Can a Free Mind Survive in Trump’s White House

Colonel McMaster had spent the first two years of the war at Central Command under General John Abizaid, trying to get their boss, Donald Rumsfeld, the Defense Secretary, to acknowledge that America was fighting an insurgency in Iraq. Rumsfeld refused to admit it, because it went against his high-tech approach to the global war on terror. He would fax McMaster pages from Che Guevara’s memoirs to prove that Iraq didn’t fit the classical definition.

.. McMaster believed that a counterinsurgency strategy—putting the focus on securing the population and bringing economic development, not just killing the enemy—could turn things around.

.. He sent his troops into the city and kept them there, establishing connections with local leaders and Iraqi Army units, gathering intelligence on the jihadis, providing security in the streets, and showing that the Americans—appearances throughout the country notwithstanding—were not abandoning Iraq to its warring factions.

.. it failed strategically because it could not resolve the basic struggle for political power between sectarian groups. As McMaster told me again and again, counterinsurgency is eighty per cent political.

.. He could also be tough on his men, who did not universally love him.

.. McMaster was too intellectually rambunctious for his own good.

.. Lieutenant General McMaster has a lot of faith in American power, especially military power.

.. I imagine that he would shake his head over the conspiracy theories about Muslims that held Flynn spellbound.

.. I wasn’t surprised to learn from a mutual friend that McMaster considered his new boss’s ban on refugees and immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries to be heinous and self-defeating.

The national-security adviser has to master three fundamental things.

  1. He has to stay on top of fast-moving events around the world while helping to develop long-term American strategy across regions and issues.
  2. He has to allow the views of the key national-security officials in Washington to reach the President in an honest and independent way.
  3. And he has to win the trust of the President himself

.. Will he have the bureaucratic skill to outmaneuver the long knives of Steve Bannon and his shadow National Security Council?