On January 22nd, two days after President Trump was inaugurated, he received a memo from his new Secretary of Defense, James Mattis, recommending that the United States launch a military strike in Yemen. In a forty-year career, Mattis, a retired Marine Corps general and a veteran of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, had cultivated a reputation for being both deeply thoughtful and extremely aggressive. By law and by custom, the position of Defense Secretary is reserved for civilians, but Mattis was still a marine at heart. He had been out of the military for only three years (the rule is seven), and his appointment required Congress to pass a waiver. For the first time in his professional life, he was going to the Pentagon in a suit and tie.

Mattis urged Trump to launch the raid swiftly: the operation, which was aimed at one of the leaders of Al Qaeda in Yemen, required a moonless night, and the window for action was approaching. Under previous Administrations, such attacks entailed deliberation by the National Security Council. Instead, the request was discussed over dinner three days later at the White House, where Trump was joined by Mattis and several advisers, including Mike Flynn, who at the time was the national-security adviser, and Joe Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The target of the raid, they explained, was a mountain camp where the Al Qaeda leader was holed up. The military hoped to apprehend him and capture his comrades’ computers and phones, which could be scoured for intelligence.

A plan for the operation had been developed under the previous Administration, but President Obama didn’t want to commit to a risky mission at the end of his term. Obama’s restraint was in keeping with an over-all preference for caution, which often rankled leading generals at the Pentagon. For eight years, the White House had tightly managed the Pentagon’s operations in the Middle East and in South Asia; even something as mundane as moving helicopters from one part of a war zone to another might require top-level discussion. “The Pentagon said they had to crawl through glass to get anything out of the White House,” a former defense official told me. Now the generals wanted to move. “There was an eagerness in the military to do something quickly,” a senior official with knowledge of the strike told me. “There was a frustration because a lot of operations had been held up.” When Trump heard the plan for the Yemen strike, he gave the order to go.

Four days after the dinner meeting, SEAL Team Six landed in Yemen, under dark skies, expecting to surprise the Al Qaeda encampment. Instead, the SEALs came under attack the moment they landed. “They were waiting for us,” the senior official said. The mission devolved into a firefight, which involved SEALs, Harrier jets, helicopters, and armed jihadis. At least fourteen members of Al Qaeda, including the targeted leader, were killed. But a SEAL commando also died in the fighting, and an aircraft was irreparably damaged. As many as twenty-five civilians were killed. Among them was an eight-year-old girl, the daughter of the American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who had been killed by a U.S. drone strike six years ago.

After press reports said that the raid had produced little valuable intelligence, Trump blamed the operation’s troubles on “the generals.” The senior official suggested that the real fault lay in the President’s hasty decision-making. “Mattis owed it to Trump to let him know that things might go wrong,” he said. “But there was no process.” Still, the official told me, Mattis spread the word that he would smooth things over with the President. He publicly endorsed the operation and praised the valor of the SEAL who was killed. “The United States would not long exist were it not for the selfless commitment of such warriors,” he said.

During the Presidential campaign, Trump’s pronouncements on foreign policy showed little consistency, but their outlines suggested that it was isolationist and dismissive of the international order that had been constructed, largely by the United States, after the Second World War. Trump declared NATO “obsolete,” and criticized previous Presidents for starting costly, unwinnable wars. His focus would be on domestic policy, and on putting “America first.”

For Trump, the choice of Mattis seemed more emotional than deliberative. Their initial meeting lasted just forty minutes, and Trump seemed drawn to him less for his world view than for his fearsome reputation. Announcing his nomination for Secretary of Defense, Trump revelled in using the general’s nickname—Mad Dog—and compared him to General George S. Patton, who was famous for his tactical brilliance, his profane language, and his merciless style. Anecdotes about Mattis’s audacity in the field are legion. Early in the Iraq War, he met with local leaders and told them, “I come in peace. I didn’t bring artillery. But I’m pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: if you fuck with me, I will kill you all.”

But, in embracing Mattis’s Mad Dog persona, Trump neglected a side of him that appealed to many others—that of the deeply read scholar-soldier and sophisticated analyst. In this view, Mattis is a kind of anti-Trump, a veteran of three wars who has been sobered by their brutalities, a guardian of the internationalist tradition in American foreign policy. Mattis was endorsed by Henry Kissinger, whom he had worked with at Stanford University. As if to prove his judiciousness, Mattis, during his job interview, tried to persuade Trump to abandon the idea of reinstituting torture as an interrogation tool, saying that offers of beer and cigarettes work just as well. Even the nickname Mad Dog is a misnomer; none of his friends use it, and Mattis himself does not care for it.

At his confirmation hearing, Mattis performed far better than many of his colleagues in the Trump Cabinet. He came across as prudent and broadly informed. “History is clear,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee, in a tacit rebuke of his future boss. “Nations with strong allies thrive, and those without them wither.” Senators from both parties seemed eager to embrace him as a competent, reassuring figure in an otherwise chaotic Administration. Jack Reed, a Democrat from Rhode Island, told Mattis, “You will be, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, the saucer that cools the coffee.” It didn’t hurt that Mattis seemed prepared, if necessary, to defy his boss’s orders and walk away from the job. “If I ever thought it was something immoral, I’d be back fishing on the Columbia River tomorrow,” he has said.

Mattis could well turn out to be a brake on Trump’s impulsive tendencies. But it’s also possible that, with the President uninterested in many details of international affairs, the military will also lack restraint. In the weeks after the Yemen raid, it launched a series of operations on a scale rarely seen in the Obama years. It stepped up air strikes in Iraq and Syria, killing many Islamic militants but also hundreds of civilians. In Afghanistan, the Air Force dropped a bomb weighing twenty-two thousand pounds—the largest conventional weapon ever used—on an ISIS bunker complex. The Navy fired fifty-nine cruise missiles at an airbase in Syria, meant to punish the regime of Bashar al-Assad for using chemical weapons. An aircraft-carrier battle group was sent to the waters off the Korean Peninsula, in an effort to persuade the North Korean government to scale back its nuclear ambitions. And the decision was made to arm Syrian Kurds against the Islamic State.

“Listen, Poirot, if you don’t shut up there’s going to be another murder on the links.” Facebook

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In a press conference, Trump boasted about the flurry of activity, which he described as the result of giving the military “total authorization.” While some of the initiatives—the Syrian strike, for instance—were undertaken on Trump’s orders, many were initiated by Mattis or by the generals reporting to him. Along with the Administration’s budget proposal to increase defense spending by fifty-four billion dollars, these actions suggest that Trump, despite his early isolationist statements, is bringing a new calculus to global politics, in which the use of force plays a more prominent role, and that Mattis may be the policy’s principal driver.