Until recently, Donald Trump’s campaign to purge naysayers had spared the Pentagon. In the absence of more proximate targets, however, it appears the president has turned his attention to foreign policy, jeopardizing his relationship with perhaps his only remaining sane adviser. Indeed, in the past week, Trump has made James Mattis’s job nearly impossible by declaring that he would send the military to guard the border with Mexico (the White House later clarified that he meant the National Guard), and insisting that the U.S. pull out of Syria (something Mattis promised last year would not happen), leading to a spectacular showdown on Tuesday, when the conflict between Trump and his generals reportedly boiled over during a meeting of top aides in the Situation Room.

According to the Associated Press, Mattis argued “that an immediate withdrawal” from Syria “could be catastrophic and was logistically impossible to pull off in any responsible way,” and offered a one-year timeline as an alternative—to which Trump responded that five or six months ought to do the trick, and “indicated that he did not want to hear in October that the military had been unable to fully defeat the Islamic State and had to remain in Syria for longer.” A person familiar with the meeting told CNN that attendees left Tuesday’s meeting “beside themselves,” arguing that Trump’s lack of desire to put together any sort of recovery plan for Syria—restoring basic needs such as water, power, and roads—would most certainly tip the country back into ISIS’s hands. “It is a huge gamble that ISIS is not going to come back and that we are going to rely on others to stabilize Syria,” an official said.

The same official noted the hypocrisy in Trump’s choice: “The president blasted Obama for a timeline in Iraq, but that is in essence what we have been given.” When Barack Obama announced that a 30,000-troop surge in Afghanistan would be followed by a withdrawal beginning in 2011, Trump bashed the move in a 2007 interview with CNN, saying, “You know how they get out? They get out. That’s how they get out: declare victory and leave. Because I’ll tell you: this country is just going to get further bogged down.” In August, Trump gave a speech in Fort Myer, Virginia, outlining his strategy for Afghanistan, depicting it as a “comprehensive, conditions-based” approach that stood in contrast to his predecessor’s “artificial timetables.” And the national security “fact sheet” on the White House Web site reads as follows:

President Trump’s conditions-based South Asia Strategy provides commanders with the authority and resources needed to deny terrorists the safe haven they seek in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

On Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders belabored this point, telling reporters, “As the president has maintained from the beginning, he’s not going to put an arbitrary timeline . . . he is measuring it in actually winning the battle, not just putting some random number out there.”

The president’s choice to eschew his own foreign-policy strategy seems characteristic of the new, “liberated” stage of his presidency, which has seen him gleefully shake off the shackles imposed by the likes of H.R. McMaster and Rex Tillerson. In his August speech, Trump noted that he had decided to remain in Afghanistan against his better judgment: “My original instinct was to pull out and, historically, I like following my instincts,” he said. “But all of my life, I’ve heard that decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk in the Oval Office.” Now that he’s rid himself of those pesky moderating voices, Trump is doing things his way. Despite his advisers’ reported efforts to sway him by presenting a binary choice in Syria—and by making the option of withdrawal as unappealing as possible—the “most militant military human being who ever lived” chose the nuclear option anyway.