Trump is at war with his own generals
We used to worry Trump listened to his generals too much. Turns out he may not listen to them enough.
Updated by Phillip Carter Aug 31, 2017, 12:00pm EDT
During his campaign for the White House, Donald Trump took the highly-unusual step of blasting America’s top generals, arguing in one debate that they’d been “reduced to rubble” and later threatening to fire them if they didn’t tell him what he wanted to hear. If elected, Trump promised to put top generals into key jobs — and then to give them the freedom to fight America’s wars without micromanagement from the White House.
True to his word, Trump has surrounded himself with a trio of well-respected current and retired generals: Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, a former Marine general best known for a successful tour through one of the bloodiest parts of Iraq; White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, a retired Marine general who served three tours in Iraq, oversaw Guantanamo Bay and was a top aide to two secretaries of defense; and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, a three-star general in the Army with a celebrated Iraq war record of his own.
The three men’s prominence, and their long history of distinguished service, has led many inside and outside the White House to see them as the adults in the room who would be guiding Trump toward a calmer, more stable, more rational foreign policy than what he alluded to during his campaign.
The three men, in turn, have spent months traveling the globe to reassure allies that Trump hasn’t meant what he said when the president threatened a preemptive strike on North Korea (which terrified Japan and South Korea) or talked about pulling out of NATO and cozying up to Russia (which terrified much of Europe). But seven months into his term, that conventional wisdom is looking increasingly shaky. Trump is openly at odds with many current and former military leaders in his administration on issues ranging from Afghanistan (the generals want more troops than he’s inclined to send) to his proposed ban on transgender troops (the Pentagon opposes the move).
The disagreements have recently reached a fever pitch over North Korea. Trump is threatening Kim Jong Un’s regime with “fire and fury,” and tweeting that “Talking is not the answer.” Mattis, by contrast, is saying “we’re never out of diplomatic solutions,” while McMaster has flown to Seoul to personally reassure the South Korean government that Washington wouldn’t do anything rash.
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https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/31/16233496/trump-pentagon-afghanistan-transgender-ban-generals
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