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The big story of the day out of the US has been Jim Mattis's resignation as defense secretary, a former four-star general in the Marine Corps. Mattis played a pretty central role to foreign policy in the Trump administration.
You know, he was known colloquially as Mad Dog Mattis. But actually he never called himself that. And he was actually referred to much more as a warrior monk, a guy who spent a lot of reading, a lot of thoughtful, intellectual work on counterinsurgency theory and in shaping the way the military fought.
His argument, and this is basically the argument of most mainstream postwar foreign policy thinkers, is that the US's biggest strength is actually not its military. It's its alliances. If you think about the rivals to the US who are emerging in the world, particularly China but also Russia, what is the main difference between them geopolitically is that Russia and China do not have a huge amount of allies right now.
The US has spent decades, since World War Two, building things like Nato, building things like bilateral military relationships with Japan and Korea and Australia. Across the world, these alliances gave the US strength.
Mattis has argued that what Trump has done is basically cast aspersions on all these alliances, and also that this sort of cozying up to strongmen, particular to the Russians but also, to a certain extent, to the Chinese, does great damage to American interests.
Look, Trump has not been shy about this since day one. This goes to the core of his America First foreign policy. He believes it is not in the Americans' interest to be the global policeman. It is not something we should risk blood and treasure overseas, forcing stability on dysfunctional countries.
So Mattis has argued that Donald Trump has put the nation at risk through some of his foreign policy decisions. And it is basically the flip view of Trump's world view. Mattis would argue - and if you go back to the '70s, certainly, and look at the last 30 years of US foreign policy, that when the US withdraws, bad things happen to the US.
Remember, the US devoted a lot of money to backing the Mujahideen, to bring down the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan, and then withdrew, and then withdrew. And what came in its place? The Taliban and al-Qaeda, which eventually came to New York on September 11.
You leave these ungoverned places to their own devices, and threats emerge. And I think this is potentially a watershed moment in Trump foreign policy because he's gotten his hardliners in place now as national security adviser, as secretary of state, and undoubtedly the next defense secretary as well.
