#general mcmaster

[truth-has-a-liberal-bias]

McMaster to Resign as National Security Adviser, and Will Be Replaced by John Bolton

General McMaster had struggled for months to impose order not only on a fractious national security team but on a president who resisted the sort of discipline customary in the military.

[deadpresidents]

If you had to pick a top 5 of Trump's appointments, who would it be?

1. General Mattis (SecDef)2. General McMaster (National Security Advisor)3. General Kelly (White House Chief of Staff/Secretary of Homeland Security from Jan. 20-July 31st )

And…that’s about it. I can’t really come up with five. Maybe Linda McMahon? At least she’s a good fit for the job she was appointed to (Administrator of the Small Business Administration) and actually has experience in that field. I mean, the Trump Administration is so bad that as I was thinking about this question, I not only considered including Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley, but I actually thought, “Well, much to everyone’s surprise, Rick Perry hasn’t accidentally triggered a nuclear reaction while inspecting Energy Department sites, so maybe he’s in the top five?”.

By the way, the fact that the best members of Trump’s Administration are all former (and, in McMaster’s case, current) high-ranking generals is not a surprise. They seem to be just about the only people in that branch of the government who are still serving their country and not the wild whims of an erratic wannabe authoritarian or the ignorant and intolerant nationalism of his political base.

[servopedes]

General H.R. McMaster is a retired United States Army lieutenant general who served as the 26th United States National Security Advisor from 2017 to 2018. He is also known for his roles in the Gulf War, Operation Enduring Freedom, and Operation Iraqi Freedom and is currently a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.  His books, "Battlegrounds" and "Dereliction of Duty" are bestsellers. He is host of the podcast "Battlegrounds: International Perspectives" and a regular on the podcast "Goodfellows."

[heathershomilies]

Trump to Meet North Korea's Kim Jong-Un

Trump to Meet North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un

Since long before he became president, Donald Trump has been attacking and insulting Kim Jong-un and North Korea. CNN has a new article that’s a compilation of ‘All the times President Trump has insulted North Korea‘.

As you can imagine, there’s a lot there, and includes plenty of tweets. Trump has also made it clear ad infinitumthat he thinks negotiation is a waste of time when it comes to North…

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[acentristview-blog]

Damn Shame! Guess no one can cross #Trump. 😔 Smear campaign targets #GeneralMcMaster #SteveBannon

[minnesotafollower]

President Trump Announces Reversal of Some Cuba Normalization Policies       

On June 16 in the Little Havana district of Miami, Florida, President Donald Trump announced a reversal of some aspects of the Cuba normalization policies that had been instituted by his predecessor, President Barack Obama. With a flourish at the end of his speech, Trump signed the National Security Presidential Memorandum on Strengthening the Policy of the United States Toward Cuba to document…

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[wordstoreference]

The national security adviser has lost sway.

Trump was livid, according to three White House officials, after reading in the Wall Street Journal that McMaster had called his South Korean counterpart to assure him that the president's threat to make that country pay for a new missile defense system was not official policy. These officials say Trump screamed at McMaster on a phone call, accusing him of undercutting efforts to get South Korea to pay its fair share. This was not an isolated incident. Trump has complained in front of McMaster in intelligence briefings about "the general undermining my policy," according to two White House officials. The president has given McMaster less face time. McMaster's requests to brief the president before some press interviews have been declined. Over the weekend, McMaster did not accompany Trump to meet with Australia's prime minister; the outgoing deputy national security adviser, K.T. McFarland, attended instead.

[newstfionline]

Will Trump Take ‘Brutally Forthright’ Advice From McMaster?

By Peter Baker, NY Times, Feb. 25, 2017

WASHINGTON--As commander of an armored cavalry troop, H. R. McMaster fought in the largest tank battle of the Persian Gulf war, earning a Silver Star in the process. Afterward, the young captain reflected on how different his experience had been from the accounts he had read about Vietnam.

So when he arrived at the University of North Carolina for graduate studies in fall 1992, questions swirled through his head: How had Vietnam become an American war? Why did American troops die without a clear idea of their mission? “I began to seek answers to those questions,” he later wrote.

The result was a dissertation that turned into a book that would become, for a whole generation of military officers, a must-read autopsy of a war gone wrong. Now, as a three-star general and President Trump’s national security adviser, General McMaster will have the opportunity to put the lessons of that book to the test inside the White House as he serves a mercurial commander in chief with neither political nor military experience.

The book, “Dereliction of Duty,” published in 1997, highlighted the consequences of the military not giving candid advice to a president. General McMaster concluded that during Vietnam, officers on the Joint Chiefs of Staff “failed to confront the president with their objections” to a strategy they thought would fail. Twenty years later, the book serves as a guidepost to how he views his role as the coordinator of the president’s foreign policy team.

“It’s a history, but he obviously draws conclusions about the need for what you might term brutally forthright assessments by military and indeed also by civilian leaders,” David H. Petraeus, the retired Army general and a patron of General McMaster, said in an interview. “That’s a hugely important takeaway. He has a record of being quite forthright.”

In his first week on the job, General McMaster has already shown an independence familiar to past colleagues. He has begun moving to revise an organizational order issued last month that seemed to downgrade the role of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the director of national intelligence, and he told an all-hands staff meeting that he did not consider the term “radical Islamic terrorism” helpful, even as the president insists on using it.

But those are relatively small matters compared to what may come. Already, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, a retired four-star Marine general, has led the president to put aside his desire to reinstitute torture in interrogations of terrorism suspects, at least by the military. Mr. Trump places great faith in the generals he has surrounded himself with, but he and General McMaster had never met until a week ago, and the book’s reputation may set a hard-to-meet standard for the general.

“The difficulty is that Trump has a lot of crazy ideas in his head--like we should steal Iraq’s oil or we should kill the relatives of terrorists or we need to ban Muslims from coming here,” said Max Boot, a military historian at the Council on Foreign Relations. “And I’m sure someone like McMaster, like Mattis, understands how crackpot these ideas are.

“So can you say to the president, ‘Hey, Sir, you’re full” of it? Mr. Boot continued. “Or do you have to sugarcoat it and handle him with kid gloves? I suspect it’s the latter, and that’s not been H. R.’s approach.”

The book is central to General McMaster’s identity and career. As he embarked on graduate studies after the gulf war, he approached his adviser, Richard H. Kohn, a professor who specialized in civil-military relations, and said he wanted to explore the role of the Joint Chiefs during Vietnam.

Using newly declassified records, General McMaster came to a conclusion that upended the conventional wisdom within the military that it had been betrayed by President Lyndon B. Johnson and undercut by antiwar protesters and never given the chance to win the war.

General McMaster concluded that the chiefs had been absorbed by the parochial interests of their different services and had never adequately pressed their opposition to the gradual escalation strategy favored by Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara.

After finishing the dissertation, he published it as a book while still a major. It quickly became a sensation. Mr. Petraeus recalled bringing it to the attention of Gen. Hugh H. Shelton after the general took over as chairman of the Joint Chiefs in 1997. General Shelton made it required reading for all of the chiefs and combatant commanders. “It is a valuable resource for leaders of any organization,” he later wrote in his memoirs.

Senator Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican who served in the Army, said officers of his age all read it. “We took the analysis to heart,” he said. Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican and a Vietnam veteran, called it “one of the very important books that anyone aspiring to leadership should read.”

Still, while praising General McMaster, Eliot A. Cohen, a professor at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies and a counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, said it may not have made a difference had the Joint Chiefs been more outspoken with Johnson. “It’s not like the president didn’t know they wanted to do more and do it quickly,” he said. “And it’s not like they really had a better idea for winning the war, other than using more violence right away.”

Others said General McMaster’s book had been misread. The shorthand is that generals should have “stood up to Johnson” or even stopped him somehow. Among those who think that is a misinterpretation is Mr. Kohn, General McMaster’s graduate adviser. “McMaster’s book neither says nor implies that the chiefs should have obstructed U.S. policy in Vietnam,” other than by candidly presenting their views, he wrote in the Naval War College Review in 2002.

Peter D. Feaver, a specialist in civil-military issues at Duke University and a national security aide to President George W. Bush, even coined the term “McMasterism” to describe the common overstatement of his thesis.

“They read McMaster’s book as supporting this defend-against-the-civilians role, but his actual argument is more subtle,” Mr. Feaver said. As a result, he added, the misinterpretation may haunt General McMaster. “McMaster’s challenge is that some may hold him to this inappropriate standard, and then he will be open to even more criticism if he disappoints,” he said.

Mr. Cohen agreed that General McMaster would now be held to an impossibly high bar. “This book will hang over him being national security adviser,” he said. “He has to be very aware that he now represents integrity and a forthrightness about speaking truth to power.”