I’ve never worked in the White House, but I’ve spent time with people who have. Some were devoted, almost religiously, to the man in the Oval Office. Others were bent on using the president to advance their own power, careers or agendas.
When Gen. H.R. McMaster was appointed assistant to the president for national security affairs, he believed that the proper role of what’s commonly called the National Security Advisor (NSA) is to provide the president with “comprehensive analysis, sound assumptions, clear objectives, and realistic concepts for integrating all elements of national power and the efforts of likeminded partners.”
A soldier and scholar, McMaster has just published At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House, a memoir of his 13 months advising the 45th president of the United States.
It’s a riveting read. It’s also fueling election-season controversies. In an effort to mitigate them, McMaster prefaces his memoir with a “note to readers.”
“Those who despise Donald Trump will want to read in these pages confirmation that he was a narcissist unfit for the highest office in the land,” he writes. “Those who revere him will want to read how Trump the anti-hero fought to save the United States from establishment politicians and bureaucrats who had for too long been derelict in their duty to the American people.”
He adds: “As a historian, I consider it my responsibility to explain what the Trump administration achieved and failed to achieve in the areas of foreign policy and national security during a pivotal moment in American history.”
The Trump White House was a sausage factory, to be sure, but McMaster makes clear that the sausages produced were mostly good quality—certainly superior to those churned out by the Obama/Biden White House and the Biden/Harris White House. (More on that in a moment.)
McMaster is currently the Fouad and Michelle Ajami Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Full disclosure: He also chairs the Center on Military and Political Power at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the nonpartisan think tank over which I preside.
I first met him when, as the NSA, he was looking to think tanks for granular research, insightful analyses and out-of-the-box policy options.
In At War with Ourselves, McMaster reveals no state secrets by portraying Trump as self-centered and mercurial. But his book primarily focuses on the widening divisions among Americans.
Back in the day, Republican President Ronald Reagan called Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill his friend. They would, he said, “have it out on the issues” but not “on each other, or their countrymen.” The two enjoyed end-of-the-day libations together. Can you even imagine President Joe Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris sharing an IPA with Speaker Mike Johnson?
There also are deep divisions within the parties. #NeverTrump Republicans and #AlwaysTrump Republicans are practically at daggers drawn. And the woke left of the Democratic Party intimidates and silences most moderate Democrats.
Inside the Trump White House, McMaster writes, those seeking to undermine trust between him and the president included “members of the alt-right” and “neo-isolationists.”
They accused him of “disloyalty and insubordination,” along with “ludicrous allegations that I was anti-Israel, soft on jihadist terrorists, and weak when it came to confronting Iran.”
McMaster notes that previous administrations have not all been exemplars of maturity, competence and strategic teamwork. Before writing Dereliction of Duty, his book on the Vietnam War, he studied President Lyndon Johnson, in whom he saw “the tendency to belittle others to make himself seem bigger and to hide his own insecurities, fears, and flaws.”
Even the Reagan administration in its first year was riven with counterproductive rivalries. Collaboration improved after George Shultz replaced Gen. Alexander Haig, who had declared himself the “vicar” of U.S. foreign policy, as secretary of state.
It’s also true that Trump, throughout his four years in office, “was beleaguered by commentary in much of the mainstream media that was vehemently opposed to him, and by a 22-month, $32 million special-counsel investigation led by Robert Mueller, which in the end failed to find that Trump or his campaign had conspired with Russia during the 2016 election.”
In conclusion, McMaster writes: “Despite the chaos in the White House, Trump administered long-overdue correctives to unwise policies.”
He adds: “The wisdom of those policies and decisions became obvious to many only after the Biden administration disastrously reversed them.”
To name just a few of those reversals: Biden’s decision to throw open the southern border; the greenlighting of Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline and cancelation of a Canadian-U.S. pipeline; restricting U.S. energy production and exports while relaxing sanctions and economic pressure on the jihadist regime in Tehran; and lifting the terrorist designation from the Houthis in Yemen even as they and other Tehran proxies were increasing the stockpiles of weapons they would unleash after Hamas’s barbaric Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
Also: The Biden administration rejoined the U.N. Human Rights Council and other rogue international organizations “without demanding reforms.”
Worst of all, Biden surrendered to the Taliban and abandoned American allies in Afghanistan and did so in just about the worst way imaginable.
On March 22, 2018, Trump phoned McMaster to tell him he was being replaced by John Bolton.
Bolton went on to expend enormous energy dissuading Trump from concluding bad deals, including a peace agreement at Camp David with leaders of the Taliban.
America’s war with itself has only been worsening, even as an Axis of Aggressors escalates its war against America. The NSA in the next administration will face extraordinary and historic challenges.
Previously published by The Washington Times.
