanahan, could get the nod. Yet other Republicans went further in echoing Mr Mattis’s warning.
Mitt Romney, the party’s presidential candidate in 2012, tweeted: “The foreign policy described by Gen. Mattis today has, for nearly ¾ century, kept us from global war, empowered our economy, helped billions escape from poverty & opened freedom’s door around the world. His service, vision & character were a blessing. He will be greatly missed.”
Others will take their cue from that. Many Republicans believe Mr Romney, a newly-elected senator from Utah, has the stature and independent-mindedness needed to resist Mr Trump’s bullying as few have. Yet what such resistance might amount to, as the Trump administration enters yet another worrying new phase, is open to significant doubt.
The thinly-veiled implication of Mr Mattis’s resignation statement is that the president’s impulses are a threat to American security interests. Yet the presidency has expansive powers over national security policy. Perhaps only Mr Trump’s removal, by the electorate or otherwise, could substantially mitigate the threat Mr Mattis has given warning of.
