HR McMaster was national security adviser for a little more than a year. His struggles to work with Donald Trump have been widely reported. After a year, the blowhard mogul fired the military intellectual – by tweet.
Two years later, the retired general has written a book. Despite his travails, it is not a White House tell-all.
Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World contains elements of memoir but is more concerned with discussing US foreign policy – on Russia, China, the Middle East, Iran – while lamenting how such foes profit from domestic political division drastically deepened by Trump.
“I talk about how we’re more connected to each other electronically than ever before,” McMaster says, by phone to New York from Stanford, where he’s now a fellow at the Hoover Institution. “But more distant from each other psychologically and emotionally than ever before. So I recommend that we come together on, you know, basketball courts and rugby pitches, to renew our fellowship with one another and to transcend the vitriol that we see on social media.”
From an American political figure, mention of rugby might seem rather unusual. But it’s not unexpected here.
McMaster and I have spoken before, about a sport that might be – after his family, the US military and history – the fourth great love of his life. That interview, shortly after McMaster was fired, rather nonplussed some in a Washington press corps eager to hear him dish the dirt on Trump. So might this.
“What I love about rugby,” he continues, “is it has some real lessons for us. We can fight like hell with each other on the pitch, and then all have a pint afterwards at the party. And become fast friends with the same people. I just think it’s super important that we bring that attitude to our civic lives and to our communities.”
‘Strategic narcissism’
In the US military community, a growing chorus is speaking up against Trump. McMaster has not joined it. He says he has never voted and went to the White House as a soldier, simply to serve the president. Asked about controversy over Trump’s reportedly dismissive attitude to US servicemen and women, even those killed in combat, he has said he did not hear such comments himself.
But it would be wrong to say he does not criticize Trump. Battlegrounds is a critical look at foreign policy, from a hawkish but internationalist standpoint, praising the president in some instances but generally at odds with his administration and others, particularly that of Barack Obama.
On the promotional trail, from The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to PBS Newshour, McMaster has commented on Trump’s sycophancy towards Vladimir Putin, his stoking of divisions encouraged by Putin’s Russia and even his “aiding and abetting” of new election interference from Moscow; his failure to condemn white supremacists; his suggestion he might not leave office if beaten by Joe Biden in November.
As the election approaches, Trump seeks foreign policy wins. When it comes to the “forever wars” in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, he has sought to bring US troops home, regardless of the cost to allies. In Afghanistan, peace talks are ongoing.
Trump’s policy, McMaster says, is “based on what we want the war to be. We want the war to be in a situation that is conducive to our withdrawal, right? So therefore, we create the enemy we want. In the Taliban, we conjure an enemy that has completely disconnected from transnational terrorist organizations or jihadist terrorists that pose a threat to us, like Al-Qaida. Well, that’s a complete fiction.”
“We create a Taliban that will not pursue the same brutal form of sharia that it imposed on the Afghan people and Afghan women in particular, but the entire population from 1996 to 2001. And so I think it is utterly unrealistic. What is astounding about Afghanistan is, if we wanted to get out, we should just have gotten out. What we’ve done is, we’ve gotten out in a way that greatly complicates the situation for the Afghan government and the Afghan people, 95% of whom do not want anything to do with the Taliban.”
To McMaster this is a perfect example of “strategic narcissism”, a concept coined by the political scientist Hans Morgenthau and examined in depth in Battlegrounds. McMaster says it’s a term he “started using a few years ago”. It seems doubtful the distinctly un-strategic narcissist in the Oval Office ever listened if he tried to explain.
When he went to the White House, McMaster was known as a military thinker, a soldier who won a famous tank battle in the Gulf war, wrote a book about Vietnam and pursued counter-insurgency tactics in the wars after 9/11.
“I tell a story,” he says. “My sidekick in the Middle East oftentimes was Joel Rayburn, who is in the state department now [as special envoy for Syria]. And at one stage when we couldn’t fathom the disconnect between reality on the ground in Iraq and our policy, [which seemed] a rush to failure, he said, ‘You know, the problem is that we’re in I-raq, but people in Washington are basing the policy on My-raq. And My-raq is anything you want it to be.
“It’s dark humor, because of course the stakes were pretty high, life and death in a combat situation. But I think that captures strategic narcissism perfectly.”
‘It’s important to read’
On the page, McMaster describes his family’s bafflement when, preparing to go to Washington, he packed “more books than clothes”. Once in the Trump administration he served – not always happily – beside another ardent reader, the defense secretary and retired Marine Corps general James Mattis.
McMaster’s Vietnam book, Dereliction of Duty, grew from his history thesis and described the failures of the joint chiefs of staff who advised Lyndon B Johnson in the early days of a war that spiraled into nightmare. It is regarded as a classic.
“In this case I was fortunate that I had the opportunity to research and write and think about national security decision-making and presidential decision-making in the context of the Vietnam war,” he said. “So I brought with me that perspective and determination to avoid at least the same pitfalls that I identified from a historical perspective.”
Did he avoid them?
“Yeah, I think I did. I think we did, as an actual National Security Council staff. I can only speak of those 13 months, but in those 13 months we put into place a process that I think prevented us from repeating the mistakes that I identified about the period during which Vietnam became an American war, from November 1963 to the summer of 1965.”
In the White House, McMaster faced issues including Russian election interference; North Korea and its nuclear threat; an Iran nuclear deal Trump wanted to trash; and the rise of China.
He sought, he says, to “understand problems holistically before rushing to action, to not tell the president what the president wanted to hear, but to give him multiple options and assessments of those options. And to not allow domestic political considerations to shape those options in a way that they became disconnected from the realities overseas.”
It is hard to say the US under Trump has made much progress on any of the overseas realities above, when McMaster was in office or since.
Russia is interfering in the election again, Trump conspicuous by his silence; North Korea has increased its nuclear threat, despite Trump’s courtship of Kim Jong-un; Trump did pull out of the Iran deal; and Trump’s trade war with China has morphed into a blame game over the coronavirus pandemic – in the midst of which, the president is now a statistic.
But it is easy to say no adviser could have corralled Trump over one such issue, never mind the whole horrific smorgasbord. And unlike his successor as national security adviser, McMaster has resisted the temptation to vent spleen in print.
John Bolton wrote The Room Where It Happened, a barrage of bombshells about China, Russia and the Ukraine scandal which led to Trump’s impeachment, a book which seems to pour notes and memos directly on to the page and which the White House tried to stop.
McMaster says he has “skimmed” Bolton’s book. “I’ve looked at how he dealt with particular topics, but I haven’t had the chance to read it.”
If not quite a “no comment”, it’s close. Of other books by former Trump insiders, McMaster says he’s seen just a few.
“I once asked one of my advisers at UNC Chapel Hill, a great historian of the American Revolution, a wonderful man, Don Higginbotham, if he had read a recent book. And he said, ‘HR, historians do not read books. They use them.’ So, I’ve skimmed some of them.”
“The book that I’m reading right now is Black Wave by Kim Ghattas, which is a treatment of Saudi Arabia, Iran and their rivalry. That’s really quite good. And then the other book I’m reading is Active Measures by Thomas Ridd, which is a history of Russian disinformation and political warfare.”
McMaster writes about his experience at the sharp end of such efforts, describing Moscow’s role in the promotion of a #FireMcMaster hashtag which Trump eventually obliged. He has described dismay at the president’s reluctance to back his intelligence community over such concerns.
‘The president was not an isolationist’
About the challenges of briefing Trump, McMaster remains diplomatic, sidestepping discussion of what Bolton called “stories, true or not, of Trump tuning out [McMaster’s] long, exhausting briefings”.
“I never would have expected the president, as busy as any president is, to get to read a whole book,” he says. “And so, you know, my first few days in the administration, we had an all hands meeting. And I said, ‘Hey, we can develop what we think are the perfect policy products for the president and ask the president to conform to what we think is the best way to convey information, or we can convey information the way that the president likes to receive it.’ So that’s what we did when I was there. And I think in those 13 months, we were effective in doing it.”
But if McMaster’s policy creed was fundamentally interventionist, and Trump’s political instinct fundamentally isolationist, surely McMaster was therefore one of the “adults in the room”, widely reported to have kept Trump somewhere near the straight and narrow until he finally broke free?
“Well, what would I think is that the president was not an isolationist. He was a skeptic, I would say, about sustained, especially military engagements abroad, if those engagements were not obviously in the interests of the American people, or they didn’t prioritize American security.”
“What I try to argue in the book is not an argument for massive troop commitments. abroad. It’s an argument for, I think I would call it sensible and sustained engagement that integrates all elements of national power, including military but as part of a broader diplomatic and economic and informational and intelligence approach to these international competitions that are already ongoing.”
In search of a metaphor, he returns to the rugby field.
“The point I try to make in the book is that these matches, you know, are already under way. And if you’re not on the pitch, you’re going to get your ass kicked.”
McMaster was kicked out of the White House by Trump. Parts of his vision are strikingly at odds with the president – he rejects climate change denialism, writes that “immigrants have been and remain one of America’s greatest competitive advantages”. Trump will never listen. Perhaps a successor will.
“I think it’s possible to prioritize American interests,” McMaster says, “but also to recognize that the best way for America to advance those interests is from within a community of like-minded countries and nations, committed to preserving the competitive advantages that our free and open societies and our free market economic systems have enjoyed.”
‘I don’t really take offence”
McMaster is determined interviews should not become tell-alls. But it turns out he is willing to discuss one infamous presidential attack.
In April 2018, the New Yorker reported that Trump, ever obsessed with appearances, had despaired of his adviser’s dress sense. The suit McMaster wore instead of his uniform as a serving lieutenant general made him look “like a beer salesman”, the president reportedly said.
McMaster laughs.
“After serving in the military for 33 years, I already assumed no one was going to come to me for fashion sense, right? But it’s so funny, I think I will tell a story.
“I’m in an administration with a lot of people who have your wealthier business backgrounds. And so I’m talking to Gary Cohn [then chief economic adviser, formerly of Goldman Sachs], it’s my first day in the West Wing, first full day anyway, and he says to me, ‘Hey, nice suit there,’ you know. And I say, ‘Thanks, but the bad news is it’ll set you back 90 bucks.’ Because I’d gotten it in Afghanistan, from a tailor there. I showed him the label: “Mobin Tailor, Kabul.”
Among the Trump books lie many other instances of president mocking adviser: for his military bearing, in refusing to listen to his briefings.
McMaster laughs again, and says he doesn’t “really take offence to those kind of comments, if he made them. I don’t know.
“I mean, what I did do, over time, was upgrade myself to a level of fashion that I would hope would be commensurate with a purveyor of fine scotches.”
