Thoughts from the Killing Fields on the Departure of Mattis

I was walking through downtown Seoul when I heard that Mattis would be resigning as Secretary of Defense. My first thought was that the next loud noise I heard would be incoming North Korean rocket artillery, but it turned out to just be a garbage truck.

As I compose these words, I’m sitting at the Killing Fields – rather, the Choeung Ek Genocidal Center in Cambodia. It is one of the hundreds of places where the Khmer Rouge executed people, and where you can find a tall ceremonial “stupa” with ten stories of skulls, numbering over nine thousand in all, excavated from the mass graves at the site.

The Killing Fields are the subject of one of Mattis’ lesser-known quotes (perhaps because it’s not real – I haven’t been able to authenticate it). He is reported to have said that as a young officer in 1979, he toured the Killing Fields and learned that the Khmer Rouge targeted teachers and the educated because they felt the biggest threat to their utopian communist society was an inquisitive mind. Even if this quote didn’t come from him, Choeung Ek is a powerful place to compose thoughts.

I was very pleased when Mattis became Secretary of Defense. I, like many others, had long admired him. I even met him once, when he was a three-star general commanding I MEF in 2006. He spoke to my platoon before we escorted him through the city of Fallujah. When he finished speaking, I felt ten feet tall. You can see it in this photo – I’m all blown up like a puffer fish. I was left with a powerful impression that, like our regimental commander Lawrence Nicholson (who just retired as a three-star), he cared very deeply for those under his command.

Over the past two years, I have wondered how long it would take for Mattis to leave the administration. For a long time, I thought he would stay on forever as he felt bound to fulfill a duty to those in uniform. When Trump recently made comments to the effect that Mattis might leave, my stomach made gurgling noises. Still, it came as a surprise that he resigned.

It came as even more of a surprise that he resigned in such a public and forceful manner. His resignation letter made my jaw drop a time or two. I believe there is more to the story than we know now, and I wonder just how many times he was asked to do something immoral (link: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/northwest/james-mad-dog-mattis-trumps-defense-pick-always-comes-home-to-richland-this-town-that-formed-me/).

Most news articles seem to be focusing on the quote from the resignation letter about how Trump deserves a defense secretary who shares his opinions on both allies and “malign actors” and the general rebuke of his worldview contained therein. I found the rest of the sentence, which seems to have been overlooked, even more telling.

Mattis said his opinions were “strongly held and informed by over four decades of immersion in these issues.”

Several months back, it was rumored that Mattis had described Trump as having the education of a fifth- or sixth-grader. I dismissed these accounts because Mattis dismissed them. Now, I’m wondering if they were true.

Mattis left the Killing Fields with a reinforced desire to make himself the best-educated person he could be; he was constantly reading when he was I MEF commander, and before and after that as well, of course. He is also a remarkably humble person. If he feels the need to remind the President – and the world – that he is experienced and educated, that is probably for a very good reason and one I do not take lightly. Simply put, is he trying to tell us that the President does have as poor an understanding of the world as was previously alluded to?

I don’t think Trump ever truly understood Mattis. I got that impression when he kept calling Mattis “Mad Dog,” an aphorism which has nothing to do with his character or intellect, during his announcement that Mattis would become SecDef.

Some people have expressed “panic” at the departure of Mattis. I don’t share the panic. I do, however, feel very concerned.

I’m less concerned that Trump does not have an “adult in the room” as I am that Trump will not have someone of Mattis’s expertise offering guidance. That is to say; I do not worry as much about Trump being in need of restraint as I worry that whatever is left of his national security staff does not have the understanding of the world that Mattis does.

What does that mean? Well, I think there are rough waters ahead. I am concerned that “deal-making” will now encompass ceding to Putin and Jinping what would previously have been the territory of the American president, or, put more specifically, the territory of the American military and diplomatic services. In effect, I think this will make for a weaker, not a stronger, America. I think that in the very long run, this will result in an America which cannot enforce international law at sea and cannot (or will not) protect her allies on land. By extension, the economy of America will be irreparably harmed. In short, I think this could result in an America which is not great.

I don’t think you can make America great (or greater) by ceding control of vast swathes of the globe to China and Russia. It is not that we need to have a massive presence in certain areas to reduce or eliminate the influence of “malign actors” in those regions, but we must be able to maintain the capability and more importantly the willingness to do so. If we lack the capability (as sequestration, a damaging legacy of the previous administration, threatened to do) or willingness (as Trump threatens to do when he flirts with the idea of abandoning Article V of the NATO charter) to do what needs to be done when it needs to be done, we will no longer be a great nation.

Reading between the lines of the resignation letter, I don’t think Trump understands this. I think he is too focused on the terror threat to see the greater threats posed by nation-states which do not share our values and in fact have fundamentally different goals and ideas as to the way the world should work (China, for example, seems to believe that it does not need to conform to international rules and norms because it wasn’t a significant power and didn’t have much of a say when they were written). I don’t think he gets that they are motivated not by the short-term desire to make a trade deal or “work together to fight ISIS,” but the long-term desire to achieve goals deeply rooted in their cultural history.

As an aside, I also believe that declaring ISIS defeated and pulling troops from Syria is nothing more than a political move. If ISIS was defeated in the region, we’d pull troops from Iraq, too.

I don’t think China wants to replace us entirely as the preeminent global power, and I think the Russians know they can’t even if they wanted to, but I do think both wish to return to the “spheres of influence” type of foreign policy which dominated in centuries past. I don’t think that’s compatible with the interconnectedness of the world and how markets function now, and I believe some sort of conflict might result from the friction that will inevitably result. Russia, for example, would love to exert control over pretty much every region starting with Bal- (except maybe Baltimore), and a few others as well.

Perhaps this is all smoke and mirrors. Perhaps Trump only flirted with the idea of stepping back from defense commitments as a ploy to get the Europeans to pay more for their militaries (which they absolutely should). But if Mattis felt it important enough to mention in his resignation letter, I don’t think it was an empty threat.

It’s possible, of course, that the Syria and Afghanistan pullout and half-pullout were the straws that broke the camel’s back. But I think there’s something more to the “other issues” Mattis alluded to in his letter. Part of me wants to know what they are, and another part of me wants to live in blissful ignorance. Either way, I think we’re worse off without the Warrior Monk advising the President.