One of the things President-elect Donald Trump’s second national security adviser liked about the neophyte president when they first met in 2017 during Trump’s first term was the commander in chief’s penchant for breaking things, especially regarding foreign policy.

“Trump’s disruptive nature could be advantageous. Many preexisting policies needed to be disrupted,” now-retired Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster wrote in his memoir, At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House. “But his impoliteness and capriciousness, in tweets or off-the-cuff comments to the press, were often counterproductive.”