Gareth Porter is an
independent investigative journalist, historian and author who has covered U.S.
wars and interventions in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Yemen and Syria
since 2004 and was the 2012… READ MORE\
More than any other presidency in modern history, Donald Trump’s
has been a veritable sociopolitical wrecking ball, deliberately stoking
conflict by playing to xenophobic and racist currents in American society and
debasing its political discourse. That fact has been widely discussed. But
Trump’s attacks on the system of the global U.S. military presence and
commitments have gotten far less notice.
He
has complained bitterly, both in public and in private meetings with aides,
about the suite of permanent wars that the Pentagon has been fighting for many
years across the Greater Middle East and Africa, as well as about deployments
and commitments to South Korea and NATO. This has resulted in an unprecedented
struggle between a sitting president and the national security state over a
global U.S. military empire that has been sacrosanct in American politics since
early in the Cold War.
And
now Bob Woodward’s “Fear: Trump in the White House” has provided dramatic new
details about that struggle.
Trump’s Advisers Take Him Into ‘the Tank’
Trump
had entered the White House with a clear commitment to ending U.S. military
interventions, based on a worldview in which fighting wars in the pursuit of
military dominance has no place. In the last speech of his “victory tour” in
December 2016, Trump vowed, “We will stop racing to topple foreign regimes
that we knew nothing about, that we shouldn’t be involved with.” Instead of
investing in wars, he said, he would invest in rebuilding America’s crumbling
infrastructure.
In
a meeting with his national security team in the summer of 2017, in which
Secretary of Defense James Mattis recommended new military measures against
Islamic State affiliates in North Africa, Trump expressed his frustration with
the unending wars. “You guys want me to send troops everywhere,” Trump said,
according to a Washington Post report. “What’s the
justification?”
Mattis
replied, “Sir, we’re doing it to prevent a bomb from going off in Times
Square,” to which Trump angrily retorted that the same argument could be made
about virtually any country on the planet.
Trump
had even given ambassadors the power to call a temporary halt to drone strikes,
according to the Post story, causing further consternation at the Pentagon.
Trump’s
national security team became so alarmed about his questioning of U.S. military
engagements and forward deployment of troops that they felt something had to be
done to turn him around. Mattis proposed to take Trump away from the White
House into “the Tank” at the Pentagon, where the Joint Chiefs of Staff held
their meetings, hoping to drive home their arguments more effectively.
It
was there, on July 20, 2017, that Mattis, then-Secretary
of State Rex Tillerson and other senior officials sought to impress on Trump
the vital importance of maintaining existing U.S. worldwide military
commitments and deployments. Mattis used the standard Bush and Obama
administration rhetoric of globalism, according to the meeting notes provided
to Woodward. He asserted that the “rules-based, international democratic
order”—the term used to describe the global structure of U.S. military and
military power—had brought security and prosperity. Tillerson, ignoring decades
of U.S. destabilizing wars in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, chimed in,
saying, “This is what has kept the peace for 70 years.”
Trump
said nothing, according to Woodward’s account, but simply shook his head in
disagreement. He eventually steered the discussion to an issue that was
particularly irritating to him: U.S. military and economic relations with South
Korea. “We spend $3.5 billion a year to have troops in South Korea,” Trump
complained. “I don’t know why they’re there. … Let’s bring them all home!”
At
that, Trump’s chief of staff at the time, Reince Priebus, recognizing that the
national security team’s effort to get control of Trump’s opposition to their
wars and troop deployments had been an utter failure, called a halt to the
meeting.
In
September 2017, even as Trump threatened in tweets to destroy North Korea, he
was privately hammering aides over the U.S. troop presence in South Korea and
repeatedly expressing a determination to remove them, Woodward’s account
reveals.
Those
Trump complaints prompted H.R. McMaster, then the national security adviser, to
call for a National Security Council meeting on the issue on Jan. 19. Trump
again demanded, “What do we get by maintaining a massive military presence in
the Korean peninsula?” And he linked that question to the broader issue of the
United States paying for the defense of other states in Asia, the Middle East
and NATO.
Mattis
portrayed the troop presence in South Korea as a great security bargain.
“Forward-positioned troops provide the least costly means of achieving our
security objectives,” he said, “and withdrawal would lead our allies to lose
all confidence in us.” The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joseph
Dunford, argued that South Korea was reimbursing the United States $800 million
a year out of the total cost of $2 billion, thus subsidizing the United States
for something it would do in its own interests anyway.
But
such arguments made no impression on Trump, who saw no value in having troops
abroad at a time when the United States itself was crumbling. “We have [spent]
$7 trillion in the Middle East,” Trump said at the end of the meeting. “We
can’t even muster $1 trillion for domestic infrastructure.”
Trump’s
belief that U.S. troops should be pulled out of South Korea was reinforced by
the unexpected political-diplomatic developments in North and South Korea in
early 2018. Trump responded positively to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s
offer of a summit meeting and signaled his readiness to negotiate with Kim on
an agreement that would both denuclearize North Korea and bring peace to the
Korean peninsula.
Before
the Singapore summit with Kim, Trump ordered the Pentagon to develop options
for drawing down those U.S. troops. That idea was viewed by the news media and
most of the national security elite as completely unacceptable, but it has long
been well known among military and intelligence specialists on Korea that U.S.
troops are not needed—either to deter North Korea or to
defend against an attack across the DMZ.
Trump’s
willingness to practice personal diplomacy with Kim and to envision the end or
serious attenuation of the U.S. troop deployment in South Korea was undoubtedly
driven in part by his ego, but it could not have happened without his rejection
of the ideology of national security that had dominated Washington elites for generations.
Fights Over Syria and Afghanistan
Trump
was impatient to end all three major wars he had inherited from Barack Obama:
Afghanistan and the wars against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Woodward
recounts how Trump lectured McMaster, Porter, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner in
July 2017 on their return from a golf weekend about how tired he was of those
wars. “We should just declare victory, end the wars and bring our troops home,”
he told them, repeating—probably unconsciously—the same political tactic that
had been urged by Vermont Sen. George Aiken in 1966 for
ending the U.S. war in Vietnam.
Even
after a massively destructive U.S.-NATO bombing campaign forced Islamic State
to abandon its capital in the city of Raqqa, Syria, in October 2017, Trump’s
national security team insisted on keeping U.S. troops in Syria indefinitely.
In a mid-November briefing for reporters at the Pentagon, Mattis declared that preventing the
return of Islamic State was a “longer-term objective” of the U.S. military, and
that U.S. forces would remain in Syria to help establish conditions for a
diplomatic solution. “We’re not going to walk away before the Geneva process
has traction,” Mattis said.
But
Mattis and Tillerson had not changed Trump’s mind about Syria. In early April
2018, the Pentagon gave Trump a paper that focused almost entirely on different
options for remaining in Syria, treating full withdrawal as a clearly
unacceptable option. In a tense meeting, Mattis and Joint Chiefs Chairman
Dunford warned that complete withdrawal would allow Iran and Russia to fill the
vacuum—as though Trump shared their assumption that such an outcome was
unthinkable. Instead Trump told them he wanted U.S. troops to wrap the war with
Islamic State in six months, according to a CNN accountfrom Pentagon
sources. And when Mattis and other officials warned that the timeline was too
short, “Trump responded by telling his team to just get it done.”
A
few days later, Trump declared publicly, “We’re coming out of Syria, like, very
soon. Let the other people take care of it now. Very soon we’re coming out.”
After
John Bolton entered the White House as national security adviser in April,
however, he persuaded Trump to view Syria in the context of the
administration’s vendetta against Iran—at least for the time being. Bolton
declared this week that U.S. troops would not leave Syria as long as Iranian
troops serve outside Iranian borders. But Mattis contradicted Bolton, saying the troops
remained in Syria to defeat Islamic State and that the commitment was “not
open-ended.”
Trump
had been calling for an end to the war in Afghanistan for years before his
election, and he felt passionate about getting out. And Woodward reveals that
the NSC’s chief of staff, retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, supported the idea of
U.S. withdrawal. When the National Security Council met in July 2017 to discuss
Afghanistan, Trump interrupted McMaster’s initial presentation to explained why
the war was “a disaster”: Nonexistent “ghost soldiers” in the Afghan army were
being used to rip off the United States, as corrupt Afghan leaders milked the
war and U.S. assistance to make money. When Tillerson tried to place
Afghanistan in a “regional context,” Trump responded, “But how many more
deaths? How many more lost limbs? How much longer are we going to be there?”
The
Pentagon and McMaster nevertheless pressed on with a plan to increase the U.S.
military presence. At a climactic meeting in mid-August on Afghanistan,
according to the account in Woodward’s book, McMaster told Trump he had no
choice but to step up the war by adding 4,000 troops. The reason? It was
necessary to prevent al-Qaida or Islamic State from using Afghan territory to
launch terror attacks on the United States or Europe.
Trump
retorted angrily that the generals were “the architects of this mess” and that
they have were “making it worse,” by asking him to add more troops to
“something I don’t believe in.” Then Trump folded his arms and declared, “I
want to get out. And you’re telling me the answer is to get deeper in.”
Mattis
spelled out the argument in terms that he hoped would finally get to Trump. He
warned that what had happened to Obama when he withdrew forces from Iraq
prematurely would happen to Trump if he didn’t go along with the Pentagon’s
proposed new strategy.
“I
still think you’re wrong” [about the war], Trump said, [it] “hasn’t gotten us
anything.” But he went along with Mattis and announced that he had been
convinced to go against his own “instincts” by approving the 4,000-troop
increase.
He
was being cowed by the same fear of being accused of responsibility for
possible future consequences of defeat in a war—a fear that had led Lyndon
Johnson to abandon his own strong resistance to a full-scale U.S. intervention
in Vietnam in mid-1965 and Barack Obama to accept a major escalation in
Afghanistan that he had argued against in White House meetings.
Trump
announced a new strategy in which there would be no arbitrary timelines for
withdrawal as there had been under Obama and no restrictions on commanders’ use
of drones and conventional airstrikes. But since then, all accounts have agreed
that the war is being lost to the Taliban, and Trump will certainly be forced
to revisit the policy as the evidence of failure creates new political
pressures on the administration.
Trump’s
economic worldview, which some have called mercantilist, poses economic dangers
to the United States. And given Trump’s multiple serious personal and political
failings—including his adoption of a policy of regime change in Iran urged on
him by Bolton and by Trump’s extremist Zionist campaign donor Sheldon
Adelson—he may finally give up his resistance to the multiple permanent U.S.
wars.
But Trump’s unorthodox approach
has already emboldened him to challenge the essential logic of the U.S.
military empire more than any previous president. And the final years of his
administration will certainly bring further struggles over the issues on which
he has jousted repeatedly with those in charge of the empire.