Chaos Under Heaven by Josh Rogin

Author:Josh Rogin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780358393832
Publisher: HMH Books
Published: 2021-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

The Rise and Fall of Pat Shanahan

Patrick Shanahan, a former Boeing executive, was thrust into the role of acting defense secretary after James Mattis resigned in protest in response to Trump’s sudden decision to withdraw from Syria in December 2018. Speaking on his very first day as acting head of the Defense Department in January, Shanahan said his focus would be “China, China, China.”

Five months later, standing at the podium in Singapore representing the United States at the Shangri-La Dialogue, Shanahan had been nominated to be the defense secretary on a permanent basis, but he was not yet confirmed. This was his chance to show the assembled officials and lawmakers in the audience he fit the role. But in a disappointing performance, he delivered basic talking points on the need for both cooperation and competition with China. He didn’t bother to push back on the Chinese defense minister’s racism accusations or talk about how Skinner’s reference to a clash of civilizations was a misunderstanding.

Minutes after Shanahan’s speech, the Pentagon released its first-ever Indo-Pacific Strategy Report, a sixty-four-page document that declared Asia was the Defense Department’s “priority theatre” and reaffirmed the National Defense Strategy’s declaration that China was a “revisionist power.”

Was this the Long Telegram for China, Pentagon edition? Not at all. For one thing, it only dealt with the military part of the equation. Neither Shanahan nor the report ever got to the larger issue at hand—namely, what were China’s intentions and what does that require us as a country to do? Hoping to force Shanahan to address that point, I asked him in the open plenary session how his promise to elevate the China issue was any different from the same exact promise made by every US defense secretary who had stood behind that same podium.

He responded that the Trump administration had fully resourced its pivot to Asia, unlike past administrations, which wasn’t true. He said the United States was finally talking openly about China’s bad behavior, as if that was something new. And he praised the Trump administration’s engagement with regional allies and partners, which is actually one of the worst parts of the Trump administration’s China policy. “Those are the three areas,” he told me, “where I think fundamentally, if you were to measure the difference, people would look at those and say, ‘This is a departure from what has been done in the past.’”

That was the last major event Shanahan ever spoke at while employed by the US government. He never got confirmed as defense secretary. Later that month, it was revealed that he had failed to disclose that he had been accused of spousal abuse as part of a tragic series of family events years prior that had resulted in the arrest of his then wife, her subsequent violent assault at the hands of their oldest son, and Shanahan’s alleged efforts to hide that son from law enforcement after the attack. When the news broke, Shanahan withdrew from consideration.

Shanahan thought that in the Trump administration, personal scandals were forgivable, and he also wanted to protect his family from the publicity.

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