At War with Ourselves by H. R. McMaster

Author:H. R. McMaster
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2024-07-10T00:00:00+00:00

My basic message during the final prep meeting at the Hamburg Messe convention center was “Do not be a chump.”

I told Trump how Putin had duped Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. “Mr. President, he is the best liar in the world.” I suggested that Putin was confident he could “play” Trump and get what he wanted—sanctions relief and the United States out of Syria and Afghanistan on the cheap—by manipulating Trump with ambiguous promises of a “better relationship.” He would offer cooperation on counterterrorism, cybersecurity, and arms control.

I could tell that Trump was getting impatient with my “negative vibe.” I said what I needed to say. If he was going to be contrary, I hoped he would be contrary to the Russian dictator, not to me. I left the room as Putin and Lavrov arrived.

The readout from the meeting revealed the string of lies and deceptions I had anticipated from Putin. Unsurprisingly, he claimed that Ukraine had been a part of Russia since the sixteenth century; that he had to protect Russian speakers in the east from Ukraine’s campaign of ethnic cleansing. He also played down North Korea’s ICBM test, claiming that Pyongyang was not close to developing a nuclear weapon or an ICBM. We should not worry about Kim, Putin advised, because the regime would resolve itself if we just opened the border and got the North Korean economy going. I took this deception as a positive sign that maximum pressure was working. Putin was concerned about potential U.S. and allied military action against Pyongyang—especially after our strikes on Syria three months earlier.

On Syria, the Russian leader went beyond false promises on Iran and safe zones to predict that Assad would transition out of power. Beyond offering a “cyber working group,” Putin gave Trump “his word” that he had never looked at any of the classified information Edward Snowden, an American citizen he was harboring in Russia, had stolen and given to WikiLeaks. As Tillerson and Trump told me about portions of the meeting, I wondered how either of them had been able to keep a straight face.

To appeal to Trump’s optimistic interpretation of the U.S.-Soviet alliance during World War II, Putin showed Trump a video of Russia’s Northern Fleet salvaging the USS Thomas Donaldson, a 7,200-ton Lend-Lease ship that a German U-boat had sunk in the arctic in 1945, before it could deliver its cargo of Sherman tanks. The idea was to evoke the memory of the United States and the Soviet Union as allies during World War II and to keep alive the pipe dream of conciliation with Putin’s Kremlin as the best way to advance both countries’ interests.

Putin used his time with Trump to launch a sophisticated and sustained campaign to manipulate him. Profilers and psychological operations officers at Russia’s intelligence services must have been working overtime. Even as the meeting stretched into its second hour, Putin did not run out of material. To suggest moral equivalence between U.S. interventions in Latin America and

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