The resignation of General Mattis spells trouble

The resignation of the US Defense Secretary, General James “Mad Dog” Mattis, is a serious blow to the Trump administration for at least three reasons.

First, because the Pentagon is practically a state within a state — it employs 1.3 million service and civilian personnel— and the loss of its titular head always signifies a political crisis of the first magnitude. To minimise this institutional upheaval, General Mattis will stay on in a caretaker role until a replacement is found early in the new year. But the administration has already lost so many key players that it can ill afford to let Mattis go. A credible replacement won’t be easy to find.

Secondly, the grounds for Mattis’s imminent departure indicate a major policy fissure within the administration over the question of troop deployment in Syria. He resigned because the President overruled him on this crucial issue. Mattis believes that an American withdrawal from the region at this juncture will be disastrous: it allows Isis to regroup and perhaps pose a new threat; it betrays the Kurdish allies who did most of the fighting and are now vulnerable to attack from their Turkish, Syrian and Islamist enemies; and it creates a strategic power vacuum that Russia and Iran will seek to fill.

This leads to the third reason, to which Mattis alludes in his resignation letter. The general appears to have clashed with the President, not just over the immediate question of maintaining a military presence in Syria, but on the fundamental direction of American policy. “I believe we must be resolute and unambiguous in our approach to those countries whose strategic interests are increasingly in tension with ours,” he wrote. “It is clear that Russia and China, for example, want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model.”

While Mattis avoids direct criticism, the implication is that President Trump has failed to pursue an unambiguous policy to deter those hostile to America and the West. Mattis and Trump disagree not only about how to deal with “malign actors and strategic competitors” but also about “treating allies with respect”. Significantly, the President thanked him, not for defeating Isis, but merely as “a great help to me in getting allies and other countries to pay their share of military obligations”. Such damning with faint praise speaks volumes about Trump’s contempt for his Nato partners. Unlike the defence establishment, he does not see allies as valuable or indispensable, but rather as a burdensome necessity.

So where does this leave the Western alliance? The Trump administration still has two highly competent individuals in charge of foreign affairs: the Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, and the National Security Advisor, John Bolton. The new Secretary of Defense will need to work well with this dynamic duo in order to maintain a steady course that deters America’s foes and reassures its allies.

President Trump may well win a second term, so it is vital to maintain continuity. Barack Obama’s first Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, was also George W. Bush’s last: though a Republican, he was trusted by Obama. It was only after Gates’s departure in 2011 that US troops were withdrawn from Iraq, leading to the sudden emergence of Isis. Many fear a similar debacle after the precipitate withdrawal from Syria announced this week, without even consulting important allies, including Britain.

Donald Trump is by no means as naive or foolish as the media depicts him. He was elected on a platform of “America First” and he sees defence in national rather than global terms, of borders rather than of buffers. As far as he is concerned, the job of defeating the remnants of Isis can be left to regional actors and no more American lives should be sacrificed for the sake of foreigners. He believes in only one cardinal principle: the sovereignty of the nation state. This, if anything, is the Trump doctrine.

But it is not enough. If the United States has a manifest destiny, it is to preserve freedom and democracy. That inevitably imposes global obligations. Trump has been reluctant to accept the role of world policeman that all of his modern predecessors have embraced. The resignation of Jim Mattis poses the question: if America is no longer prepared to defend Western civilisation, who will?