At War with Ourselves, page 9
I asked him how he had earned his reputation as an honest broker. He responded that “the cabinet has to be confident that their views are getting through to the president. And the president’s decisions and priorities have to get to the cabinet. You have to be a conduit both ways.”
I wanted to be that honest broker. But after the conversations with Tillerson and Scowcroft—only one day apart—it was clear that Tillerson had a different idea of the “Scowcroft model” than the man for whom the model was named. My understanding of post–World War II U.S. history had convinced me that there was no effective substitute for an NSC-led policy process. I did not yet realize it, but Tillerson had already initiated a tug-of-war over control of Donald Trump’s foreign policy.
Chapter 6
A Well-Oiled Machine—Really
SYRIA DEATHS LINKED TO CHEMICAL AGENT SARIN . . . A suspected chemical attack killed dozens of people in a rebel-held area of Syria . . . TRUMP TO HOST EGYPT, JORDAN LEADERS IN BID TO IMPROVE TIES . . . ABDULLAH AND TRUMP ARE UNITED AGAINST ISIS, DIVIDED ON REFUGEES . . . Debate over the effects and future of the NAFTA trade deal have been but one point of contention between Mexico and the US since President Donald Trump took office . . . TRUMP ADMINISTRATION CONSIDERING REMOVING U.S. FROM NAFTA . . . President Trump welcomes Chinese President Xi Jinping Thursday at his Mar-a-Lago estate . . . THE TRUMP-XI SUMMIT: A ROCKY RELATIONSHIP TAKES CENTER STAGE . . . Since Trump took office, U.S.-China relations have faced a rather dangerous situation . . . Russian forces continue to provide active military support to Syrian forces despite extensive evidence that the latter are using chemical weapons and targeting civilians . . . PUTIN STANDS BY ASSAD AS FIRM EVIDENCE OF CHEMICAL ATTACK MOUNTS . . . TRUMP ORDERS MISSILE ATTACK IN RETALIATION FOR SYRIAN CHEMICAL STRIKES . . . McMaster has succeeded in imposing a more regular process on national security decision-making . . . MCMASTER’S INFLUENCE on Trump Security Policy Seen in Syria Airstrikes . . . The White House is standing by President Trump’s assertions that former President Obama ordered a wiretap of his phones . . .
ON THURSDAY, March 30, 2017, I was traveling west to California for a joyous family occasion, the marriage of our middle daughter, Colleen, to Lt. Lee Robinson of the Seventy-Fifth Ranger Regiment. Katie was already in Santa Barbara.
Thanks to the Secret Service, I avoided the ordeal of Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), a place in which Chaucer’s phrase “every man for himself” (from “The Knight’s Tale”) is apt. Suburbans were positioned below the aircraft. As we drove through the airport gates, an escort of California Highway Patrol officers raced ahead on BMW motorcycles in a high-speed choreography to expedite our entry onto the Hollywood Freeway, U.S. Route 101, and our two-hour drive north.
About halfway, in Camarillo, the CHP officers led us into the parking lot of an In-N-Out Burger, a culinary ritual I regard as compulsory upon returning to California. After indulging in a Double-Double and fries, I went on to meet Katie and our daughters at a hotel in downtown Santa Barbara.
The next day, we joined our extended family at the Alisal, a bucolic guest ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley. Our daughters grew up in the Army. (In two weeks, we would move into our eighteenth house.) Colleen had chosen the Alisal as the venue for the wedding reception because it was a touchstone for her and her sisters, a place they came back to every summer for vacation with grandparents, aunts, uncles, and their sixteen cousins.
The wedding Mass at the nearby Old Mission Santa Inés, in Solvang, was beautiful. Two of our dear friends, Fr. Vince Burns and Fr. Paul Hurley, celebrated the Mass and the Sacrament of Marriage. Father Burns, who retired as a lieutenant colonel, is a fellow Philadelphian. Father Hurley is my West Point classmate and a major general who was serving as the Army’s chief of chaplains.
As every father knows, a daughter’s wedding is an emotional event. The dominant emotion that day was joy over what a wonderful woman Colleen had become. Besides not crying while walking her down the aisle, making it through the father-daughter dance without stepping on her toes, and delivering a toast at the reception, my main responsibility had been hiring the band. Harold Wherry and his Blue Breeze Band were fantastic. There were times when everyone was on the dance floor, including my eighty-year-old aunt Johanne Curcio, whom everyone knows as Aunt Nan.
Secret Service agents got concerned after Lee’s fellow officers had the novel idea to coax a general—namely, me—onto a chair that they then proceeded to heave into the air repeatedly. I returned to earth without incident, however. As the festivities continued at an after-party generously hosted by my brother-in-law Michael Trotter I thought about how I had enjoyed everything about the day—seeing two loving people married, feeling the comradeship among soldiers, getting an opportunity to be with family, listening to some killer old funk and Motown music, and being able to stand outside the Washington Thunderdome to get some perspective.
The next morning, after a head-clearing workout, I went horseback riding with family and friends. A cavalry officer who rode tanks and other machines, I am far from an accomplished horseman, but the wrangler leading the ride set a slow pace. When we returned, Michael, one of the Secret Service detail, who had joined the ride despite never having mounted a horse, remarked that he was happy to have accomplished his objective of “finishing on the same side of the horse that I started on.”
One Secret Service agent based in California was a true horseman. He had served on the protection detail for former president Ronald Reagan. As we crested a small rise, he pointed out Reagan’s Rancho del Cielo, at the very top of a ridge to the west of Alisal.
Looking out at the place where Reagan had sought solace for about twenty-five years of his life, I was struck by the similarities and differences between him and the president I was serving: Trump and Reagan were both celebrities before entering politics. Both cast themselves as disruptors from outside Washington. Both were elected to the presidency by American voters unhappy with political elites whom they believed were self-interested and had failed them.
Reagan’s popularity mounted against the backdrop of the stagflation and oil crises of the 1970s. Reagan voters were disappointed about the economy and foreign policy failures, from the fall of Saigon in 1975 to the Iran hostage crisis, which began in November 1979 and did not end until Reagan’s inauguration in January 1981. Trump voters were rocked by the housing and financial crises of 2008–9, the transitions in the U.S. economy based on unchecked globalization, and the associated loss of manufacturing jobs to China and other countries. Trump’s political base was frustrated with the length and cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The president’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” was obviously derivative of Reagan’s “Let’s Make America Great Again.” Both men were effective communicators. Reagan, a former actor, was even known as “the great communicator,” as he was particularly effective on the relatively new medium of television. Trump, a former reality-TV star, had mastered social media and delivered impassioned unscripted monologues at political rallies.
But the differences between the two presidents who came into office with similar agendas (including tax cuts, deregulation, judicial appointments, and increased military spending) were as stark as the contrast between Reagan’s rustic Western-style White House and Trump’s lavish southern White House at Mar-a-Lago.
Trump preferred exquisite surroundings but engaged in a coarse form of communication. He took advantage of social media to reach the American people directly with visceral messages.
Reagan was polished. He had a quick wit and a strong sense of humor, often poking fun at himself. When his age became an issue in the 1984 campaign, he quipped that “Thomas Jefferson once said, ‘We should never judge a president by his age, only his works.’ And ever since he told me that, I stopped worrying.”
Trump had a sense of humor, but his vanity precluded any form of self-deprecation. He could be funny, but his preferred form of amusement was ridicule and name-calling—from “Crooked Hillary [Clinton]” to “Lying Ted [Cruz]” to “Little Marco [Rubio].”
Reagan had been on my mind even before the horseback riding at the Alisal. I had been looking for examples of the kind of strategies we needed to compete with China and Russia and had reread one such strategy, National Security Decision Directive 75, which Reagan approved in January 1983 “to contain and over time reverse Soviet expansionism.” But while we prioritized the development of long-term strategies, we also had to be ready to respond quickly to crises such as the one Reagan confronted on September 1, 1983.
On that date, Reagan was at Rancho del Cielo. I was a twenty-one-year-old cadet “firstie” in his last year at West Point, enjoying playing rugby and taking then-Major Peter Chiarelli’s Politics and Government of the Soviet Union course. I may have been sitting in that class when Reagan’s national security advisor Bill Clark made an urgent call to the president’s ranch to deliver a preliminary report that a South Korean airliner, Flight 007, en route from New York City to Seoul, had been shot out of the sky by Soviet fighter planes.
“Bill,” Reagan said, “let’s pray it’s not true.” Unfortunately, 269 passengers and crew, including 61 Americans, were lost.
Reagan wrote this in his diary that evening: “We were due to return to Wash. on Labor Day but realized we couldn’t wait so we left on Fri . . . When we got in on Friday, I went directly to an NSC meeting re the Soviet affair.”
I knew the chances were high that I would have to help President Trump respond rapidly to a crisis. There was no shortage of potential flashpoints. Russia had already shot down a Malaysian airliner over Ukraine, on July 17, 2014, killing all 283 passengers and 15 crew members. After Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea and its invasion of Eastern Ukraine in 2014, it was easy to imagine an intensification of that war or an air or naval encounter with Russian forces in the Black Sea region. China’s aggression in the South China Sea increased the possibility of an event analogous to the Hainan Island incident of April 2001, during which an American signals intelligence aircraft and a Chinese interceptor jet collided in midair. North Korea had increased the pace of its missile tests in Northeast Asia. A large-scale collapse of security in Afghanistan seemed possible. The nuclear deal with Iran had given the Islamic Republic more funds to intensify its proxy wars. And the weak international response to crimes against humanity in Syria had emboldened the Assad regime and its Iranian and Russian sponsors.
Unlike Bill Clark, in a time of crisis, I would have access to twenty-first-century secure communications and conferencing. After horseback riding, I conducted videoconferences and phone calls from a hotel in Solvang to prepare for a principals small-group meeting on Tuesday morning to refine the China policy framework and the objectives and agenda for the summit with Chairman Xi that would begin the following Thursday at Mar-a-Lago.
I said goodbye to Katie and caught the last Southwest flight out of LAX. One of the busiest and most consequential weeks of my tenure lay ahead.
* * *
RETURNING TO Washington from the placid Santa Ynez Valley was jolting. Upon my arrival at the White House, Pompeo called to share reports that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons in an attack that killed scores of people in Syria’s northern Idlib Province. Reports suggested sarin gas, a nerve agent. As our Middle East team gathered more information, I left for the principals small-group meeting on the upcoming China summit.
I got to the Situation Room a few minutes early to greet the attendees and thank them for coming at an early hour. We started promptly at eight o’clock. The purpose of the meeting, I explained, was “to refine our framework for a new China strategy, understand how the first Trump-Xi summit fits into that framework, and identify ways to use the summit to advance the new policy.”
I then read an excerpt from the Obama administration’s China policy that reflected the forlorn hope, across multiple U.S. administrations, that China, having been welcomed into the international order, would play by the rules and, as it prospered, liberalize its economy and, eventually, its form of governance. This framing meeting and the paper we had prepared would ground our approach on a new set of assumptions based on the CCP’s ideology and its determination to rewrite the rules in favor of its authoritarian mercantilist system. I noted that we were about to help the president effect the most significant shift in U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War.
Tillerson summarized the nature of the competition with China, what was at stake, and the objectives for a new policy. Trump wanted Chinese leaders to know that the United States and our allies would oppose Chinese efforts to establish exclusionary areas of primacy in the Indo-Pacific. We would insist on fair economic practices and reciprocity in trade and market access. We would also try to convince Xi and his delegation that denuclearization of North Korea was in our mutual interest because a Kim family regime armed with the most destructive weapons on earth was a threat to the entire world. Finally, CCP leaders should leave Mar-a-Lago knowing that we would not tolerate Chinese cyberattacks or cyber espionage.
At the conclusion of the meeting, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and Pompeo updated us on those previous reports that the Assad regime had used a nerve agent to murder scores of civilians in Khan Shaykhun, Syria. All indicators, from photographs and personal accounts, were consistent with the horrible symptoms of contact with sarin gas, including decreased heart rate, convulsions, foaming at the mouth, and respiratory paralysis. Soil samples were taken, and our intelligence professionals were working with allies to confirm the nature of the attack and who had conducted it.
I briefed the president on Khan Shaykhun. He reacted as Reagan did after the Korean Air Lines shootdown in 1983. He hoped that the report was not true. Why, Trump wondered aloud, would Assad and his Russian allies do this? I told him that the attack had occurred where a Syrian Army offensive had failed, and it seemed likely it was meant to regain the initiative against the rebels.
He then asked, “Could an attack like this have happened without Russia’s knowledge?”
I answered with the consensus intelligence view that Russian military advisors would almost certainly have known. I promised to have more details later in the day.
“Okay, General,” he responded, “but I just don’t understand why they would do it.”
* * *
I ENTERED the Four Seasons in Georgetown through the back entrance, took the service elevator up several floors, and walked past armed guards to Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s suite. The Egyptian president had met with President Trump the day before, while I was traveling home from Colleen’s wedding, and had requested a meeting with me.
Trump wanted to improve our relationship with leaders in the Middle East. Egypt, I thought, would be an easy sell. Then-general al-Sisi took power in 2013, after a coup against the Muslim Brotherhood government of Mohamed Morsi. The Obama administration’s embrace of Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood government and criticisms of al-Sisi had helped Russia regain influence in Egypt that the Soviet Union had lost four decades earlier after another military leader, President Anwar Sadat, jettisoned Cairo’s fifteen-year alliance with Moscow. The warming of relations with Egypt in the 1970s and the associated geostrategic benefits were analogous to what Trump could achieve with a reversal of Obama’s accommodation of Iran and alienation of Egypt and the Gulf States.
Our conversation was amicable. Al-Sisi reminisced about Fort Benning (now Fort Moore), Georgia, where he had attended the Infantry Officer Basic Course in the 1980s. We had attended Airborne School and Ranger School around the same time. He shared with me his concerns about the regenerative capacity of the Muslim Brotherhood and its ties to jihadist terrorist organizations. During the Trump administration’s transition, Egyptians, the Emiratis, and the Saudis pushed hard for a presidential designation of the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. But the State Department raised concerns that the designation would prevent discourse with less extremist branches of the Brotherhood and drive the group underground, where it could become more dangerous.
Toward the end of our conversation, I adopted a more serious tone to emphasize, as Trump had the day before, the need to remove a significant impediment to improved relations with Cairo. I told al-Sisi that I was “confident that we could accomplish a lot together, but only after you free Americans unlawfully imprisoned in your country.” I mentioned several of these by name, including Aya Hijazi, an American who, along with her husband, had founded a nongovernmental organization to advocate for child prisoners in Egypt. Hijazi was imprisoned in May 2014 and had gone without trial. I told al-Sisi that the State Department and Dina Powell would follow up with his team. I left the meeting with the impression that he would move on this issue.
Our prioritization of hostages and those unlawfully detained would pay off. Weeks later, Hijazi was released, and Trump received her in the White House on April 21, 2017.
* * *
MY NEXT meeting was also in the Four Seasons, with King Abdullah of Jordan, whom I had first met in 2003, while I was serving at U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM. As with al-Sisi, our shared military experience fostered good rapport between us. We were both cavalry officers.
I asked the king for his ideas about how to prevent Iran from extending its influence and perpetuating the cycle of violence in the region. He emphasized the importance of stabilizing Iraq and ensuring that Baghdad was not aligned with Iran. King Abdullah was pessimistic about our ability to achieve a resolution to the Syrian Civil War that would result in the removal of Assad, the defeat of ISIS and other jihadist terrorists, and a reduction in Russian and Iranian influence. He hedged on condemnation of Russia, more evidence that Moscow had succeeded in casting itself as an indispensable mediator even as it perpetuated the crisis in Syria.
* * *
BACK IN the White House, there were more reports confirming the Syrian regime’s mass murder attack at Khan Shaykhun. Our team was moving fast. The deputies had reviewed draft options for the president. Eisenberg, the NSC legal advisor, was analyzing presidential authority under Article II of the Constitution to take military action. A fast response would give the Kremlin less time to obfuscate. I wrote down what I thought were eight key tasks we must accomplish to satisfy our objectives:
