With Generals gone, world may see what Trump's 'America First' truly means

President Trump appointed more generals to senior positions than any other modern president. But with the resignation of Jim Mattis, no will generals remain

With the angry departure of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, the United States and its shaken allies are about to discover the true meaning of “America First.”

Mr. Mattis, a retired four-star general, prided himself on spending four decades preparing for war while nurturing the alliances needed to prevent conflict. He was more than the competent grown-up in the Situation Room, quelling talk of unilateral strikes against North Korea. In fact, he was the last senior official in the administration deeply invested in the world order that the United States has led for the 73 years since World War II, and the global footprint needed to keep that order together.

The breaking point was Syria, where Mr. Trump decided over his defense secretary’s objections to pull out all American troops, and Afghanistan, where the president seems determined to reduce the American presence by half in the next few months. By the time Mr. Trump made clear he would delay those actions no longer, Mr. Mattis was isolated.

He was not alone: Most of the advisers Mr. Trump once called “my generals” also believed in the worldview that Mr. Trump has long rejected. And now, headed into his third year in office and more convinced than ever that his initial gut instincts about retreating from a complex world of civil wars and abstract threats was right, Mr. Trump has rid himself of the aides who feared the president was undercutting America’s long-term national interests.

Now the president appears determined to assemble a new team of advisers who will not tell him what he cannot do, but rather embrace his vision of a powerful America that will amass a military that will enforce national sovereignty and bolster American deal-making — but not spend time nurturing the alliance relationships that Mr. Mattis, in a remarkable resignation letter, makes clear are at the core of American power.

Predicting how far Mr. Trump will take his “America First” vision is risky, but there are some clear hints.

Pulling completely out of Afghanistan is entirely within the realm of possibility, foreign diplomats and Pentagon officials say — and Mr. Trump appears to be halfway there with the planned troop reduction. But that may be only a start.

Mr. Trump has often threatened to pull back forces from the Pacific, wondering why he should be paying to defend Japan and South Korea, especially given the fact that the United States has trade deficits with both.

He may also be inclined to reassess his approach to that part of the world in the wake of North Korea’s declaration the other day that its interpretation of “denuclearization,” the goal of Mr. Trump’s outreach to Pyongyang, was far broader than Washington’s, further dimming hopes for a deal with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader.

Chafing at the limits imposed by arms control treaties signed by predecessors back to Ronald Reagan, he could decide to resume a nuclear arms race — one aimed more at China than Russia — if the administration goes ahead with its threat to suspend the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty in early February. Feeling equally encumbered by longstanding agreements with allies, especially those he views as not carrying their weight, he could threaten to exit alliances.

“Who will persuade Trump not to withdraw from NATO?” Daniel B. Shapiro, the former American ambassador to Israel, asked in a tweet on Friday as the implications of the Mattis resignation sunk in. “Really scary possibility, no longer theoretical.”

To Mr. Mattis, alliances were a force-multiplier. To Mr. Trump, they are mostly a burden.

“I think the question for any future secretary of defense — or any of those going onto the Trump team now — is whether they want to be like Jim Mattis and try to defend the principles he defended, starting with alliances, or get on board with the President’s approach,” Leon Panetta, who served as defense secretary, C.I.A. director and White House chief of staff during a long career, said by telephone Thursday night. “While the president tweeted, Mattis went around the world reassuring people that they could wink at the statements and know that America was going to be there to steady the ship.”

Mr. Panetta paused. “Until he couldn’t keep that going any more,” he said.

The national security adviser, John R. Bolton, made no secret of his deep suspicion of international institutions like the United Nations, NATO, and the European Union. After an initial, awkward meeting at the Pentagon with Mr. Mattis, the two men often steered clear of each other.

The secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, is more artful at straddling the line, talking up Mr. Trump’s view of America’s role in the world while quietly working to channel the president’s most extreme instincts. But while he objected to the Syria decision, he defended it, if weakly, on a series of friendly radio and TV interviews on Thursday.

In retrospect, the clash of world views between Mr. Trump and Mr. Mattis was inevitable. Mr. Trump made his views clear from the early days of the campaign, when he railed about the Iran nuclear deal as a “terrible” giveaway for the United States, criticized NATO as an alliance of freeloaders and described the presence of American troops in Asia as nonsensical, because the United States ran trade deficits with Japan and South Korea.

Mr. Mattis, in contrast, was an institutionalist — as were H.R. McMaster, the retired lieutenant general who served as national security adviser, and Rex Tillerson, the Exxon Mobil chief who never figured out how to run the State Department, but recently said he spent most of his time trying to talk Mr. Trump down from illegal acts on the world stage.

The three men never got along. But they all believed America’s strength lay in its role leading NATO, or the anti-Islamic State alliance, or keeping the peace in the Pacific by making it clear to North Korea and China that the Navy was just over the horizon.

Mr. Mattis and Mr. McMaster were authors of a national security strategy that Mr. Trump issued but never embraced, one that said dealing with the “revisionist” powers of Russia and China, not combating terrorism, was once again the primary objective of American national security policy.

“We are moving back to an earlier conception of America’s role in the world, looking out for ourselves, hoping the two oceans protect us, and when necessary saying the rest of the world is full of freeloaders who can go to hell if they don’t get on board,” said Robert Kagan, a conservative foreign policy expert whose books, “The World America Made” and “The Jungle Grows Back,” chronicle the ebbs and flows of American influence.

“It may be an era more destructive of the world order than in the 1930s,” he said. “Back then, at least Britain and France were responsible for keeping part of the order. Now we are the responsible world power — and we are undermining it.”

Mr. Mattis almost never repeated the “America First” line that his boss found so attractive. But he also rarely openly contradicted the president. He was more subtle. When he received orders he believed destructive — for example, the presidential tweet that seemed to ban transgender soldiers from serving — he would slow-walk the process, forming a committee to study the issue, then issuing watered-down directives.

By dwelling in his resignation letter on the value of the NATO alliance, the coalition to fight the Islamic state, and the need to be cleareyed about Russia and China, he was aiming at the heart of his differences with Mr. Trump.

“Whenever I said ‘Trump is destroying the Atlantic alliance,’ ” Mr. Kagan said, “people would tell me, ‘At least there is Mattis.’ ”

In fact, Mr. Mattis was the man who worked up the plans to circulate troops through Eastern Europe, as a signal to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. It was Mr. Mattis who helped establish what was supposed to be a long-term presence in Afghanistan, to convince the Taliban they would have to negotiate a peace.

But Mr. Mattis was also a cautious player. He clashed with Mr. McMaster over the defense secretary’s refusal to order the military to hail and board North Korean ships suspected of carrying goods that violated the embargoes on the country. And whenever people talked about unilateral strikes against North Korea, it was Mr. Mattis who would warn, darkly, of the potential cost to millions of lives in Seoul.

Now the question is whether Mr. Trump will conclude that his experiment with the generals — he told an interviewer during the 2016 campaign that he liked them because they “represent power” — is truly over.

It turns out that long military careers usually create a different view of the way the world works than long careers in commercial real estate. And it is a view that Mr. Trump still rejects, even more vociferously than he did when he was running for office.