The Slatest

McMaster Is an Improvement, but He’s Going to Be Cleaning Up After Trump Like Everyone Else

President Donald Trump announces Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, left, as his national security adviser at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, on Monday.

Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images

Donald Trump’s new national security adviser, a highly qualified and widely admired general, is certainly an improvement over the politically compromised extremist Michael Flynn. But how much influence can H.R. McMaster have on the views of a president who gets his information on world affairs from half-baked Tucker Carlson segments?

McMaster is not the first noncrazy person to join Trump’s team. The president already has a Cabinet stocked with figures espousing relatively mainstream GOP foreign-policy views—many of whom directly contradicted much of Trump’s campaign rhetoric during their confirmation hearings. But so far, the dynamic of these officials moderating Trump’s views and behavior has not played out. Instead, the so-called moderating forces are spending a good portion of their time cleaning up Trump’s messes and explaining to foreign governments that their boss didn’t mean what he very clearly did mean.

Vice President Mike Pence, who has existed in a parallel universe to his boss since the campaign, was in Brussels over the weekend, assuring European governments of America’s “steadfast and enduring” support for the European Union and contradicting Trump, who has expressed indifference to the EU and embraced euroskeptic politicians like Nigel Farage. According to Reuters, Pence’s reassurances also contradicted remarks made by Steve Bannon to a German diplomat last week, in which the chief White House strategist called the union a flawed construct and said the U.S. would be better off conducting relations with European governments on a bilateral basis.

Defense Secretary James Mattis, on a trip to Iraq, is also on cleanup duty Tuesday, saying “We’re not in Iraq to seize anybody’s oil,” in response to questions about Trump’s oft-stated belief that America should have “kept” Iraq’s oil after the 2003 invasion and might still do so.

And last week, it was up to U.N. envoy Nikki Haley to explain that “we absolutely support a two-state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and that Trump was just “thinking out of the box” by suggesting that he had no particular attachment to the longtime U.S. policy position.

Now it’s McMaster’s turn to take a crack at an administration that often seems to be running two separate foreign policies in parallel, a traditionally Republican one administered by Pence and the Cabinet secretaries, and a disruptive and unpredictable one run by Bannon and Trump himself. If you’re a foreign leader or diplomat right now, trying to get a handle on just how disruptive and transformative this administration is going to be, McMaster’s appointment is likely welcome, but also making things even more confusing.