Mr. Mattis, in contrast, was an institutionalist — as were H.R. McMaster, the retired lieutenant general who served as national security adviser, and Rex Tillerson, the Exxon Mobil chief who never figured out how to run the State Department, but recently said he spent most of his time trying to talk Mr. Trump down from illegal acts on the world stage.
The three men never got along. But they all believed America’s strength lay in its role leading NATO, or the anti-Islamic State alliance, or keeping the peace in the Pacific by making it clear to North Korea and China that the Navy was just over the horizon.
Mr. Mattis and Mr. McMaster were authors of a national security strategy that Mr. Trump issued but never embraced, one that said dealing with the “revisionist” powers of Russia and China, not combating terrorism, was once against the primary objective of American national security policy.
But when Mr. Trump accepted Mr. Mattis’ resignation on Thursday afternoon, the most he could say about his defense secretary was that his greatest accomplishment was “the purchase of new fighting equipment” and getting allies to pay more of their share of the burden of the alliances. He never mentioned the strategic reorientation, contained in a document his former aides say he never read.
“We are moving back to an earlier conception of America’s role in the world, looking out for ourselves, hoping the two oceans protect us, and when necessary saying the rest of the world is full of freeloaders who can go to hell if they don’t get on board,’’ said Robert Kagan, a conservative foreign policy expert whose books, “The World America Made” and “The Jungle Grows Back,’’ chronicle the ebbs and flows of American influence.
“It may be an era more destructive of the world order than in the 1930s,’’ he said. “Back then, at least Britain and France were responsible for keeping part of the order. Now we are the responsible world power — and we are undermining it.”
Mr. Mattis almost never repeated the “America First” line that his boss found so attractive. But he also rarely openly contradicted the president. He was more subtle. When he received orders he believed destructive — for example, the presidential tweet that seemed to ban transgender soldiers from serving — he would slow-walk the process, forming a committee to study the issue, then issuing watered-down directives.
from Just News Update http://bit.ly/2EBXiN4
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