Trump Isn’t the Only One H.R. McMaster Takes to Task in His New Book (2024)

H.R. McMaster’s At War With Ourselves, a memoir of his 13 months as Donald Trump’s national security adviser, has aroused much attention for its stinging criticism of the former (and, God help us, possibly future) president. But the publicity and TV interviews have been too narrowly focused. McMaster also takes dead aim at a vast cast of others who got in his way or disagreed with his views: Secretaries of Defense and State Jim Mattis and Rex Tillerson; Trump’s mischief-makers Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus; his successor, John Bolton; White House chief of staff John Kelly; and, not least, Democratic Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama.

The hero of this well-written and entertaining tale is H.R. McMaster himself, and its grand theme is what a great shame it was that the president didn’t take his advice more often. It is an oddly presumptuous theme for a three-star general—a hero of both Iraq wars—who was, and is, more intellectual than most of his Army brethren but who had never worked in Washington or engaged in any policy issues outside the Middle East.

During the Iraq war, McMaster thoroughly studied the history and theory of counterinsurgency warfare, then applied his learnings as regiment commander in the province of Tal Afar with remarkable success. Entering Trump’s White House, he studied the handbooks and protocols on the division of responsibilities between the national security adviser and the various Cabinet secretaries—and thought his mastery would once again guide him to dominance.

He never grasped—and still doesn’t; not completely anyway—the vast divide between theory and reality in the minefields of Washington politics.

McMaster led teams of talented analysts in the NSC staff to write impressive documents on geopolitics, a new approach to China, and other weighty matters. Trump, of course, never read them (few presidents peruse such documents); his bureaucratic rivalries had their own priorities, which he was ill-equipped to reconcile. A deputy warns him early on in his tenure that Washington is “nothing like your experience in the military.” Here, she warns, “friends stab you in the chest.”

McMaster does emerge from his adventure with shrewd insights into the commander in chief’s failures, and it is these insights that have (rightly) boosted the book’s appeal. For instance: “Trump’s ego and insecurities” left him vulnerable to “flattery,” a fact easily exploited by Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, the Saudi royal family, and his own lackeys, who viewed White House meetings as “exercises in competitive sycophancy,” in which common phrases included “Your instincts are always right” and “You are the only one who,” which encouraged Trump to “stray from the topic at hand or to say something outlandish—like ‘Why don’t we just bomb the drugs’ in Mexico or ‘Why don’t we take out the whole North Korean army during one of their parades.’ ”*

Trump’s “lack of historical knowledge” made him susceptible to Xi Jinping’s self-serving account of Beijing’s rights to the South China Sea. The “fragility of his ego and his deep sense of aggrievement” made it particularly easy for Putin to “play him like a fiddle.”

Still, McMaster saw his role as helping to execute the president’s policies—a role bolstered by his insistence on remaining an active-duty officer (who has a legal obligation to carry out the president’s legal orders). And in this sense, he misunderstood the hostility mounted against him and the president by Mattis and Tillerson.

Both men—Mattis a retired Marine four-star general, Tillerson a former Exxon CEO—were supremely self-confident. They each expected McMaster to roll over to their demands; McMaster resisted, thinking his job was to coordinate administration policy. Mattis was especially condescending toward McMaster, viewing the relationship as that of a four-star to a three-star—and, in military culture, the supremacy of a four-star over a three-star is enormous.

McMaster viewed their connivances as purely a competition for “control.” But much more was going on. As we now know, and knew to a large extent at the time, Mattis and Tillerson viewed Trump as a danger who needed to be contained. Mattis spent much time traveling abroad, downplaying Trump’s America-first ramblings, assuring allies that the United States would always have their back; some thought his title should have been “secretary of reassurance.”

McMaster complains in the book that Mattis “slow-rolled” Trump’s requests for “contingency planning on North Korea and Iran.” What he omits from his account is that Trump wanted contingency planning for a military strike on those two countries; they thought that he really wanted to initiate a strike and that slow-rolling the request would restrain his impulse toward war. When Kelly, another retired general, started joining the private meetings with Mattis and Tillerson, McMaster thought, “Tillerson and Mattis have gotten to him.” But in fact, what Kelly got was the supreme danger of Trump. And the three men left McMaster out of their cabal because they knew—in part because he still wore the uniform—that he’d sworn to take Trump’s side. McMaster reveals that, at one point, Kelly told an aide to let him know whenever McMaster was meeting alone with Trump.

McMaster understands all this to some degree. “Tillerson and Mattis were not just confident in themselves,” he writes near the end of the book. “They often lacked confidence in a president they regarded as impulsive, erratic, and dangerous to the republic.”

In a particularly revealing passage, McMaster writes that Trump’s incitement of insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, “might be invoked as an ex post facto justification for their [Mattis’ and Tillerson’s] behavior. But in August 2017, I was just trying to help the elected president set his course.” In fact, Jan. 6 can be seen as evidence that the two Cabinet secretaries were right—and that by helping Trump set his course, McMaster was sharpening the danger.

But McMaster is correct that Mattis and Tillerson were incompetent plotters. “The more independent of the president and the White House they became,” he writes, “the less effective they would be.” And that is what happened. Tillerson was fired even before McMaster was. (He was a terrible secretary of state who, among other things, put the interests of ExxonMobil above those of the United States, perhaps in part because he saw them as identical.) Mattis was an insular defense secretary—he surrounded himself with fellow Marine officers, many of whom had served with him abroad—and had no idea how to deal either with the Pentagon’s civilians or with the people in the White House, whom he held in contempt, to his ultimate self-defeat.

It’s a shame: On the issues, Mattis and McMaster agreed on much. Had they worked together, they might have steered Trump in a more sustainably sensible direction. That they didn’t is more Mattis’ fault than McMaster’s. John Bolton had plenty of high-level bureaucratic experience; when he replaced McMaster at the White House, he shut Mattis out completely. (In a remarkable exchange in the book, which takes place when McMaster knew he was on the way out, he tells Mattis, “I hope you get John Bolton, because you deserve John Bolton.” A red-faced Mattis replies, “At ease, Lieutenant General”—“at ease” being a phrase that senior officers invoke to put subordinates in their place—“you can’t talk to me that way.”)

Still, in the book’s postscript, McMaster hopes “that young people who have persevered through these pages will conclude that, even under challenging circ*mstances, there are tremendous rewards associated with service under any administration.”

Alas, the case he presents for a rewarding experience, at least in the Trump administration, is flimsy. Earlier in the book, he notes, “Despite the frictions I was encountering,” he and his team “were helping Trump make sound decisions.” He cites as examples Trump’s “long-overdue correctives to unwise policies” toward China, Russia, North Korea, Cuba, and Iran.

He makes something of a point on China, where the administration was fairly unified in dropping the long-standing hope—held, to some extent, by every president since Nixon—that engagement would lure Beijing into the Western-dominated global system. But Trump’s correctives, mainly levying tariffs and launching a trade war, had little effect other than to hurt American consumers.

On the other areas, McMaster’s boast rings hollow. On Russia, Trump caved to Putin at every opportunity. On North Korea, after McMaster’s departure, and to Bolton’s frustration, Trump commenced a bromance with Kim Jong-un, again to no effect. His reimposition of sanctions on Cuba—which Obama had started to lift—helped nothing. Scuttling the nuclear deal with Iran had no effect on Tehran’s mullahs, except to spur them to revive their uranium-enrichment program, which the deal had halted.

It is worth delving a bit into McMaster’s comments on Cuba and Iran because they reveal, despite his harsh critique of Trump, a deeply partisan analyst.

He states that Obama pursued a policy of “accommodating Iran,” which had the effect of strengthening Hezbollah. He avoids noting that Obama retained several sanctions having to do with Iran’s missile program and its ties to terrorist groups. Nor does he note that under the nuclear deal, Iran was well on its way to dismantling its nuclear program under tight international inspections—until Trump scuttled the deal. As a result, Iran is now closer to building an atom bomb than it has ever been. (McMaster, by the way, writes in agreement with Trump that the accord was “the worst deal ever.”)

He also asserts that Biden would “resurrect the Obama policy of accommodating Iran”—a claim that is simply puzzling. Biden did not revive the Iran nuclear deal (though I was among many who urged him to do so), nor did he relax the sanctions against Iran that Trump reimposed. Biden has also helped Israel defend and retaliate against Iran’s attempted attacks. Where is the accommodation?

In another utterly mystifying (and uncharacteristically far-right) jeremiad, McMaster writes that Obama’s attempt to normalize relations with Cuba stemmed from a “New Left interpretation of history at America’s top universities, where students learned that the world is divided into oppressors and oppressed and that geopolitics is a choice between socialist revolution and servitude under ‘capitalist imperialism.’ ” This is ridiculous. Obama’s policy was driven by a realization that America’s half-century-long isolation of Cuba had done nothing to change the regime and was only hurting the tiny island’s people. McMaster also writes, “Obama, like Trump, evinced an unseemly affinity for authoritarians”—a truly bizarre contention.

And so, while McMaster certainly won’t endorse Trump in the November elections or go work for him again (though there’s no chance, especially after this book, that he’d be asked), it’s also unlikely that he’ll endorse Kamala Harris. (He has said he’s not endorsing any candidate.)

One point of this book, I suspect, is rehabilitation. Back when he was an Army major, McMaster wrote a Ph.D. dissertation turned book, called Dereliction of Duty, about how senior officers in the 1960s deliberately misled President Lyndon B. Johnson on the war in Vietnam, telling him what he wanted to hear rather than giving him their honest military advice, thus betraying their constitutional obligations.

A few months into his term in Trump’s White House, McMaster was ordered to go talk to the press about reports that, at a meeting in the Oval Office, Trump had revealed classified information to top Russian officials. McMaster recited a carefully written, very deceptive script: a “non-denial denial.” One of his former colleagues told me at the time that the statement left him “heartbroken.” A fellow retired Army officer mused, “I wonder what title will be given to the book written about him.” I should add that, in the book, McMaster refers to the column I wrote at the time:

The journalist Fred Kaplan, who wrote an essay entitled “The Tarnishing of H.R. McMaster,” stated that I “had been all but incapable of guile” but was “now soaked in the swamp of deceit in the service of Trump.” I was more amused than offended at his hyperbolic criticism.

The book doesn’t come clean about what really happened; most readers, who won’t remember the incident, will be left confused.

Still, At War With Ourselves provides McMaster—now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University—a chance to cut all ties with Trump, to point out the many times that he openly disagreed with Trump and tried to push Trump in the right direction, occasionally successfully. It’s an attempt to set the record straight and to fix for himself an honorable legacy, very different from that of the generals and admirals who abetted Lyndon Johnson’s horrors in Vietnam. In that, he has for the most part succeeded.

Correction, Sept. 3, 2024: This piece originally misidentified Kim Jong-un as Kim Jong-il.