Before coming to the White House, McMaster was known primarily as the author of the book Dereliction of Duty, an account of America’s involvement in Vietnam. It is the underlying foreign-policy views and experiences of the three “adults” with military backgrounds—Mattis, McMaster, and Kelly—that are the most important and the least covered. ↩, Vivian Salama and Julie Pace, “Trio of Military Men Gain Growing Influence with Trump,” Associated Press, February 23, 2017. It is Gavras' first feature film that was shot in Greece. As national security adviser, McMaster has had to handle especially acrimonious disputes inside the White House over issues ranging from trade and immigration to America’s role in the world. At a conference in Singapore in June, when asked if America were retreating from its role in the world, he invoked a quote routinely misattributed to Churchill about America: “Bear with us,” Mattis told the audience. ↩, James Kitfield, “Trump’s Generals Are Trying to Save the World. James Mann is a Fellow-in-Residence at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. The most troubling question about Trump’s “adults” is not so much what they believe but why most of them come from the military. What does it mean that most of Trump’s so-called grownups come from the military. See “Report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic,” released September 6, 2017. ↩, Greg Jaffe and Dan Lamothe, “With a Drama-Filled White House, Mattis Has Shown Deft Political Touch,” The Washington Post, August 30, 2017. He came to the position of secretary of state with more establishment credentials (or at least job references) than any of the other “adults”; luminaries of past Republican administrations, such as Robert Gates, Condoleezza Rice, and James Baker all supported him. Like US military officers in general, they tend to favor preserving and strengthening America’s existing military alliances. Under Trump, this phenomenon is now spreading from US operations abroad to the top levels of leadership in Washington. “His resume says he works at a big, white shoe firm, so I’m not sure we can get him to leave given what we are willing to offer. Trump’s three generals didn’t seek out the civilian jobs they now hold, collectively or individually. Mattis has had the (relatively) easiest time of it with Trump, while McMaster and, now, Kelly, have had the hardest, in part because of the nature of the different jobs they hold. McMaster, “Afterword,” in Daniel R. Green, The Valley’s Edge: A Year with the Pashtuns in the Heartland of the Taliban (Potomac, 2012), p. 217. The chances are that some of them won’t stay for long, either; there have already been occasional reports that McMaster or Kelly will be fired or quit. Such statements raise, momentarily, the specter of countries like Turkey or Egypt or Thailand, where the military assumes an obligation to step in for the good of the country when civilian governments have collapsed. At the same time, he has had to wrestle with personnel battles that extend beyond the usual ones among cabinet secretaries. But what has been most disturbing this year is the subtle link that is being created in American consciousness between the phrases “military leaders” or “generals” and the phrases “adults” or “grownups in the room.” Having military figures act as “adults” may somehow suggest that civilians lack the capacity to govern on their own, or even that civilians act like children. The notion that some officials are “adults” or “the grownups in the room” is an old Washington trope dating back decades before the arrival of Donald Trump. In an essay about Afghanistan in 2012, McMaster wrote: “The difference between how the war is briefed in Washington, D.C., and in Kabul, versus how it is waged in the field, cannot be starker.”7. ↩, Chris Whipple, The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency (Crown, 2017), p. 11. This page was last edited on 7 October 2020, at 23:21. (It is a fair and continuing question whether the proper course for an “adult” in the Trump administration is to resign from it.). In a recent insightful book based on her experiences in the Pentagon under Obama, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything,13 Rosa Brooks describes how the military has come to dominate American foreign policy overseas because it possesses the money and personnel to do what the State Department cannot. All of these predecessors had powerful civilian mentors who, over time, promoted them to senior positions (Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger for Haig and Scowcroft, Defense Secretaries Caspar Weinberger and Frank Carlucci for Powell). ↩, That Assad’s regime used chemical weapons was confirmed in September by an independent UN commission. It is linked to an opposing metaphor: in Washington parlance, others are said to be “in need of adult supervision.” These phrases go to the heart of the way those who work in Washington operate, see themselves, and, above all, talk about themselves. At first, the “adults” honorific was most commonly applied to the threesome of Tillerson, Mattis, and National Security Adviser H.R. Giuseppe Leone, "Yanis Varoufakis, Adulti nella stanza (ma non troppo)", in "Pomezia-Notizie", Roma,agosto 2020, pp. But Trump’s “adults,” as a group, have been mostly soldiers, not staff officers in the Haig model. He could not stop Trump from saying outrageous things in public on the spur of the moment; Trump’s outburst equating the two sides in the Charlottesville protests came at what was supposed to be a press conference on infrastructure, and it left Kelly staring at the floor. Kelly served under Mattis in Iraq; his own son was killed in combat in Afghanistan.