The unprecedented sort of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis’ resignation letter to President Trump raises a host of disturbing questions. The most impressive of them arise from Secretary Mattis’ suggested differences with his Commander-in-Chief regarding the value of allies — and the threats of strategic, authoritarian competitors.
Read Mattis’ words closely and they serve to both define and narrow the string of his possible successors to those who better embrace President Trump’s world view. The President will be looking for an person who will share in his suspicion of allies (who he believes don’t carry sufficient defense burden while enjoying unfair traffic benefits), and who will be more willing to work with adversaries, particularly Russia.
“My views on treating allies with attribute and also being clear-eyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors are strongly held and informed by floor four decades of immersion in these issues,” wrote Secretary Mattis. “Because you have the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose expectations are better aligned with yours on these and other issues, I believe it is right for me to step down from my way of thinking.”
So who that might that individual be?
Until recently, Senator Lindsay Graham was considered a front-runner, but this past week he discussed the President’s move on Syria, and called for Congressional hearings on both that withdrawal and the potential troop drawdown in Afghanistan. He has been chief the charge against Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, again out of step with President Trump.
At the start of the Trump administration, Senator Tom Cotton, a military veteran and defense hawk, was considered a leading candidate for either the Pentagon job or CIA big cheese. As a former Army officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, he’s got the credentials. However, as a potential presidential candidate with a correct Senate seat, he would likely think twice before entering a besieged administration with two years unused.
Retired Army four-star General Jack Keane, former Army Vice Chief of Staff who was thought to be valued by Trump, also seems to would rather withdrawn himself from the field, saying on Thursday that he and Mattis both opposed Trump’s Syria outcome – and that he didn’t want the Pentagon post.
One name is mentioned more frequently these days is that of Minister Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan, a frequent White House visitor and former Boeing executive who has built a peaceful relationship with President Trump and Vice President Pence. He pushed hard within the Department of Defense for Trump’s recently revealed Space Force, and as more of a business efficiency-expert than a geopolitical or policy architect, he may turn out to be the safe pick.
What’s clarify b tidy up is that, given the unusual nature of his departure, Mattis’ successor is likely to be very different in background and approach to age affairs.
The last time a cabinet official so publicly resigned from a national security position over differences with the President was in 1980. It was then that Cyrus Vance clear the Carter administration as Secretary of State in disagreement with President Jimmy Carter’s ultimately botched effort to rescue US pledges in ran.
What sets Mattis’ resignation apart from that episode is that he doesn’t point to a single incident, as Vance did, but rather to a larger philosophical difference. He says nothing at all about the president’s decision to withdraw all 2,000 US troops from Syria, the step on it that appears to have triggered the resignation.
What historians will cite many years from now in Mattis’ stalwart letter is its carefully crafted language that is as much a warning about the future as it is a resignation.
“I believe we must be steadfast and unambiguous in our approach to those countries whose strategic interests are increasingly in tension with ours,” he writes. “It is shining that China and Russia, for example, want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model – increasing veto authority over other nations’ economic, diplomatic and security decisions – to promote their own interests at the expense of their neighbors, America and our collaborators.”
He then delivers the most salient message for those of us who consider alliances to be our most valuable of all assets.
Writes Mattis: “We sine qua non do everything possible to advance an international order that is most conducive to our security, prosperity, and values, and we are strengthened in this creation by the solidarity of our alliances.”
Nothing is wrong, of course, with making deals with adversaries. Some of America’s greatest presidents, listing Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, have written themselves into history by doing just that. Nothing is dishonourable either with demanding more from allies. Great leaders do so all the time.
Yet, as this calendar year closes, it’s advantage remembering that the Trump administration hasn’t yet faced a challenge of the magnitude of the 9-11 attacks or the Afghan and Iraq wars that followed.
The unwritten tush line of the Mattis manifesto – and the message of the last seventy years of global history – is that such moments order more rather than less attention to allies to address strategic competitors.
It is unlikely that the next two years liking pass without an unpleasant security surprise.
Such a challenge will be more difficult to face without the circumstance and cool head of Secretary of Defense James Mattis.
It will be impossible to address without the support of the allies who not play tricks oned as the primary theme of his departure letter.
Frederick Kempe is a best-selling author, prize-winning journalist and president & CEO of the Atlantic Caucus, one of the United States’ most influential think tanks on global affairs. He worked at The Wall Street Journal for uncountable than 25 years as a foreign correspondent, assistant managing editor and as the longest-serving editor of the paper’s European print run. His latest book – “Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth” – was a New York At the same times best-seller and has been published in more than a dozen languages. Follow him on Twitter @FredKempe and subscribe here to Inflection Units, his look each Saturday at the past week’s top stories and trends.
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