At War with Ourselves, page 31
For that trip, I took with me Nadia Schadlow, who had replaced Dina Powell as deputy national security advisor for strategy after Dina departed the administration in January; Fiona Hill, our senior director for Europe and Russia; and representatives from the key departments, including Col. Rich Outzen from the State Department.
Over dinner at the Palazzo Corpi, a magnificent 1882 mansion with elegantly frescoed walls, Consul General Jennifer Davis described a relationship on the rocks. The Turkish government was harassing embassy and consulate local staff. The state-controlled media spewed a steady stream of anti-American propaganda, including unfounded accusations that the United States was behind the 2016 coup attempt against Erdoğan. Prospects for the future of the relationship were grim, Davis said, due to the conservative Islamist ideology and anti-Western populism animating Erdoğan and his party.
The U.S. relationship with Turkey would require a sustained effort. I knew that I would not be around long enough to see it through, but if I could deliver a well-reasoned assessment of the relationship, a mutual understanding of our interests, and agreed priorities for solving problems, others could follow through and at least prevent the relationship from foundering completely.
The next morning, our party made the short drive to the Yildiz Palace complex and grounds, first used as an imperial estate during the reign of Sultan Ahmed I, in the early seventeenth century. Kalin and Fidan met us on the steps of the Mabeyn Köşkü, one of several imperial Ottoman pavilions and villas, a fitting venue evocative of Erdoğan’s and his party’s sentimental nostalgia for the Ottoman Empire.
I thanked Kalin and Fidan for hosting us in such a historic and elegant place. I told them that maybe memories of the Russo-Turkish wars and the Ottoman-Persian wars to which the buildings there bore witness might make easier our task of arresting the drift in our relationship. I wanted first to hear their assessment, because I “believe that the growing distance between us could be the most profound shift in the geopolitical landscape since the end of the Cold War. And I believe that shift is terrible for both of our nations.”
As expected, Kalin, who did most of the talking, complained heavily about U.S. support to the Syrian Democratic Forces and the U.S. failure to extradite Erdoğan’s arch-nemesis, Muhammed Fethullah Gülen.
When he finished, I pulled out a chart that was a by-product of the strategies for Syria and Turkey that Trump had approved during the week before Christmas. It listed the strategic objectives of major actors in the Syrian Civil War, including Iran, Israel, Jordan, Russia, Syria, Turkey, and the United States. The objectives were arranged in boxes and color-coded for each country. It was a striking depiction of the general alignment between U.S. and Turkish objectives and divergence between Turkey and the Syria-Russia-Iran axis. The one outlier was the Turkish objective of curtailing U.S.-SDF ties.
Our discussion confirmed two obstacles on each side that were preventing an improvement in our relationship. For Turkey, it was Gülen and U.S. support to the SDF. For the United States, it was the unjust imprisonment of American chaplain Andrew Brunson and the purchase of the Russian S-400 air defense system. I told them that I would regret to see it, but we would soon have to take measures to impose costs on Turkey for both. The end of Turkey’s participation in the F-35 program was a certainty if the S-400 sale proceeded. I don’t think they believed me.
As I had warned Kalin and Fidan, Brunson would be released only after Trump placed punitive tariffs on Turkey in August 2018 that resulted in an 18 percent devaluation in the lira. Trump also terminated Turkish participation in the F-35 program.1
Tillerson had follow-on meetings in Ankara, but both of us would be gone two months later. Two years later, when a Russian and Iranian offensive in Idlib Province killed approximately sixty Turkish soldiers and drove nearly one million more refugees toward the Turkish border, I wondered if Fidan and Kalin remembered our discussion. My hope was that, in the long term, the importation of Russian arms and Turkey’s deepening dependence on Russian energy would embolden Moscow to use its leverage against Ankara and thereby revive unhappy memories of Turkey’s experience with the Russian Empire. And, I thought, Iran’s hegemonic aspirations in the region would eventually collide with Turkey’s interests in Syria and the Middle East. But Erdoğan’s and his AKP party’s sympathies for Islamist parties, their close relationship with Qatar, and their antipathy to Israel would, in the near term, keep Erdoğan close to Tehran and Moscow.
On the flight home, I debriefed the cabinet, including Tillerson, who would visit the Turkish foreign minister and Erdoğan the following week, and Mattis, who would meet his Turkish counterpart at a NATO ministerial meeting. I suggested that we refine our Turkey strategy with an emphasis on the modest objective of avoiding a complete breakup while developing contingency plans for the worst-case scenario, including the relocation of U.S. military assets currently in Turkey. Years later, when Erdoğan would say after the horrible attacks on Israel of October 7, 2023, that Hamas was not a terrorist organization but a “liberation group,” I thought it might be time for the NSC to dust off that plan.
* * *
TURKEY WAS not alone in taking advantage of the ambiguous U.S. policy in Syria. Moscow apparently concluded that if Trump had one foot out the door, it was time to give him a little push. On February 7, 2018, Russian mercenaries and other pro-Assad forces reinforced with tanks and artillery attacked U.S. forces, and the Kurdish and Arab militiamen they were advising, in northeastern Syria.
The mercenaries were from the Wagner Group, a state-funded private military company owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Russian oligarch known as “Putin’s cook,” a man indicted by U.S. special investigator Robert Mueller and sanctioned by the Trump administration for his role in sowing disinformation during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. (Prigozhin would meet his demise in an unexplained plane explosion in 2023 after marching on Moscow with a force composed largely of ex-convicts.)
The attack on the U.S.-SDF base was ill-conceived and poorly executed. U.S. forces and their partners killed more than two hundred Russian mercenaries while suffering no casualties. The mercenaries’ immediate objective was to gain control of an old Conoco oil plant needed to defray the costs of the war and reconstruction. But I thought a secondary objective may have been to cause U.S. casualties and, as with the “Black Hawk Down” incident in Somalia in 1993, catalyze the withdrawal of U.S. forces.
No battle like that between Russians and Americans had ever occurred, even at the height of the Cold War. But Putin was eager to sweep the crushing defeat under the rug. He used Prigozhin’s Wagner Group to give him deniability, and he did not want to cope with negative news that might interfere with his engineering a lopsided victory in the forthcoming presidential election.
One week later, I was shaking the hand of Putin’s right-hand man, Nikolai Patrushev, at the U.S. consulate in Geneva. Patrushev had wanted to meet for a long time, but I had again delayed, in deference to Tillerson. By early 2018, it was clear that Tillerson’s solo effort to find areas of cooperation with Russia had achieved disappointing results and that it was time to establish more direct channels of communication between the White House and the Kremlin, other than the occasional phone calls and meetings between Trump and Putin.
No one on our team believed that the Geneva meeting would solve our problems with Russia. Events of the following month confirmed that assessment—including the Skripal poisoning and a chest-thumping speech in which Putin announced new nuclear weapons and showed an animated video depicting these weapons descending on what appeared to be Mar-a-Lago.
After introductions, I offered coffee to the Patrushev delegation, but none of them touched the light refreshments we had on hand. Fiona Hill; director for Russia Joe Wang; our State Department consul general, Ted Allegra; and I sat down across from Patrushev, two of his senior staff, and a notetaker. Patrushev had the air of self-confidence of a former KGB officer and the sullenness of a patriot full of resentment after witnessing the downfall of the system to which he had sworn allegiance.2
I wanted Patrushev to understand that the United States was determined to oppose future Russian aggression in Ukraine or the Black Sea region. I did not mention the failed Russian attack in Syria. Instead, I made the general point that the next act of Russian aggression in Syria or Ukraine could trigger a major military confrontation, even if Moscow intended to act below the threshold of what might elicit a military response from NATO.
I wondered if Patrushev had ever smiled. I thought his face might crack and fall off if he did. But he did sort of smirk when I thanked him for providing the U.S. Congress with what seemed to be the only issue members agreed on—sanctioning Russia for its subversive activities. I noted that the first major foreign policy legislation to emerge from the U.S. Congress after President Trump took office was the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, which passed in the Senate in a 98–2 vote after the House passed it 419–3. Patrushev’s half smile seemed meant to communicate that despite the Kremlin’s denials, Russia was, of course, deeply engaged in cyber-enabled information warfare, including the sustained attacks on me that peaked in August 2017.
I ended the meeting by expressing hope that “Russia will stop acting reflexively against the United States, at least in areas in which those actions cut against Moscow’s interests.”
The meeting confirmed for me that Trump, like his two predecessors, was bound to be disappointed in his effort to build a better relationship with Putin. Putin and Patrushev had low opinions of American resolve, and although Trump had approved extensive sanctions on Russia and decided to provide and sell defensive weapons to Ukraine, his mixed messages would not disabuse Putin of that opinion. I was sure there would be more challenges to come.
* * *
ON SATURDAY, February 17, I arrived at the Munich Security Conference in time for a large dinner at which Prime Minister Netanyahu was to deliver the keynote address. Netanyahu moved from the seat across the table to sit next to me. He was concerned about Hezbollah’s improved capabilities, including precision rockets, and the likelihood that it and other Iranian proxies, including Hamas and Palestine Islamic Jihad in Gaza and the West Bank, could attack in the coming year after the election in Lebanon.
He thanked me for the close coordination with his team, and I took advantage of the opportunity to voice my concerns about his hedging approach to Russia. “Prime Minister, you know that Putin is using a ‘bait and switch’—baiting you with the promise to curtail Iran’s presence and influence in Syria while actually enabling Iran’s proxies on your borders.”
Netanyahu smiled and said he had better return to his seat.
Getting others to see and act on the threat from Russia was the main theme of my trip. In separate meetings with German minister of foreign affairs Sigmar Gabriel and defense minister Ursula von der Leyen, I tried to convince them that the Russia-to-Germany natural gas pipeline Nord Stream 2 was a bad deal and that it was past time to reverse Germany’s effective disarmament since the end of the Cold War. It would take Russia’s massive reinvasion of Ukraine in February 2022 to kill Nord Stream 2 and impel German chancellor Olaf Scholz to declare a Zeitenwende, or watershed moment, and begin to rearm. Obviously, Scholz and much of Europe were too late to prevent the first major war in Europe since World War II.
In the speech I delivered at the conference—which immediately followed a speech by Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov—I emphasized the need to counter the proliferation and use of the most destructive and heinous weapons on earth, defeat jihadist terrorists, and reform international institutions that had been subverted and turned against their purpose. But what made news was the response I gave to a question from the member of the Russian Duma, the lower house of the Federal Assembly. As I mentioned in chapter 1, he suggested cooperation between Moscow and Washington in the area of cyber-security. After joking that I doubted there would be any Russian cyber experts available because they were all engaged in subverting our democracies, I described evidence cited in the Mueller investigation’s indictments of Russians for election interference in 2016 as “incontrovertible.”
My statement incensed Trump and almost certainly accelerated my departure from the administration. Press reports refracted my answer through the lens of the false accusations of “collusion.” Trump remained unable to recognize that he could both accept that Russia had conducted a cyber-enabled information warfare attack during the 2016 election and reject assertions that the attacks were intended to bias or had succeeded in biasing the results in his favor. Partisan politics had helped the Russians and their alt-right fellow travelers and undermined the most important requirement for success in the White House or any organization: trust.
When I saw Trump on February 20, a year after he had hired me, I said, “I know you’re angry with me, but I was only calling out the Russians, not agreeing with those accusing you of so-called collusion or claiming that Russia affected the election result.” He was civil, but I could tell he was still angry. He avoided eye contact with me for the rest of our meeting.
When Gary Cohn told me he planned to announce his departure from the White House on March 6, I told him, “I think I’ll be close behind you. I’m thinking right after the NATO summit in August.”
Gary replied, “I don’t think it’ll be that long.”
The first deliberately leaked stories about my impending departure had appeared on March 4.
* * *
ON THE afternoon of March 8, I hosted South Korea national security advisor Chung Eui-yong in my office for a one-on-one debrief on his meeting with Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang three days earlier. Separately, Deputy Director of the CIA Gina Haspel met with South Korea’s director of national intelligence, Suh Hoon, who had also attended the meeting with Kim. We then summarized the results for select members of the cabinet, including Mattis and Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan—Tillerson was traveling in Africa—in a conference room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Our plan was to meet with Trump the following morning before asking Chung and Suh to join him in the Oval Office.
All was going according to plan until I received a note that the president had heard about our meeting in the EEOB and wanted to see Chung and Suh right away. I asked Pottinger to take over for me, tapped Haspel on the shoulder, and walked with her to the Oval Office. I politely apologized to the administrative assistant who tried to stop us as we entered the Oval. I felt it important to pre-brief Trump.
“We believe that Kim is feeling the effects of the pressure campaign and wants a way out,” I told him. “That is the main reason he wants to meet with you. We also think that President Moon and his team want desperately to get talks started and are probably telling you and Kim what they think each of you wants to hear. You have two choices: say you will talk now or tell Kim that you will wait until you see progress toward denuclearization. In either case, we should make no concessions just for talks, and we should keep the pressure up.” I turned to Haspel: “Gina, what would you like to add?”
Haspel didn’t get a chance to respond; Kelly opened the door and ushered in the others who had been in the meeting at the EEOB. I walked over to the door and asked, “What the hell are you doing? We were pre-briefing the president.”
Kelly responded, “Everyone else should be here, too.”
It was more evidence that he was trying to squeeze me out—but more important: Trump was not going to get anything out of a discussion with eight people in his office.
Although I knew Trump would find the prospect of a summit with Kim irresistible, I wanted to suggest that he send a strong message back to Moon that we would not let up on the pressure. I caught Pottinger’s eye, and we both smiled in resignation as Chung and Suh entered the room.
Chung sat down next to Trump and relayed Kim Jong-un’s invitation to meet with Trump. When Trump immediately answered yes, Chung just about fell out of his chair. Then Trump asked Chung and Suh to make the announcement to the press from the White House.
Kelly and I would exchange words as I departed the Oval Office, and I let him know what I thought about how he handled this situation. But there was no time for hard feelings.
I sat with Chung at the conference table in my office and drafted a statement on a legal pad in long hand. Chung and Pottinger reviewed it. Our team quickly typed it up. I called President Moon’s office on my secure line, handed the phone to Chung, and left him and Suh alone there to update Moon and get his approval on the statement.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders arranged for Chung to address the press at the “sticks” outside the entrance to the West Wing. Once everything was set, I asked Chung and Suh to excuse me—Katie and I were hosting a long-planned farewell dinner for Gary and Lisa Cohn. “Eiu-yong, break a leg,” I told Chung. “I’ll see you tomorrow for breakfast.”
The next morning, Chung and I agreed that we should meet again with our Japanese counterpart, Yachi Shotaro, to ensure that we stayed aligned. Then I assembled our team to establish principles for a summit between Kim and Trump.
A summit with Kim presented opportunities. Trump was unconventional, and conventional approaches had not worked. A top-down process with North Korea seemed better than previous bottom-up, protracted negotiations with North Korean officials who had no real decision-making authority and who were fully vested in the status quo.
Kim Jong-un had a tremendous capacity for brutality, but no one knew how he would respond to President Trump’s argument that denuclearization was in the North Korean leader’s interest. To maximize the opportunity and protect against the downside, I drafted a short list of risks and mitigating measures. I asked Matt and Allison to work with State and Defense on actions necessary to achieve a favorable outcome. I also asked them to list the concrete steps necessary to reach verifiable denuclearization before the end of Trump’s first term.
