TRUMP AND HIS GENERALS

The Cost of Chaos

By Peter Bergen

Luckily, no one makes us read a book that covers all of our bad moments in the dental chair — the tut-tutting about a cracked tooth, the anesthetic-charged needle sliding into soft tissue, the high-pitched whine of the drill, the grating sound of enamel being ground away, the bleeding gum, the anodyne assurance that there are only four more visits left before the restoration is complete. Unfortunately, Peter Bergen has decided to have his readers relive the Trump foreign and national security policy equivalent in this account of the first three years of the current administration.

There it all is — the spectacular flameouts, from semitragic former generals ending up in court to harlequins flitting through White House corridors; the kooky theories of “The Fourth Turning,” which informed Stephen Bannon’s understanding of American history; the impulsive hires of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the national security adviser H. R. McMaster, and their humiliating tweet-singed send-offs; the jumped-up mediocrities incapable of writing a memo and the multimillionaires on the make with schemes to outsource the Afghan war; the birther conspiracy theories about Barack Obama; Kellyanne Conway’s invocation of the Bowling Green massacre and alternative facts; the constant expletive-laden discourse in which major American foreign policy decisions were conceptualized by the president as variations on the Anglo-Saxon monosyllable for sexual intercourse; the contempt for human rights, loyalty to allies and fidelity to covenants. And all this before the Ukrainian quid pro quo.

One should be grateful to Bergen, a vice president at New America and the author of several books on national security, even though none of the stories are fundamentally new. The anti-Trump Republican foreign and national security officials who denounced him in two letters in March and August of 2016 (both of which I had a hand in) foresaw all of this. It took a level-headed observer of no particular insight or special knowledge to understand that Donald Trump’s deficiencies of character, outlook and experience made him unfit for office. But “Trump and His Generals” raises, even if it does not address deeply, some important questions about the outlandish and sordid tale.

One of these has to do with Trump’s relationship with the military. Bergen focuses on the generals (Michael Flynn, John Kelly, Jim Mattis, McMaster and others) but he occasionally goes a bit beyond that, for instance describing Trump’s visit to Dover Air Force Base to witness the return of the body of a member of the SEALs killed in a raid gone bad. Typically, Trump immediately shifted the blame to his generals: “This is something they wanted to do.” The notion of accepting responsibility is as central to the military’s ethic as it is alien to Trump’s. His relationship with pretty much every general in his orbit failed because he seems to associate soldiering not only with violence, but also with uncaged brutality. Hence his initial approving description of Mattis as “Mad Dog” and his disgust at discovering that the Marine is a soft-spoken, well-read and judicious combat commander. Hence too his tensions with the leadership of the Department of Defense over the handling of military personnel accused of war crimes.