Jim Mattis holds firm as chaos engulfs Trump's national security team

President Donald Trump’s shakeup of his national security team adds to the burden on one man at the center of any decision about war and peace: Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.

Long a champion of alliances and diplomacy, Mattis increasingly finds himself surrounded by policy hawks on issues from Iran to North Korea. Yet his command of the nation’s 1.2 million active duty personnel makes him uniquely placed to steer Trump away from any rash decision to unleash the U.S. military.

Trump stunned his own aides this month by reshaping his foreign policy team in a more hawkish bent ahead of a key decision on the Iran nuclear deal and a historic summit with North Korea’s leader. With a tweet, he said he’d replace Secretary of State Rex Tillerson with CIA Director Mike Pompeo. Then Thursday he tapped former United Nations ambassador John Bolton to be his third national security adviser in 14 months, dismissing H.R. McMaster.

While the 67-year-old Mattis has broken with his boss on several top policy issues, he’s as permanent a fixture as anyone can be in the tumultuous Trump administration.

‘Last man standing’

“He’ll be the last man standing,” said MacKenzie Eaglen, a defense analyst with the American Enterprise Institute. “He is the most powerful Cabinet member and knows it. He gets to run DoD and be a shadow secretary of state.”

Mattis made rare public comments alongside Trump on Friday when the president announced his decision to sign a $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill that earlier in the day he threatened to veto. Trump cited a $70 billion boost to the Pentagon budget as the overriding reason for him to sign the legislation, singling out a number of priority weapons projects that could now go forward. “We need to take care of our military,” Trump said.

Taking the microphone, the four-star general lauded Trump’s decision to sign the funding bill by citing comments attributed to President George Washington in the 1790s, saying the support will help guarantee peace. “We in the military are humbled” by the backing provided by the American people, he added.

It’s clear from their relationship that Mattis “won’t be next” to leave the administration, Eaglen said, even though his three predecessors at the Pentagon — Ash Carter, Chuck Hagel and Leon Panetta — each lasted two years or less in the job.

Mattis, who Trump introduced to the country more than a year ago using the general’s “Mad Dog” nickname, will still have to contend with the rise of Pompeo and Bolton. The two are widely viewed as more hardline conservatives who have openly championed the utility of regime change and pre-emptive strikes abroad.

So far, Mattis’s term as defense secretary has been characterised by a low-profile approach seemingly designed to limit “gotcha” moments where he might be seen as openly contradicting his boss. He’s held only two televised press conferences in the Pentagon briefing room — one last April after a cruise missile attack on Syria and the other in May, directed by Trump, to tout progress against the Islamic State.

But he has shown flashes of disagreement.

In a pep talk overseas last year, Mattis told U.S. soldiers to “hold the line” until Americans respect each other again, a comment many analysts interpreted as a criticism of the rhetoric emerging from Washington.

After Trump said in August that U.S. forces were “locked and loaded” to confront the North Korean regime, Mattis helped calm tensions by saying “nothing’s changed” in U.S. force posture and continuing with a tour of the U.S. west coast.