At War with Ourselves, page 29
When Trump suggested that the embassy move might ease the peace process, it was clear he was not going to sign another waiver.
I assured everyone that the NSC process would get the president their advice and ensure that the departments and agencies were ready to implement his decision.
“Okay, General, run the process,” Trump said. “But I want to make the decision soon.”
An NSC meeting in the Situation Room on November 27 allowed Trump to hear from his principal advisors. Tillerson and Mattis recommended that the president renew the waiver to avoid sparking widespread violence, but once Trump had made the decision, all were prepared to implement it.
On December 5 and 6, Trump called Netanyahu, Abbas, King Abdullah, King Salman, and al-Sisi. I called my key counterparts, as did Tillerson, Mattis, and Pompeo. I had recommended that Trump explicitly hold out the possibility that a portion of East Jerusalem could become the capital of a future Palestinian state. Trump rejected the idea, but he would give reassurances that the United States remained committed to facilitating a lasting peace agreement and maintaining “the status quo at Jerusalem’s holy sites, including the Temple Mount, also known as Haram al-Sharif.”
Friedman told me later that he had been wary about bringing the decision to the president through the NSC process, but he was surprised by how our team had acted as honest brokers and coordinated a comprehensive plan for implementation. And despite the controversial nature of the decision, none of our deliberations leaked. I asked Friedman to share his views with Trump, explaining that those who had joined the administration to press their own agendas had tried to portray the NSC staff as the problem instead of the solution to overcoming bureaucratic inertia and resistance to policy changes. For several days after the announcement, Mike Bell held regular meetings to help the departments and agencies to integrate mitigating diplomatic, informational, and security measures.
* * *
IT WAS not getting any easier to coordinate with the secretaries of defense and state. The twice-weekly phone calls had worked well, but Mattis and Tillerson, who had requested them months earlier, often missed them. I concluded that I had no option but to resort to formal and informal written communications when their departments slow-rolled or acted contrary to the president’s decisions and policies.
I wrote to Tillerson, noting that Trump had said clearly that it was “useless to talk to the Taliban when they think they are winning,” but State Department officials, as they had done with approaches to Pyongyang, were pursuing talks with the Taliban in Doha, Islamabad, and Mecca.
I sent Mattis a memo noting that, despite the president’s directive and many public statements on lifting restrictions on U.S. forces in Afghanistan so they could pursue the Taliban, the Obama administration rules of engagement had remained in place. Mattis finally lifted the restrictions and restored status-based targeting of the Taliban.
Our senior directors continued to coordinate directly with their counterparts at the deputy and assistant secretary levels, but even that became problematic toward the end of 2017, as Tillerson occasionally forbade acting assistant secretaries from attending meetings and Mattis issued what one of his assistant secretaries described as a “gag order” to preclude collaboration on contingency planning for North Korea and Iran.
It was difficult to get State and Defense even to comply with Trump’s directives to stop certain activities. I discovered that contrary to the South Asia strategy, which called for the suspension of all aid to Pakistan with a few exceptions, when Mattis visited Islamabad in the coming weeks, the Pentagon was going to deliver a military aid package that included more than $150 million worth of armored vehicles.
I called for a meeting with Mattis, Tillerson, Dunford, and the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Gina Haspel. I started by noting that the president had been very clear on multiple occasions to suspend aid to the Pakistanis until they halted support for terrorist organizations that were killing Afghans, Americans, and coalition members in Afghanistan. We had all heard Trump say, “I do not want any money going to Pakistan.”
Mattis noted the possibility that Pakistan might retaliate in certain ways, but others, including Ambassador David Hale, who had joined by video from Islamabad, did not share those concerns. Mattis reluctantly halted that shipment of assistance, but other aid would continue, prompting Trump to tweet on New Year’s Day, “The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than 33 billion dollars in aid over the last 15 years and they have given us nothing but lies & deceit thinking of our leaders as fools. They give safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan with little help. No more!”2
Pakistan was not changing its behavior, and almost as an insult, the government released Hafiz Saeed, the mastermind behind the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks, on the eve of Mattis’s visit. Moreover, a recent event in Pakistan involving hostages had exposed the undeniable complicity of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence with the terrorists.
News reports criticized the president’s tweet as capricious and devoid of a coherent policy.3 But halting assistance was a critical part of the South Asia strategy that Trump had approved at Camp David in August. A lunch that the president hosted with the vice president, Tillerson, Mattis, Kelly, and me on December 14 helped me understand why it was difficult to implement Trump’s guidance on Pakistan or to foster cooperation on contingency plans for North Korea.
North Korea had recently tested an intercontinental ballistic missile judged capable of reaching the United States.
After lunch, Tillerson and Mattis pulled out a chart with a notional time line at the bottom. Diplomatic and then military actions were depicted from left to right. Diplomatic actions were in green and military actions in red. The premise was that diplomatic and military actions were separate rather than integrated and that we could put maximum pressure on North Korea with diplomatic and economic actions alone.
But military efforts such as the interdiction of ships evading UN sanctions and visible preparations to respond to DPRK aggression were essential to convince Kim Jong-un that his regime was safer without the weapons than with them. Unless Kim thought the United States, South Korea, and Japan might conclude that the risk of a nuclear-armed North Korea outweighed the cost of a military campaign to destroy its missiles and nuclear facilities, he had little incentive to give them up.
If we had to act militarily, Trump asked Mattis, “What more do we need to do to be ready?” Mattis’s response portrayed the military as unprepared, lacking the training and range of capabilities necessary for war. Trump was surprised: “How could our military not be ready when we are spending seven hundred billion dollars on it?”
As we walked out of the dining room, I said to Kelly, “What the hell was that? It sounded like [Mattis] was describing the military of the 1970s.”
Mattis, who viewed the president as someone prone to rash decisions, seemed to have been underselling U.S. military prowess to give Trump pause. That may also have been the reason the Pentagon, when asked to participate in contingency planning and a tabletop exercise on North Korea, had slow-rolled the effort.
Slow-rolling was not limited to contingency planning or the Defense Department. The president kept asking me, “Are we at maximum pressure on North Korea?” The answer was no, as the State Department opposed secondary sanctions on Chinese banks facilitating illicit North Korean financial transactions. The State Department was also ambivalent about Nikki Haley’s effort to secure additional UN Security Council sanctions.
Thanks to Haley’s persistent diplomacy with the backing of Trump—who had told Xi, “Oil should be cut off entirely. . . . We have to get much tougher faster”—the UNSC resolution passed, authorizing member states to “seize, inspect, freeze, and impound any vessel in their territorial waters found to be illicitly providing oil to North Korea through ship-to-ship transfers, or smuggling coal and other prohibited commodities from the country.”4
Despite that authorization, U.S. forces did not conduct any interdictions. Slow-rolling is bad etiquette in poker and could be disastrous in national security.
* * *
TRUMP AND I agreed that the United States had vacated arenas of competition vital to national security.
I told Trump in late November, “Your National Security Strategy is more than an academic exercise. It is an opportunity to describe the significant shifts in policy that you are making, persuade others to support those changes, and overcome normal bureaucratic inertia and opposition from the people who reflexively oppose anything you propose.
“And, Mr. President, you have to own this strategy for it to serve its purpose.”
Sitting across from the Resolute Desk, Schadlow briefed him on the main themes and the priority actions the strategy directed.
Trump responded, “This is fantastic.” He directed Stephen Miller, who was in the meeting and had reviewed drafts of the document, “I want more language like this in my speeches.”
The National Security Strategy appealed to Trump in part because we had started with the president’s views on foreign policy. And he liked much of the language because he had spoken it in previous speeches and statements we had helped draft to give him an opportunity to preview the strategy’s main themes and big ideas. The strategy appealed to Trump the iconoclast because it explicitly broke with previous policies that were based on fundamentally flawed assumptions. And Trump embraced the main theme of the strategy that the United States needed to compete to promote American prosperity, preserve peace through strength, advance U.S. influence, and protect the American people, the homeland, and the American way of life.5
I thanked Schadlow and her team for delivering a sound and compelling document that would drive Trump’s foreign policy priorities across the government and for doing so in record time. As the first National Security Strategy to meet Congress’s expectation that it be published during the first year of a presidency, this NSS had been foundational to and ensured consistency across the many other public strategies that followed it, from the National Defense Strategy to the Nuclear Posture Review to the Ballistic Missile Defense Strategy to the counterterrorism and cyber strategies. The collaborative process that Schadlow ran allowed fellow senior directors on the NSC staff, officials from across the government, and outside experts to challenge previous policies and generate new ideas about how to compete effectively.
The other purpose I had in mind for the NSS was to help Trump reconcile his contradictory predilections, especially the need to advance American interests abroad and his desire to retrench. The National Security Strategy and Trump’s speech announcing it stated clearly that, while the United States cannot solve the world’s problems or pay for everything, it can and would continue to catalyze positive developments in key regions of the world. The strategy acknowledged that alliances made America stronger while urging allies to pull their own weight. It communicated to adversaries and rivals that competition would not foreclose on cooperation, but that cooperation would come with an expectation of reciprocity. Trump’s short introduction stated that America would “promote a balance of power that favors the United States, our allies, and our partners” while never losing sight of “our values and their capacity to inspire, uplift, and renew.”
With the benefit of hindsight, it is difficult to argue against the objectives and priority actions in the NSS, such as improving border security, accelerating defense innovation, modernizing the nuclear deterrent, and protecting the national security innovation base. Subsequent events, such as Russia’s massive invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, highlighted the strategy’s call for pursuing U.S. “energy dominance” and bolstering critical supply chains.
* * *
DECEMBER 20 was Trump’s last day in the White House before he headed to Mar-a-Lago for Christmas with his family. I went to see him in the Oval Office before we walked to the Situation Room.
“Mr. President, I know you are wary of an open-ended commitment in Syria, but I also know that you do not want to allow the return of ISIS or permit Iran to establish a land bridge across Iraq and Syria that strengthens Hezbollah and other Iranian proxies and threatens Israel.”
Pompeo, Coats, and I had, over the previous three weeks, shown Trump that what he was hearing from Erdoğan and Putin was disinformation aimed at getting him to abandon the SDF and help Assad regain control of the oil-rich northeastern part of the country. And in those conversations, I told the president that ordering U.S. forces out of Syria prematurely would be the same as Obama leaving Iraq in 2011, which had set the stage for the rise of ISIS.
The meeting went well, and Trump approved the strategy. Tillerson explained Trump’s decision in a speech at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in January 2018, noting the 2011 mistake of premature disengagement from Iraq and pledging to “continue to remain engaged as a means to protect our own national security interest.”6 I had done my best to show Trump that the United States’ leaving the Middle East would neither conciliate the region’s violent passions nor insulate America from them.
Still, it would be a constant struggle to help Trump remember the logical argument that had helped him resolve his dissonance about the Middle East and set a clear long-term vision to advance U.S. interests there.
* * *
I WAS satisfied that we had ended the year with the National Security Strategy rollout and the clarification of U.S. policy in Syria. My approach to transcend rather than get mired in the internecine battles for control of foreign policy was tough but was getting results.
And I was drawing strength from the best part of my job—working with talented and dedicated people who wanted to make a difference. I had blocked time to make the rounds to our directorates to take stock of the year and listen to their ideas about priorities in the coming year. I asked each directorate to clarify its major goals and describe how it and the interagency team aimed to achieve those goals. And, as always, I asked the directorates how I could help them overcome obstacles and take advantage of opportunities to accelerate progress. We held another all-hands meeting in which I recognized members of our team who had contributed to the success of the Asia trip, the NSS, and the Syria strategy. I sensed that morale was high. Within the national security staff, we were building momentum.
And we created some holiday cheer. Our team put together a fantastic party in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Tom Bossert and I offered toasts to thank our staff and their families for the important work they were doing. The Georgetown University Chamber Singers, accompanied by the U.S. Army Band Woodwind Quintet, sang Christmas carols. Katie and I got to wish everyone the best for the holidays as we made our way through the progressive cocktail and hors d’oeuvre gatherings that each directorate hosted. To cap off the evening, I introduced DJ Max Powers and confessed my ambition to be remembered as the funkiest national security advisor. During the following week, Katie and I hosted two ugly-sweater parties for our dedicated Secret Service detail so that both shifts could attend one.
The White House got quiet after Trump left for Mar-a-Lago. I enjoyed giving evening tours to family and friends, to show them the decorations in the Residence. Aunt Nan and Tish visited just before Christmas. Our family went to see the musical play An American in Paris at the Kennedy Center on December 23. On Christmas Eve, Fr. Paul Hurley, Katie, and I wandered around a dark White House looking for light switches to illuminate the Christmas trees. Father Paul said Mass at our home for our family and some of our Catholic neighbors, and I experienced the comfort of family, friendship, and faith. Later that evening, we brought dinner out to our Secret Service detail, who had placed next to the armored SUV an illuminated blowup of Olaf, the friendly enchanted snowman from Disney’s Frozen.
* * *
THE DAY after Christmas, I rushed out to the SUV to tell the Secret Service that I needed to make an urgent trip to Philadelphia. My father had suffered a stroke. Our team scrambled a second SUV and got us moving north fast on the interstate.
When I arrived at the county hospital, I quickly realized that I had to get my father out of there. The doctors and nurses were overwhelmed with emergency cases, including gunshot wounds. My dad was receiving little attention. A kind friend of Jared’s arranged a flight for my dad to a teaching hospital, where he received dramatically better care, albeit too late to prevent severe damage to his speech and motor skills.
My gratitude for our Secret Service team would deepen as they got me to Philadelphia many times over the coming months as my father underwent extensive treatment and rehabilitation. It was sad to see this former hard-nosed athlete and tough soldier hobbled by the stroke, but he was cognizant that Katie, Tish, and my cousins were with him, and we enjoyed our time together. Fr. Vince Burns visited many times, as did troopers from the First Troop Philadelphia City Cavalry. When it was doubtful that my father would recover, Father Vince said Mass for us and administered the sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick.
As in combat, responsibility suppressed my sorrow over my father’s condition. And there were signs of hope and positive momentum in the New Year. Widespread protests in Iran that had begun in Mashhad, the nation’s second-largest city, indicated that maximum pressure was the right policy toward that country. I recommended that, in contrast to the Obama administration’s silence during massive protests in 2009, Trump tweet his support for the protestors: “The world is watching!” and “Oppressive regimes cannot endure forever.”7 As some in the U.S. media criticized Trump for his tweets, Iranian protesters chanted, “Our enemy is right here, they are lying that it is America.”
To put more international pressure on the regime, Ambassador Haley and I planned a visit of the UN Security Council ambassadors to the capital, during which Haley took them to the Washington Navy Yard to see a collection of rockets and missiles that Iran had provided the Houthis for attacks against the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and shipping in the Bab al-Mandeb Strait. Years later, after the Biden administration resurrected the policy of accommodation with Iran and removed the terrorist designation from the Houthis, the latter would acquire more advanced missiles from Iran and use them to disrupt shipping in the Bab al-Mandeb after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, murderous attack on Israel.
