Bracing candor from General Mattis

His resignation letter is going to prove to have historical significance. One wonders about the timing, the extent to which it expresses thoughts he'd been entertaining for some time, and the extent to which immediate circumstances, namely, the pullout-of-troops-from-Syria announcement, spurred its writing.

Consider this Bloomberg piece from December 9, when Kelly's departure was the latest incident of administration instability, and what the lay of the land looked like at that point:

Mattis, the warrior intellectual in charge of the Pentagon, has worked to get fellow North Atlantic Treaty Organization members and Pacific allies to watch what the U.S. does, not what it tweets. Were he to go, too, at a time of escalating trade tensions and frictions between the U.S. and its partners on everything from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal to climate change, those most reliant on U.S. support would be shaken.

“His departure definitely wouldn’t be a positive message for us,’’ said retired General Ants Laaneots, who commanded the armed forces of Estonia, one of NATO’s three small Baltic state members, from 2006 to 2011. Mattis, he said, “knows what is happening here and knows there is a Russian threat.”

There’s no immediate indication the defense secretary’s job is in danger. Still, whether his days are numbered is among the big questions doing the rounds at NATO’s shiny-new Brussels headquarters, according to two alliance officials, who asked not to be named due to the sensitivity of the issue. They described Mattis as one of the last remaining Atlanticists in the Trump administration, and the main interlocutor for European allies.

And now he's pulled the trigger.

It's obvious from his letter that he wanted the chasm between his view of America's role in the world and that of the Very Stable Genius to be on very public display. David French at NRO correctly determines the most important line in it, and just what is meant by it:

Again he refers to treating allies with respect. Again he urges clarity in dealing with “malign actors.” The lead sentence of the following paragraph is devastating: “Because you have the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other matters, I believe it is right for me to step down from my position.” (Emphasis added.)

Donald Trump is at a pivotal moment. He can heed General Mattis’s warning — delivered publicly, firmly, and respectfully — or he can continue down his current, reckless path. This letter represents America’s most-respected warrior telling the nation that he does not believe the president sees our enemies clearly, understands the importance of our alliances, or perceives the necessity of American leadership. We should be deeply troubled.

Clearly, General Mattis has had a belly full of the Trump approach to dealing with other people or nations. Trump is the kind of guy who thinks you can savage people with juvenile and baseless nicknames and assertions and still get them on board for "deals," that such meanness is just part of the normal course of doing business. He thinks nothing of going from "little rocket man" to "beautiful letters" (which have less import than he'd like us to think, given North Korea's return to its customary bellicosity.)

Morale is in the toilet at the Pentagon, Brussels bureaucrats have the jitters, and Iran and Turkey emboldened. And what, at this juncture, does Vladimir Putin chime in with?

Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a chilling warning Thursday about the rising threat of a nuclear war, putting the blame squarely on the U.S., which he accused of irresponsibly pulling out of arms control treaties.
Speaking at his annual news conference, Putin warned that “it could lead to the destruction of civilization as a whole and maybe even our planet.”

Granted, his reasoning, predicated on the US pulling out of the INF treaty, solely reflects his own perspective, since it is true that the actual reason for withdrawing was Russian cheating, but it nonetheless indicates Putin's current mood.

This entire scenario ought to, as French says, leave us deeply troubled.