H.R. McMaster’s New Book Explains Why Trump Fired Him

Authored by Fred Fleitz via American Greatness,

Just in time for the 2024 presidential election, a new tell-all memoir has been published by a former senior Trump administration official that regurgitates the usual never-Trump criticisms of the former president. Like former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s spiteful 2020 tell-all book, former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster’s tome, At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House, is dripping with derision because of Trump’s decision to fire him after just over a year on the job.

McMaster is a learned man with a distinguished record of military service. He holds a Ph.D. in military history and is the author of several noteworthy books on national security. He claims to be a historian and quotes ancient Roman and Greek philosophers in his book.

However, McMaster has also long been part of the foreign policy establishment, and this got him in trouble with President Trump because he constantly deferred to establishment positions on foreign policy questions and opposed Trump’s often unconventional approaches. McMaster clearly gravitates toward elitist foreign policy circles and is more comfortable associating with the Council on Foreign Relations and Harvard University’s JFK School of Government than he is with Trump, whom he looked down on.

It was not a surprise when the Wall Street Journal ran an excerpt of McMaster’s book as a feature article titled “I Cannot Understand Putin’s Hold on Trump.” Although McMaster said allegations that the 2016 Trump campaign colluded with Russia “were found to be false,” he tries to revive this narrative by suggesting that Putin had somehow coopted Trump and portrays himself as a heroic Trump aide who was “swimming upstream” trying to warn the president of this.

This claim reflects the frustration of McMaster and the foreign policy establishment that, despite years of trying to discredit Trump for his statements and policies on Russia, Trump’s approach to Russia was far more successful than President Biden’s. McMaster and his establishment fellow travelers can’t get over the fact that Putin invaded neighboring states during three of the last four U.S. presidents but not Trump. They have no explanation for why U.S.-Russia relations were stable and peaceful during the Trump administration but a disaster during the Biden years.

Since McMaster can’t blame Trump for Russia invading Ukraine during Biden’s watch, he tries to change the subject by mocking Trump for the way he dealt with Putin and revealing alleged statements by Trump about Putin and other national security topics made in confidence to him in the Oval Office. Aside from the fact that revealing these candid conversations was a betrayal of the confidence of the president that he served, I doubt many Americans will believe such partisan accusations suddenly appearing just before the 2024 election.

On a related issue, McMaster’s account of President Trump’s anger with him over a statement he made at the February 2018 Munich Security Conference is quite enlightening. In response to a question by a Russian politician at this conference, McMaster said evidence in the Mueller investigation that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election was “incontrovertible.” In response to Trump’s anger over his comment, McMaster claimed he was quoted out of context and accused “those eager to undermine me” of stirring up Trump over his remark.

The reality is that this was not a matter of McMaster being misquoted or unnamed adversaries working against him with the president. Although McMaster’s comment about the Mueller report was in line with the New York Times editorial board, his remark obviously was not Trump’s view. As a cabinet member and the President’s National Security Adviser, McMaster had no business publicly disagreeing with Trump on such a sensitive issue, especially at a conference held overseas.

I was disappointed to read McMaster’s feeble attempt to blame President Trump for President Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. He asserts that Trump’s agreement with the Taliban betrayed the Afghan government and notes that the Biden administration “claimed that it had been bound to adhere to the Trump administration’s negotiated timeline for withdrawal.” These claims are false because the Trump administration’s plan to withdraw from Afghanistan was to be done in phases and conditioned-based. The abrupt withdrawal ordered by Biden was very different and done with little planning.

This is the misleading rationale that the Biden administration and the Harris campaign are using to escape responsibility for the deadly Afghanistan withdrawal fiasco. McMaster was only too happy to assist them.

One issue that caused tension between McMaster and Trump was the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran (the JCPOA). McMaster claims he was at odds with Trump supporters who wanted to get out of the deal, as well as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense James Mattis, because of his efforts to give the president options to pressure Iran to work with the U.S. and Europe to fix the JCPOA. Maybe Tillerson and Mattis were upset with McMaster for not supporting their clear position that the U.S. remain in the JCPOA. But the truth is, there was no chance Iran would agree to amend the JCPOA, and McMaster actually worked to protect a bad nuclear agreement beloved by liberal foreign policy experts and European leaders by postponing and preventing a Trump decision to withdraw from it.

Strangely enough, McMaster gives Trump credit for his many national security successes. These include repairing frayed relations with Israel and negotiating the Abraham Accords. McMaster credited Trump for long-term strategies to defeat ISIS and al-Qaeda, strengthening U.S. defense, recapitalizing the U.S. nuclear deterrent, and long-term strategies to compete in space and cyberspace. He lauded Trump for overruling the bureaucracy to move America’s embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, cutting off aid to Pakistan, and stopping U.S. payments to UNRWA, which was helping fund Hamas.

McMaster also approved of Trump’s needling of German Chancellor Angela Merkel over Germany’s dependence on Russian gas and praised him for shutting down the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, constructed to transport Russian gas to Germany, with U.S. sanctions.

However, McMaster’s praise for Trump’s accomplishments comes off as hypocritical because it is accompanied by constant criticism of Trump’s leadership, character, and beliefs. Much of this criticism was petty and personal.

I was surprised to read about the intense infighting between McMaster and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense James Mattis. McMaster writes about Tillerson’s astounding incompetence in conducting foreign policy and his refusal to cooperate with the NSC. He portrays Tillerson and Mattis as constantly going behind the backs of himself and Trump. McMaster said Mattis told him he was trying to ensure that “reason triumphs over impulse,” meaning Mattis viewed himself as “reason” trying to rein in “impulse”—President  Trump. McMaster indicated that he mostly agreed with Tillerson and Mattis’s efforts and did not take offense to their “obstructionist and occasionally rude and petty behavior,” even though they faulted McMaster for “enabling” the president.

This incredible arrogance adds up to three cabinet members who thought the president should defer to them on foreign policy and not the man—Donald Trump—who was elected president by the American people to make national security decisions to protect their security.

McMaster begins his book with high-minded statements that his work is not partisan or about payback.

He wrote:

But I wrote this book to get past the hyper-partisanship and explain what really happened. I wrote with no political agenda; the politics of our day are pulling this country apart. And I wrote with no desire for requital. I wrote to recount what I experienced.

These claims are laughable because McMaster obviously timed the release of the book to cash in on the 2024 presidential election and the vast audience of Trump haters. It is also crystal clear that he is trying to affect the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.

McMaster’s book proves that he is part of the foreign policy establishment and that this made it impossible for him to serve effectively as President Trump’s National Security Adviser. McMaster’s constant efforts to resist and counter Trump’s national security policies, the disloyalty he demonstrates in his book, and his gratuitous and petty criticism prove that President Trump was right when he decided to fire McMaster after only 15 months on the job.

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Fred Fleitz previously served as National Security Council chief of staff, CIA analyst, and a House Intelligence Committee staff member.