At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House, H.R. McMaster, Harper Collins, £25 

On 24 November 2017, President Donald J. Trump shared a phone call with his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. During the call, President Erdoğan described the United States’ arms sales to the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) – the Kurdish fighters who played a key role in defeating the Islamic State – as a ‘waste of money’. Echoing the words of Vladimir Putin of Russia, who had called Trump a week earlier, Erdoğan suggested that Washington’s continued commitment to Syria’s Kurds was ‘null and void’, especially following the defeat of ISIS earlier in the year. Trump agreed; disregarding the advice of his national security advisor, General H.R. McMaster, he described America’s policy as ‘ridiculous’. The president apparently mocked his own officials and even promised to provide Erdoğan with a personal phone number so that he could be reached at any time.

Trump had not told McMaster to stop supplying weapons to the SDF, however; the president was riffing and had veered off script. From McMaster’s perspective, it was clear that that ‘Erdoğan, like Putin, had figured out how to play to Trump’s distaste for sustained military operations in the Middle East’. The consequences of this conversation would be revealed over the next few years as Trump’s ambivalence led to Turkish military incursions against the SDF, encouraged Russia and Iran to launch proxy attacks against American troops in Syria and Iraq, and compelled Washington’s allies in the region – including Israel and Saudi Arabia – to ‘hedge with Russia’ and ‘accommodate’ Syria’s President Assad.

This is just one memorable episode that is recounted in H.R. McMaster’s intriguing White House memoir, which summarises the former general’s 457 days as President Trump’s National Security Adviser between 20 February 2017 and 9 April 2018. In At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House, McMaster pulls back the curtain on Trump’s first year in the Oval Office. He describes how bureaucratic power struggles and intense personal rivalries, sometimes bordering on outright treachery, derailed key foreign policy initiatives. More than this, he illustrates how Trump himself often stoked these rivalries and undermined his administration’s ability to pursue its objectives.

McMaster’s memoir is all the more interesting because its author is neither a MAGA partisan nor a die-hard never-Trumper. Unlike the explosive tell-all book published by John Bolton, his successor as National Security Adviser, this account is not written with any overt personal animus against Trump himself. Instead, General McMaster writes as a historian and a military man rather than as a political animal or scheming Washington insider. In his words, he saw it as his ‘duty’ to serve his commander-in-chief and, while serving, he sought to transcend his country’s partisan divides. McMaster believed that telling Trump ‘what he didn’t want to hear’ and providing him with ‘a wide range of perspectives’ would allow the president to ‘develop a coherent foreign policy agenda that was true to his priorities and would help bring Americans together’.

Throughout the book, McMaster takes aim at the ‘flawed assumptions’ underpinning US foreign policy during the Obama administration. He frames his work as national security advisor as a quest to channel Trump’s disruptive energies in order to overhaul failing policies in areas as various as military strategy in Afghanistan, geopolitical competition with China, and the threat of nuclear proliferation in Iran and North Korea. The main thrust of McMaster’s critique is that President Obama often sought to negotiate with hostile regimes from a position of weakness and without a clear understanding of their motives. In so doing, Obama failed to wield credible economic and military pressure and projected an image of feebleness that left America’s adversaries with little incentive to negotiate in good faith.

Accordingly, during his time as national security advisor, McMaster sought to assist Trump in reshaping US foreign policy, and with notable successes. The April 2017 airstrike on the Syrian Air Force’s Shayrat Airbase, authorised by Trump in response to the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons, sent a clear signal to the regime as well as its Russian and Iranian backers. As a result, the ‘red line’ declared but then abandoned by Obama was belatedly enforced, and deterrence restored. A more coherent military and diplomatic strategy for South Asia was introduced, lifting restrictions on fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan and cutting off US security aid to Pakistan. Meanwhile, the US steadily abandoned its quixotic approach to China and began to counter the country’s authoritarian system, its anti-competitive trade practices and its imperial ambitions. Finally, ‘maximum pressure’ in the form of economic sanctions was exerted on Iran and North Korea in order to isolate these countries’ governments and bring them to the negotiating table.

From an early stage, however, it became clear to McMaster that ‘the Trump administration was already at war with itself’. McMaster had to deal with bureaucratic power struggles, persistent leaks to the press, and the intrusion of ‘vitriolic’ partisanship into the work of the administration. When combined with Trump’s own personal flaws, these power struggles often undermined the coherence of the president’s foreign policy initiatives. Controversies continually revolved around what McMaster neatly summarises as ‘allies, authoritarians and Afghanistan’. Trump’s disdain for many American allies in Europe and Asia, his ‘longing for affirmation’ from his political base, his ‘unseemly affinity for authoritarians’ and his instinctive aversion to costly military commitments all led him to vacillate and backtrack on major foreign policy shifts. This is why Trump’s South Asia strategy was abandoned in favour of withdrawal from Afghanistan, why maximum pressure on North Korea dissipated and why, in 2019, Trump ultimately left Syria’s Kurds high and dry.

Trump’s term in the White House, therefore, left a dual legacy: on the one hand, Trump disrupted an unsustainable status quo and ‘administered long-overdue correctives to unwise policies’. On the other, he ‘unmoored’ American foreign policy without giving it a new anchor. As a consequence, both ‘Trump’s inconsistency’ and ‘Biden’s fecklessness’ have emboldened authoritarian leaders and contributed to the current proliferation of crises in Ukraine and the Middle East; in addition, both presidents have failed to redress rising tensions in the South China Sea and Taiwan.

McMaster’s account is a compelling one, but there were some avenues that might have been explored more fully in the book. In some cases, the debates surrounding key policy changes and their consequences could have been explored in greater depth. In light of recent events in the Middle East, and a second Trump term in office, more detail on Trump’s approach to Iran, Israel and the Gulf states would have been warranted. McMaster might also have extended his exploration of Trump’s personality into a reflection on the nature of presidential power itself. Several commentators have speculated that a Trump return to the White House will herald the rise of a new ‘imperial presidency’. Drawing on the term popularised by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr in the 1970s they argue that a second Trump presidency has the potential to be more assertive and less constrained by congressional power than its recent predecessors.

There are grounds for such speculation. On 1 July 2024, the United States Supreme Court ruled that presidential immunity from criminal prosecution covers all ‘official acts’. In other words, the court decided that presidents enjoy ‘absolute’ legal immunity in exercising ‘core constitutional powers’, such as the president’s role as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. This ruling would provide Trump with a far wider scope to pursue unilateral actions in foreign policy, freed from the threat of prosecution during or after his time in office. At the same time, Trump, as in his first term, would be the inheritor of longer-term changes in the balance of power between the legislature and the executive; he would be able to exploit the weakening of congressional checks on presidential power in areas related to national security that has taken place since 9/11 and the War on Terror. Finally, critics allege that Trump plans to replace tens of thousands of federal workers with personal loyalists if he wins in November. If this happened, then there would be no McMaster-like figures around during Trump 2.0 to restrain the president’s instincts and tell him what he doesn’t want to hear.

All things considered, Trump’s re-entry into the Oval Office in 2025 with the support of a Republican-controlled Congress as well as a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, could make him America’s most powerful president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Such power would endow him with an unparalleled opportunity to reshape America. Yet, if McMaster’s account is to be believed, Trump’s own indecision as well as the strength of US institutions may yet counteract any imperial impulses or despotic designs. If the American presidency is in some ways an imperial office, as Schlesinger warned, then McMaster’s portrait of Trump is that of a vacillating and chaotic emperor. It would have been interesting to read more of the author’s thoughts on how Trump’s tenure fits into the past, present and future of the US’s highest office.

Nevertheless, the general is wise to leave the reader wanting more. At War with Ourselves provides a fascinating insight into the Trump White House and its early struggle to reshape US foreign policy. Overall, it amounts to an honest and cool-headed reflection on what went right during Trump’s first year in office as well as what went wrong. It offers an intimate and refreshingly non-partisan glimpse of the man who, very shortly, will be returning for a second term in the Oval Office.