The Cost of Chaos by Peter Bergen

Author:Peter Bergen [Bergen, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-05-17T00:00:00+00:00

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Trump’s America First foreign policy gathered steam during the spring and summer of 2018, and it created further tensions between the president and his secretary of defense. Trump told his senior advisers that he was thinking of pulling the United States out of NATO. Trump also feuded publicly with allies at a NATO summit in Brussels in July, calling them “delinquent” in their defense spending and making the false claim that “many countries owe us a tremendous amount of money for many years back.” That’s not the way NATO worked. As mentioned above, each country in the alliance had agreed to spend 2 percent of their GDP on defense by 2024. None of that spending was “owed” to any other country.

This all contrasted with Mattis’s deep support of NATO. At his confirmation hearing, Mattis described it as “the most successful military alliance probably in modern world history and maybe ever.” On his first day in office, Mattis made it a point to call the NATO secretary-general, the British defense secretary, and the Canadian defense minister to emphasize the continuing American commitment to the alliance.

Trump had kowtowed to Putin at the Helsinki summit in July 2018. Several months later, Mattis said publicly at the Reagan Defense Forum in California, “We simply cannot trust” Putin.

In June 2018, Trump attended a much-ballyhooed summit in Singapore with Kim and later declared, “We fell in love.” This love affair had scant impact on the dictator’s nuclear ambitions. The North Koreans accelerated their ballistic missile program at more than a dozen secret bases, yet Trump had canceled joint US–South Korea military exercises, a staple of the alliance for decades. The move blindsided Mattis and was a gift to the North Koreans.

Mattis was also frustrated with the management style of the new national security adviser, John Bolton. Where McMaster had convened relatively frequent meetings of the National Security Council, Bolton dealt with few officials on the NSC and kept his own counsel. Instead of conducting “principals” meetings in person, Bolton convened “paper committees” where he would send around papers with which the principals could “concur” or “non-concur” with a particular course of action by a certain date. Some of this was because Bolton—despite his fearsome reputation—was a classic shy introvert.

Mattis complained to Bolton about the collapse of a formal national security review process because of the lack of NSC meetings chaired by Bolton. Bolton ignored Mattis.

When mortar attacks landed in the US embassy compound in Baghdad on September 6, 2018, likely launched by a Shia militia with ties to Iran, Bolton asked for a range of military options against the Iranians. Mattis was alarmed by the request. Bolton then tried to go directly to CENTCOM to ask for options that he believed were completely legitimate for him to be able to provide to Trump. Mattis blocked Bolton.

Another point of tension was the deployment of active-duty soldiers to the United States–Mexico border in late October 2018 just before the midterm elections. Trump made “the crisis at the border” a central theme of that election.

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