OPINION — Don’t be too surprised if former-Defense Secretary James Mattis breaks his silence about President Trump’s performance as commander-in-chief before next year’s election.
“There will come a time when I speak out on strategic issues, policy issues. That, I do not have a question about. But I need to give some period of time to those who have to carry out the responsibility to protect this country in a very, very difficult age,” Mattis said during his September 3, appearance before the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City.
A man who makes a point of putting things in context, Mattis went on to say, “We have to recognize that historians may not be writing about it yet, but we are living through historic times right now and all we’re getting is the current events each day on the newspaper. We don’t see the reflective analysis that helps us to put this all together. And so when the time comes, I’ll know it, when it’s right. I can’t tell you. I can’t tell myself. I’m not keeping a secret. When the time’s right to speak out about policy or strategy, I’ll speak out.”
The time will be right a year from now, September 2020 when the presidential campaign will start heating up. I know that Mattis told Judy Woodruff on the PBS NewsHour that he did not have any responsibility to speak up before the election, nor “evaluate those who have the toughest job in the world.
He did lightly sketch Trump as “an unusual president, and he talks openly about many things,” but Mattis added, “in the privacy of the office, he has to deal with the reality of competing factors. And I would bring the grim realities of war into that office. At the same time, political leaders are elected to try to bring human aspirations to bear, of a better economy, of pulling troops out of wars.”
Mattis described that as “the normal tension between human aspirations and war's realities, those grim realities. And it's something that, I like being hard on the issues. I don't believe in being hard on the people.”
So don’t expect Mattis to criticize Trump directly, describe conversations where the President showed ignorance or made false statements, or as he put it, “start talking in what we commonly call a kiss and tell now.”
Instead, I suspect Mattis will be subtle and indirect, much as he was in his December 20, 2018, resignation letter which Trump initially failed to realize was critical of his dealing with allies until others pointed it out.
Mattis has given hints of how his criticisms will be presented during recent interviews to promote his new book, Call Sign Chaos. For example, at the Council on Foreign Relations, as he did in his resignation letter, Mattis showed he sharply disagrees with Trump’s continued upbraiding of allies and contempt for NATO, in particular.
“I have been on many battlefields,” Mattis said when the question of NATO and alliances came up. “I had the privilege to fight many, many times for this country. Not once did I fight in an all-American formation. When this town was attacked on 9/11, I went into Afghanistan less than sixty days later—seventy days later. And alongside us were Canadian troops, and German troops, Norwegian, and United Kingdom, Turkey, and Jordan, Australia, and New Zealand. Their town wasn’t attacked. They were there because we were attacked.”
It is also clear that Mattis is unhappy with Trump’s repeated statements about bringing home U.S. troops from Afghanistan as he was with the President surprising him by suddenly saying American forces should leave Syria.
Although Mattis refused to comment on the U.S. negotiations with the Taliban with regard to Afghanistan, which have now temporarily collapsed, he did show indirectly his concerns using his own past experience with the Obama administration’s reduction of troops in Iraq.
“When we were leaving Iraq against the military’s advice and against the intelligence community’s advice, the intelligence community still remembered the young CIA analyst sent down to me and several others, and she said basically, if you pull your troops out you’ll most likely have to go back in because I guarantee you that an al-Qaida-associated group, I’m not quite sure which leadership cadre will form it, will be bringing them back out stronger than ever. You think of the millions displaced, the refugees all stemming from ISIS and what happened—the intelligence community did not miss that…And so sure enough, we had to send the troops back in. But look at what the cost was in Germany, in Turkey, all across the Middle East, the disruption.”
Although not directly linked to Trump’s risky approach to the Taliban in Afghanistan, Mattis warned the Council members, “Should we not learn from that [past Iraq] situation? We can want a war over. We can declare the war over. But the enemy gets a vote. And terrorism is going to be an ambient threat.”
His long-term concerns about terrorism led Mattis to raise what is his continued disapproval of Trump’s criticism of alliances and attempts to go it alone.
“The idea that we can now turn our back on this threat [terrorism] and somehow we’re going to live in an island in the global community unaffected by it just doesn’t match. We’re going to have to learn from our past, and we’re going to have to see where alliances can help take some of the burden off us and protect others like it protects us. And it’s not easy. Churchill put it well when he said the only thing harder than fighting with allies is what? Fighting without them. But I will tell you it’s worth it. For every vote in the U.N. they bring, for every soldier they put on the battlefield, for every diplomat they put into the negotiating teams, it’s worth it.”
Mattis broadened that out in what easily could be read as a clear dissent with Trump’s distain for international organizations.
“I believe that the international conventions, the international community, the organizations that tie us together, we should engage more in them. I believe in engaging with the world more and intervening militarily, at least with large forces, less…So I believe in engaging with the international organizations, whether they be economic or diplomatic, and trying to find ways to make things work.”
On Sunday’s CBS program Face the Nation, Mattis outlined two other areas where I believe he showed disagreement with current Trump policies, without saying so directly.
He focused on what he called the “Russia of Putin,” which he said “mucked around in our elections,” and the China of President Xi. He did not mention Trump’s public admiration of those two leaders. Instead, he described the National Defense Strategy, which Mattis had helped draw up, as acknowledging “the reality of those nations,” Russia and China, as the biggest external national security threats to the U.S. because they “are trying to impose their authoritarian models and decisions over other countries.”
Turning to internal threats, Mattis mentioned two.
On Face the Nation, Mattis, for one of the first times, voiced his concern for “our growing debt that we’re going to transfer to the younger generation with seeming no fiscal discipline.” I doubt he was referring to the increase in defense spending so I intuit that the accompanying trillion-dollar, unpaid-for, Trump tax cut must be one of his targets.
But Mattis ranked first as a major internal threat to the country something he has spoken about regularly, “the increasing contempt I see between Americans who have different opinions. I mean we're going to have to sit down and remember if we want this country to survive we're going to have to work together.”
At the September 3, CFR session he said, “What we all need to do is recognize elections are rough and tumble. They’re not always civil. I’m smart, you’re dumb. I’m right, you’re wrong. OK, welcome to democracy. It’s a little raucous at times.”
Mattis went on, “When an election’s over, let’s all go to work and try to govern. It doesn’t mean we can’t have good arguments. And we are set up to have three coequal branches of government. They all have a voice…But if we don’t start working together, there’s no guarantee that we’re going to turn this over in as good a shape or better than we received it.”
Fit that in with what Trump, last July 23, told 1,000 teenagers attending the Turning Point USA’s Teen Student Action Summit at a hotel in Washington, D.C. “I have the right to do whatever I want as President,” Trump said after citing Article II of the Constitution, which gives him no such powers.
Judy Woodruff asked Mattis toward the close of her September 2, interview, “If you believed that this president or any president wasn't a fit commander in chief, would you say so?
Mattis answered, “Yes.”
But when she responded, “In other words, you think he's fit? Mattis said, “No, I'm not saying that. I don't make political assessments one way or the other. I come from the Defense Department. We protect this experiment in democracy. We don't make assessments of the people's choice to serve as the elected commander in chief.”
Hopefully next year, when he finally comes forward and speaks up about Trump administration policies and strategies, I believe Mattis will be giving his assessment and judgment about this President as commander-in-chief.
But he will leave it to others to decide whether Trump should continue for four more years in that position.
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