What Trump Got Right About National Security
16 min read
There are many who despise Donald Trump and see him as a narcissist unfit for the highest office in the land. And there are many who revere Trump as an antihero, fighting to save the country from establishment politicians and bureaucrats derelict in their duty to the American people. My job as Donald Trump’s national security adviser, a position I held through March of 2018, demanded not a sweeping attitude but a focus on my role. The central task was to run a process designed to help the elected president make decisions involving foreign affairs and national security. My job was not to supplant the president’s judgment but to inform it and to advance his policies.
Because Donald Trump is campaigning for a second term in the White House, it is worthwhile to recall his record on foreign affairs during the term he already served—especially on issues in which his instincts, as I saw them, were essentially correct. Foreign affairs doesn’t typically drive national elections, but the conduct of foreign affairs underlies our national well-being across a broad front. The next president will confront cascading crises in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa as well as looming crises in the Indo-Pacific region centered on the South China Sea and Taiwan.
Understanding how Trump’s personality and experiences shaped his worldview was essential to my job, not some foray into pop psychology. Each president brings a unique set of experiences, skills, and personality traits to the office. When he assumed the presidency, Trump lacked knowledge of how the government runs, and his impatience with learning about the roles of his senior officials and about alternative models for decision making limited his ability to lead. When there was conflict, he avoided it or, at times, stoked it.
As a historian who had written about presidential decision making and the Vietnam War, I saw in Trump a number of traits similar to those I had identified in President Lyndon B. Johnson. As with LBJ, Trump’s sensitivity to criticism and desire for attention distracted him. Also, like LBJ, he had a loose relationship with the truth and a tendency toward hyperbole. He was beleaguered by commentary in much of the mainstream media that was vehemently opposed to him, and by a 22-month, $32 million special-counsel investigation led by Robert Mueller, which in the end failed to find that Trump or his campaign had conspired with Russia during the 2016 election.
And yet: In the realm of foreign affairs, despite what could sometimes be described as “chaos” within the White House, Trump administered long-overdue correctives to a number of unwise policies. In his first year, Trump articulated a fundamental shift in national-security strategy and new policies toward the adversarial regimes of China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba. In general, Trump recognized that America had to compete more effectively to promote American prosperity, preserve peace through strength, advance U.S. influence, and protect the American people.
Trump repaired frayed relationships among Israel and its key Muslim-majority neighbors, and at the same time pursued normalization of relations between them, something that many observers had dismissed as a futile endeavor. He overruled the bureaucracy and defied foreign-policy experts by moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem; stopped providing aid to Pakistan, whose army was funneling support to our enemies; cut off hundreds of millions of dollars to the corrupt United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, which was abetting Hamas in Gaza; and withdrew from the United Nations Human Rights Council, which counts among its members some of the greatest human-rights abusers. He unveiled long-term strategies to defeat the Taliban, the Islamic State, al-Qaeda, and other terrorist organizations, strategies based on objectives rather than arbitrary timelines. His administration strengthened defense, lifted senseless restrictions on America’s warriors, recapitalized the nuclear deterrent, and launched efforts to compete in space and cyberspace.
For the National Security Council staff and members of the Cabinet, helping President Trump develop a coherent approach to foreign policy and national security often meant finding a path between contradictory ideas. Trump believed in American exceptionalism and believed that America was a force for good in the world, but he often manifested moral equivalence—the idea that America is no better than other nations, even brutal dictatorships. (When the Fox News host Bill O’Reilly noted that Russian President Vladimir Putin was a “killer,” Trump replied: “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What, you think our country’s so innocent?”) He was viscerally opposed to communist and socialist regimes but was ambivalent at best about the dictators of Russia and China. He was skeptical about long-term military commitments overseas, but believed in peace through strength and recognized the need to defeat jihadist terrorists who threaten U.S. citizens or the American homeland. He abhorred democracy-promotion abroad but understood that American power and influence are diminished when autocrats thrive and collaborate with Russia and China. He found it difficult to even utter the phrase “human rights” but became impassioned when he witnessed cruelty, such as the serial episodes of mass murder in Syria. He wanted fair and reciprocal trade and economic relationships, but was biased against trade agreements that might advance those objectives. He wanted alliances and international organizations to share security and development burdens, but viewed multilateral organizations as threats to U.S. sovereignty and their member nations as taking advantage of American largesse.
In certain areas, however, Trump’s thinking was consistent. He wanted American allies—NATO countries, Japan, and South Korea—to invest more in their militaries and shoulder greater responsibility for mutual defense. He was determined to compete with the statist, mercantilist People’s Republic of China, and to counter the weaponization of China’s economic model against the United States. And on Iran, Trump believed that efforts to seek conciliation with the hostile theocratic dictatorship in Tehran were futile. All of these remain “live” policy issues—matters of ongoing significance that the next president, whoever it is, must confront.
On the first of these issues: Trump did manage to cajole European and other allies into paying more for collective security. That said, his words sometimes undercut the overall objective of strengthening alliances. Trump was right to point out that many member nations were free-riding on U.S. defense. But his suggestion that the United States might not come to the aid of NATO allies that had failed to live up to a common pledge (to invest the equivalent of at least 2 percent of their gross domestic product in defense) was music to Putin’s ears. Trump’s skeptical attitude toward allies and alliances became one of the millstones that ground down our relationship. I saw U.S. allies as bestowing tremendous advantages, while Trump tended to view them mainly as freeloaders.
In May 2017, Trump flew to Brussels for a meeting of NATO nations. During the trip, I suggested to Trump that he press hard to get member states to increase defense spending while not giving Putin what he eagerly sought—a divided alliance. In the end, in his public remarks to alliance members, Trump made the points he wanted to make about burden-sharing without bringing up topics that would create cracks in the alliance.
TheWashington Post decried his comments on burden-sharing as “confrontational, nationalist rhetoric.” But Trump had a legitimate argument, one that NATO allies recognized, and one that he brought up continually—not only in Europe, but also in Japan and South Korea. I remember a meeting between Trump and Angela Merkel in Hamburg. Despite claims to the contrary in the press, Merkel and Trump had a good rapport and seemed to enjoy challenging each other. Trump said something like “Clearly you think NATO is fantastic, so why aren’t you paying up?” And Merkel responded with something like “You are the world superpower—that should make you proud. China wants to be the superpower and will become that if you vacate your position.” Trump then turned to me and asked, “How many troops do we have in Germany?” I told him the number was about 35,000, plus rotational troops in Europe as part of the European Defense Initiative. He then asked Merkel, “Why are we defending you against Russia when you are not paying, and burning gas that is giving cash to the Kremlin?”—the reference being to Germany’s pipeline deals. It was not until Russia’s massive reinvasion of Ukraine in February 2022 that the new German chancellor, Olaf Sholz, declared a zeitenwende, or turning point—canceling the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and accelerating increases in defense spending.
A second theme, competition with China, involved the need to counter Beijing’s unfair trade and economic practices as well as its industrial espionage, its cyberattacks, its construction and weaponizing of islands in the South China Sea, and its unwillingness to help restrain North Korea’s growing nuclear capability. The Obama administration’s cooperation-and-engagement approach to Beijing reflected the forlorn hope, across multiple U.S. administrations, that China, having been welcomed into the international order, would play by the rules and, as it prospered, liberalize its economy along with (eventually) its form of governance. Trump saw China’s exploitation of the “free-trade system” as a threat to American prosperity. The loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs and the trade imbalance in goods after China was granted entry into the World Trade Organization was, in Trump’s eyes, a consequence of “stupid people” allowing others to profit at America’s expense.
Trump thought that the time had come for the U.S. to move away from a China strategy of soft-headed cosmopolitanism and hopeful engagement and toward a policy based on clear-eyed competition. As Trump said to the Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing, “I don’t blame China. Who can blame a country that is able to take advantage of another country for the benefit of its citizens?” Rather, he blamed the U.S. itself for failing to respond. On North Korea, Trump was direct, telling Xi that China “could solve the problem in two seconds” if Xi wanted to solve it. Pyongyang’s dependence on China for crucial commodities such as oil and refined petroleum gave Beijing tremendous coercive power.
Over the course of his administration, Trump held back on some trade-enforcement actions and sanctions on Chinese entities that had engaged in acts of economic aggression, but the general direction of U.S. policy on China shifted fundamentally, and that shift has endured.
Finally there is the matter of Iran. In my very first conversation with Trump—when I was interviewing for the job—he asked about the Middle East. We discussed the cycles of sectarian violence in the region centered on the horrific civil war in Syria and Iran’s role in perpetuating violence through its support for the Assad regime in Damascus and terrorist organizations in Lebanon, Gaza, Yemen, Iraq, and elsewhere. I shared the president’s distrust of the theocratic dictatorship in Tehran and lamented the sanctions relief under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—that is, under the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration.
Trump had stated many times in 2016 that the JCPOA was “the worst deal ever.” The Obama administration had wanted to separate negotiating a nuclear deal and confronting Iran’s proxy wars, but the reality was not so simple. The accord gave Iran a cash payment of $1.7 billion up front and allowed more than $100 billion in unfrozen assets to flow to Tehran—money used by Iran to intensify its proxy wars and expand sectarian conflicts in the region. Once, in a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron, Trump stated bluntly, “It just seems that, no matter where you go, especially in the Middle East, Iran is behind it, wherever there’s trouble.” He was making the important point that any decision on the nuclear deal must also address Iran’s proxy wars and support for terrorist organizations.
President Trump was eager to get out of the “terrible deal,” but staying in it in the near term, given common knowledge of his inclination to get out, might create leverage for the U.S. to isolate the Iranian regime diplomatically as well as economically. Trump could use that leverage to get others to support fixing—possibly—the deal’s flaws. In any case, the idea was to create an overall Iran strategy into which decisions about the nuclear deal would fit, rather than viewing “stay in or get out” in isolation.
In October 2017, Trump delivered a major speech on Iran. He unveiled a comprehensive strategy designed not only to block Iran’s path to a nuclear weapon but also to counter its missile and asymmetric threats. Further, the strategy would restrict cash flow to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and neutralize its destabilizing behavior. The idea was, in the short term, to impose strong sanctions outside the existing deal while trying to persuade Iran to renegotiate the deal itself. If that failed, the president could get out of it whenever he wanted—as he ultimately did in May 2018. The long-term objective was to encourage a change in the nature of the Iranian regime such that it ended its permanent hostility toward the United States, Israel, and its Arab neighbors. The Trump administration began to strangle Iran financially, and protests against the regime in early 2018 indicated that the Iranian people knew that the cause of their suffering lay in Tehran, not Washington.
As U.S. policy on NATO, China, and Iran took shape, I knew that I would not be around to see those and other major efforts through. Reports that I had “never really clicked” with Trump were accurate. I was fine with that. I did not need Trump as a friend, and I did not crave validation from him. I was determined to give Trump what he required—the best analysis; access to his Cabinet and advisers; and multiple options so he could determine his foreign-policy agenda. But I was not the person to give him everything he wanted: for instance, affirmation that his instincts were always right, as well as other forms of flattery. During my research on the Johnson administration, I had found that, to maintain influence with the president, many of LBJ’s advisers had resolved to tell him only what he wanted to hear. Which raised the question: What good was their influence under that arrangement?
Trump could be funny, and we shared some laughs, but his preferred form of amusement was ridicule and name-calling. In 2018, when Trump began to mock unnamed generals with the words “sir, yessir” to insinuate that the senior military were unthinking automatons incapable of grasping his unconventional approach to foreign and defense policy, I knew that my time with him had almost run its course. Leaks from the White House soon confirmed that view. At the end of March 2018, I asked White House Chief of Staff John Kelly to give me a date for the transition to my successor.
I hosted my last official dinner as national security adviser at my home with counterparts from two of America’s closest allies, the United Kingdom and France. The conversation with Mark Sedwill and Philippe Étienne turned toward a retrospective on our work together. My friends were worried about the durability of the policy shifts we had helped implement. They were right to be concerned.
As the presidential scholar Fred Greenstein has observed, “Presidents who stand firm are able to set the terms of policy discourse” and thereby “serve as anchors for the rest of the political community.” In the years that followed, rather than anchoring his agenda, Trump often unmoored it. Following his approval of the most significant shift in U.S. foreign policy in decades—from engagement with China to competition with China—Trump vacillated. He swung between the use of enforcement mechanisms (investment screening, tariffs, export controls) and the pursuit of a “BIG deal,” in the form of a major trade agreement with Beijing. Although he held true to his decision to make no major concessions to North Korea before it took irreversible steps toward denuclearization, he also canceled U.S.–South Korean military exercises. He hosted the family of Otto Warmbier—an American student who was tortured nearly to death in a North Korean prison, and released just before he died from his injuries—and decried the “savage” regime in North Korea; but then, after a June 2018 summit in Singapore, Trump said that he and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un “fell in love.” Trump even absolved Kim of personal responsibility in Warmbier’s murder, saying that he took him “at his word.”
Trump also reversed course on Pakistan, inviting its virulently anti-American prime minister, Imran Khan, to sit next to him in the Oval Office. Like his two predecessors, Obama and Bush, Trump foolishly asked a Pakistani leader to help resolve the security problems in Afghanistan, problems for which the Pakistani army was largely responsible.
After making the righteous decision to kill Qassem Soleimani and his Iraqi terrorist puppet, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, in Baghdad in January 2020, Trump chose not to respond to subsequent Iranian and Iranian-proxy attacks on U.S. and allied forces, aircraft, and facilities, including shipping and oil infrastructure—raising doubts among U.S. allies in the Gulf about America’s reliability.
Trump also abandoned his South Asia strategy—which had removed a time limit on U.S. support for the Afghan armed forces. His betrayal of our Afghan allies was forged in a withdrawal agreement with the Taliban signed by his envoy, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, in February 2020.
On Russia, Trump imposed tremendous costs on the Kremlin for its initial invasion of Ukraine, in 2014. He recognized the folly of reliance by Germany and others on Russia for oil and gas, and he urged NATO nations to rearm to deter Russia. But he would continue to delude himself about Putin. I found myself yelling at the television in July 2018 as Trump described Putin’s denial of Russian interference in the 2016 election as “strong and powerful.”
Trump was right to provide defensive capabilities to Ukraine, but he would withhold that assistance to seek an advantage over Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election—in effect using weapons as a hostage, to be released when Ukraine agreed to try to dig up dirt on the president’s son and Biden himself.
Despite inconsistencies, many of the decisions that Trump made in the first year of his presidency endured. Many Americans may have realized their value only after the Biden-Harris administration reversed them.
A short list of those reversals includes relaxing security on the Mexican border; green-lighting Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline while canceling a U.S.-Canada pipeline; restricting exploration and the drilling of new wells on federal land while easing sanctions on Venezuela and Iran, and asking these hostile dictatorships to export more oil and gas; lifting the financial and economic pressure on Iran even as the regime intensified its proxy wars across the Middle East; and lifting the terrorist designation from the Houthis in Yemen even as they and other members of Iran’s network of terrorists were increasing the stockpiles of weapons that they would unleash after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, assault on Israel. After presiding over its most humiliating foreign-policy failure—the surrender of Kabul to the Taliban and the deadly retreat—the Biden administration claimed that it had been bound to adhere to the Trump administration’s negotiated timeline for withdrawal.
Whoever is elected president in November will have much work to do to recover from the crises of the early 2020s—or even just to contain them. His or her ability to do so will depend in large measure on presidential character—the patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior that shape the way a person deals with the challenges and opportunities of the presidency. There are plenty of psychological and political-science constructs to use, but the simplest and clearest come from the Stoic philosophers Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Seneca. They focus attention on the disciplines of perception, action, and will.
Epictetus defined the discipline of perception as the quality of clear judgment in the present moment. Trump could see the contours of complex situations and was in the habit of challenging assumptions and conventional wisdom. But his conflicted vision of the world and America’s role in it clouded his judgment.
Marcus Aurelius observed that discipline of action requires toleration of those who are “meddling, ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, and unsociable,” recognizing that they can harm you only if you allow them to. Trump was obsessed with his critics, and his preoccupation with political pugilism sometimes distracted him from the task at hand. He demonstrated the ability to make tough decisions, but after disapproval from his political base, he was prone to abandoning those decisions. Trump’s sense of grievance reinforced his penchant for seeking affirmation from his most loyal supporters rather than broadening his base of support. It was too easy for people to stoke his anger and direct it against others in order to increase their own influence or remove obstacles to their own agendas.
Seneca emphasized the need to have control over one’s own mind: to govern oneself, accept things as they are, and manage one’s thoughts and emotions, understanding that much in life is beyond our control. Trump was understandably angry over false charges of collusion with Russia and the considerable bias against him in the mainstream media. But he found channeling his emotions toward constructive purposes difficult. Ultimately, Trump’s deficiency in the discipline of will produced a tragic end to his presidency: His election denial and his encouragement of what became a deadly assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. He abandoned his oath to “support and defend the Constitution,” a president’s highest obligation.
Trump’s instincts in foreign policy were often correct. He demonstrated the ability to evolve in his thinking and to make tough decisions that improved American security, prosperity, and influence in the world. Would he be able, if reelected, to learn from his experience and evolve in these traits of character? Only if he does can he avoid playing the role, once again, of the antagonist in his own story.
This essay has been adapted from H. R. McMaster’s new book, At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House.
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