So far, Mattis untouched by shake-up
President Trump’s reshuffling of national security team has left defense secretary isolated
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s shake-up of his national security team adds to the burden on one man at the center of any decision about war and peace: Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.
Long a champion of alliances and diplomacy, Mattis increasingly finds himself surrounded by policy hawks on issues like Iran and North Korea. Yet his command of the nation’s 1.2 million active-duty personnel makes him uniquely placed to steer Trump away from any rash decision to unleash the U.S. military.
Trump stunned his own aides this month by reshaping his foreign policy team in a more hawkish bent ahead of a key decision on the Iran nuclear deal and a historic summit with North Korea’s leader. With a tweet, he said he’d replace Secretary of State Rex Tillerson with CIA Director Mike Pompeo. Then Thursday he tapped former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton to be his third national security adviser in 14 months, dismissing H.R. McMaster.
While the 67-year-old Mattis has broken with his boss on several top policy issues, he’s as permanent a fixture as anyone can be in the tumultuous Trump administration.
“He’ll be the last man standing,” said MacKenzie Eaglen, a defense analyst with the American Enterprise Institute. “He is the most powerful Cabinet member and knows it. He gets to run DoD and be a shadow secretary of State.”
Mattis made rare public comments alongside Trump on Friday when the president announced his decision to sign a $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill that earlier in the day he threatened to veto. Trump cited a $70 billion boost to the Pentagon budget as the overriding reason for him to sign the legislation, singling out a number of priority weapons projects that could now go forward.
“We need to take care of our military,” Trump said.
Taking the microphone, the fourstar general lauded Trump’s decision to sign the funding bill by citing comments attributed to President George Washington in the 1790s, saying the support will help guarantee peace. “We in the military are humbled” by the backing provided by the American people, he added.
It’s clear from their relationship that Mattis “won’t be next” to leave the administration, Eaglen said, even though his three predecessors at the Pentagon — Ash Carter, Chuck Hagel and Leon Panetta — each lasted two years or less in the job.
Mattis, who Trump introduced to the country more than a year ago using the general’s “Mad Dog” nickname, will still have to contend with the rise of Pompeo and Bolton. The two are widely viewed as more hardline conservatives who have openly championed the utility of regime change and pre-emptive strikes abroad.
So far, Mattis’s term as defense secretary has been characterized by a lowprofile approach seemingly designed to limit “gotcha” moments where he might be seen as openly contradicting his boss. He’s held only two televised news conferences in the Pentagon briefing room — one last April after a cruise missile attack on Syria and the other in May, directed by Trump, to tout progress against the Islamic State.
But he has shown flashes of disagreement.
In a pep talk overseas last year, Mattis told U.S. soldiers to “hold the line” until Americans respect each other again, a comment many analysts interpreted as a criticism of the rhetoric emerging from Washington.
After Trump said in August that U.S. forces were “locked and loaded” to confront the North Korean regime, Mattis helped calm tensions by saying “nothing’s changed” in U.S. force posture and continuing with a tour of the U.S. West Coast. “U.S. forces maintain their usual high state of readiness in their deployed positions,” he said.
And while Trump has repeatedly labeled the 2015 deal with Iran to curtail its nuclear program a “disaster,” and threatened to tear the agreement up by mid-May, Mattis has been more cautious. He told the Senate Armed Services Committee in October that if the U.S. “can confirm that Iran is living by the agreement,” he believed “this is something the president should consider staying with.”
That tightrope act between moderation and bombast seems to have worked so far. Trump referred to Mattis as “our great military genius-slash-person” in December. And the defense secretary earned a laudatory presidential tweet when he said it would be “game on” if North Korea fires missiles at the U.S.
In at least one way, Mattis has had a simpler job than any of his counterparts did: he oversees a department whose success Trump holds paramount and whose budget he has long sought to increase.
Unlike Tillerson, Mattis also seems to have earned the right to steer his department as he sees fit. On foreign policy, Trump once said “I’m the only one that matters.” He’s made no such claim when it comes to military issues, seeming to treat the military brass as a breed apart. Trump early on moved to give his generals in the field — from Afghanistan to Syria — more direct authority over combat decisions.
The question now is whether Mattis will find Bolton and Pompeo chipping away at his powers. Mattis had a strong alliance with Tillerson — they frequently coordinated their positions — in a partnership that was a break from past tensions between the heads of the Pentagon and the State Department.
Now, however, he finds himself surrounded by Cabinet members and advisers who disagree with his worldview, experienced bureaucratic insiders who enjoy the rough-and-tumble of Washington politics. Mattis is a firm believer in the so-called rules-based international order, under which the U.S. pays for the bulk of institutions such as the United Nations and NATO as a way of ensuring stability and maintaining its influence.
Of course, there’s never any guarantees in the Trump White House. The president has frequently proven quick to sour on top aides whose views he disagrees with, with almost half of his key advisers leaving since he took office.
“Mattis is now more isolated,” said Byron Callan, a defense markets and politics analyst in Washington for Capital Alpha Partners LLC. “He had kindred spirits in Tillerson and McMaster.”
If Mattis were to leave this year, he’d be the fourth consecutive defense secretary to do so after serving less than 24 months.