Trump's Generals Can Save The World From War
Last November, when James Mattis traveled to Bedminster, New Jersey, at the behest of the president-elect, his close friends were shocked. They couldn’t believe Mattis, a retired Marine Corps general, would consider working in the new administration as secretary of defense. “Jim,” his friend Peter Robinson asked him, “Donald Trump?”
For three years after leaving the Marines, Mattis had been ensconced at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, padding around campus in sneakers and jeans, a backpack slung over his shoulder, happily working on a book. The man retired Marine Colonel Gary Anderson calls “the finest combat leader our military has produced in decades’’ looked like an “old graduate student,” as Stanford colleague Robinson puts it. And he had little intention of changing that. Until Trump called.
Two other prominent retired generals received similar calls—and they, too, agreed to serve: national security adviser H.R. McMaster and newly appointed chief of staff John Kelly, who first joined the administration as the head of Homeland Security.
Trump calls them “my generals,” a title their colleagues say makes them a bit uncomfortable. And now, six months into a chaotic administration, under an unpredictable president who many fear isn’t fit for the job, the skepticism that many of their friends initially evinced has been replaced by something else: “relief,” says Johns Hopkins military historian Eliot Cohen, a friend of all three. “These are grown-ups in grown-up jobs. God knows this administration needs them.”
It is hard to overstate how widespread that feeling is among key U.S. allies—and even some adversaries, especially now with a mounting nuclear crisis in North Korea and Trump’s use of bellicose rhetoric unnerving friends and foes. One Chinese diplomat who, like many others in this story, would speak to only on condition of anonymity, says his government—like many others—had “no idea” what to make of Trump when he won the presidency. But it was
