Susan B. Glasser is POLITICO’s chief international affairs columnist. Her new podcast, The Global Politico, comes out Mondays. Subscribe here. Follow her on Twitter @sbg1.

Subscribe to The Global POLITICO on Apple Podcasts here. | Subscribe via Stitcher here.

This is a moment of truth for President Trump’s national security team. He is set to overrule both his secretaries of State and Defense on the Iran nuclear deal this week, declaring it no longer in the U.S. “national interest” in explicit contradiction to their public position. And if they don’t like it, Senator Tom Cotton says, then they should get out.


Their “job is now to move out and execute,” Cotton, the Arkansas Republican and national security hawk who is one of Trump’s closest remaining congressional advisers on foreign policy, says in a new interview for The Global Politico, our weekly podcast on world affairs. Or, “if you feel strongly enough, then you have to resign.”

Cotton, who has personally advised Trump in recent days about the new Iran strategy he is set to release this week, stopped short of saying either embattled Secretary of State Rex Tillerson or Defense Secretary Jim Mattis should in fact resign. But his comments were nonetheless a striking acknowledgment of the giant rift that has opened up in the midst of the Trump team over foreign policy.

And what a rift it is: long rumored privately, it has now burst into spectacular public view in recent days with Tillerson refusing to personally deny reports he called Trump a bleeping “moron” and Mattis pointedly disagreeing on Iran in congressional testimony. After the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Bob Corker, leaped to their defense, Trump hit back in a Sunday tweetstorm that included blaming Corker for the Iran deal he had voted against. By Sunday evening, the Senate’s top foreign policy leader was calling the president of the United States a risk to put the country “on the path to World War III” and deriding his White House as “adult day care.”

The interview with Cotton took place before this latest explosive twist, but even then it was clear a new rift of significance was opening up inside the Republican foreign policy world. I spoke with Cotton Thursday, the day after Tillerson’s unusual press conference to deny press reports he was considering quitting, and just a couple hours after Cotton was summoned to the White House for a private Oval Office meeting with Trump to discuss the Iran strategy. In the interview, Cotton did not really try to paper over the rift or offer the usual assurances that it would all be papered over. Instead, when I asked him directly whether there would be resignations, Cotton did not say there wouldn’t be, only that he did not believe they were “imminent.”

Global Translations A new podcast series from POLITICO. Email Sign Up By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Cotton, an ambitious Harvard graduate and veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan who has only just turned 40 as he serves his first Senate term, was similarly coy when I asked at the end of our conversation whether he would consider leaving the Senate for a major Trump administration post should one become available, saying only that he liked his current job in the Senate.

When I pointed out that he had offered “a non-denial denial,” Cotton did not disagree and merely smiled.



***

How did it get to this?

Clearly, Tillerson, Corker and other Republicans who are now breaking with Trump over his handling of foreign policy tried to work with him for months – opting for back-stage persuasion and lobbying where Trump’s campaign pronouncements or Oval Office orders differed from the inclinations and recommendations of his foreign policy team.

It was, at least in those initial few months, a stark contrast with the approach taken by Senator John McCain, who generally holds similar views but from the beginning let loose a string of critical press releases and scathing Twitter commentary on Trump’s apostasy from the Republican foreign policy creed.

Indeed, when I interviewed Corker for an early edition of The Global Politico back in February, the extent to which he was trying hard to justify working with Trump and persuading him from the inside was notable – and his frustration with the McCains of the world was palpable. When I listed the areas he seemed to disagree with Trump on – a long list that covered everything from Russia policy to blowing up trade deals – Corker at the time fretted about a head-on collision with such a confrontational figure as Trump. And he insisted his more accommodationist approach would lead to “evolution” by an untutored new president.

“Is that really the best way to approach a double-down kind of president? Or is it best to help the team and others evolve to a different place? Is that a better approach?” Corker asked. “That is the approach right now that I’m taking.”

Well, not anymore. Corker, who recently decided not to run for reelection, has been acting like a man liberated to speak his mind about Trump, as his explosive interview last night with the New York Times showed, and he now seems entirely unwilling to back down from the confrontation he once feared.

Which makes it all the more interesting to talk Trump and foreign policy for an hour with Cotton amid the escalating feud.

Because Cotton today is one of the few Senate Republicans who pay close attention to foreign policy who is still out there making Corker’s initial case for engagement with Trump, and he insists it’s paying off with substantive shifts in Trump’s thinking on subjects as varied as how to deal with Russia and the continuation of the war in Afghanistan.

Screen out some of the inflammatory rhetoric, Cotton maintains, and “I would submit that his foreign policy, over these first nine months in office, is much more in keeping with the bipartisan tradition of foreign policy, starting with Truman in 1945 and going through George Bush in 2009, than President Obama’s policy was,” Cotton says. “In almost every area, in his own way, with his own rhetoric, he has reasserted American leadership, and he’s willing to confront threats before they gather.”

In the interview, Cotton argues that Trump’s national security team “changed for the better on two occasions” so far in his short tenure. The first came when Trump fired his first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and brought in Cotton’s recommendation, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster. The second came when the president fired his first chief of staff, Reince Priebus, and replaced him with John Kelly, a retired Marine four-star general also touted by Cotton. “I can see that from where I sit and the kind of interactions we have with the White House and my office, before and after both of those,” he says.

Cotton also says the fact that the two generals are both steeped in the military chain of command is a plus when dealing with the prickly president.

“They understand they’re not the president,” Cotton says in what seems at least an implicit nod to the view among the commentariat that the generals are there to oversee, or even constrain, Trump, from his own worst impulses. “Donald Trump is the president. Their job is to advise. His job is to decide. Their job is to make sure he has the best facts, the best thinking, presented to him in an orderly fashion and ready for decision. But he decides and they move out and execute.

As for substantive policy shifts, Cotton cites Afghanistan, where McMaster, Mattis and Tillerson spent months persuading Trump – against all his instincts, as the president later publicly acknowledged – to double-down on the war that just hit the 16-year mark this week by sending several thousand additional troops.

“That’s the way the policymaking process should work,” Cotton says in a response that seems worth quoting in full:

“When you’re a cabinet member, when you’re a senior advisor in the White House, and the president is right, you should help him achieve his objectives and run with his thinking. When you think the president is wrong, you have a duty to try to present to him the best facts and the best thinking to help him see it in a different light. Maybe you can, but if he doesn’t, and he says, ‘No, I want to do it my way,’ then your job is to move out and execute. And if you feel strongly enough, then you have to resign. “

Which, of course, brings us right back to the present moment – and the rift that the Iran deal seems to have opened up on Trump’s already conflicted team.

Until now, Trump has shied away from outright confrontation with the experienced hands he’s hired to oversee his national security policy. But the Iran deal now seems to have finally forced a public rupture.

Cotton, who has repeatedly consulted with Trump and other top White House officials in recent days, appears to be on the winning side, pushing Trump to adopt the formula his administration has now settled on of refusing to re-certify the Iran deal to Congress but holding off – for now – asking Congress to blow it up by imposing new sanctions. Iran “is on the president’s mind right now, probably more than anything,” Cotton says, and he says he believes Trump will take the step of not certifying as a way to send “a very important signal to Congress and to our E.U. plus three partners and to Iran that this president is not going to abide by a disastrous nuclear deal.”

Beyond the rhetoric, though, Cotton acknowledges the idea is not “to re-impose sanctions immediately” – an act that would be tantamount to blowing up the agreement – but instead give “coercive diplomacy” time to work. Cotton envisions Trump using the threat of imminent congressional action – Cotton declines to say how long, but suggests a deadline of “weeks or months” – to get U.S. allies in Europe and the Mideast on board with a plan to revisit the deal with Iran and secure more concessions on areas such as Iranian ballistic missile development, which is continuing and outside the deal right now; and ending the so-called “sunset clause” after which Iran might be free to resume its nuclear program.

Tillerson and Mattis have reportedly signed off on the final plan, which Trump is supposed to make public in a speech this week in advance of an October 15 deadline for Trump to certify Iranian compliance with the deal to Congress, as he is legally required to do every 60 days. But multiple sources have said that Tillerson privately lobbied Trump hard in favor of certification at least one more time, while Mattis, queried directly about this in his Senate testimony the other day, went public with his view that the deal in its current form remains “in the national interest” – precisely the opposite of what Trump is set to declare this week.

Cotton gave a lengthy address at the Council on Foreign Relations the same day as Mattis’ testimony taking the opposite view – and a link to it was soon tweeted out approvingly by an Iran deal hardliner inside the administration, U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley.

I asked Cotton about that Mattis statement, and how Trump should proceed given the obvious – and clearly consequential – moment of potential rift with the Pentagon chief. Even before last week’s all but open break with Tillerson, Trump had often expressed frustration over the secretary of state, but he has yet to really feud with Mattis almost alone among his top officials.

“On that specific point, I simply disagree with him,” Cotton told me of Mattis. “At root, though, we don’t have secretaries of state and secretaries of defense to make these decisions. We elect a president, who’s democratically accountable to the American people. And they say, in baseball, that the longest 18 inches is the difference between the assistant coach’s seat on the bench and the manager’s seat. That it’s the difference between advising and deciding. Same thing is true at the National Security Council table.”

In other words, Mr. Secretary, if you don’t like it, quit.