Former national security adviser H.R. McMaster said the risk of another 9/11-style attack on the country is “very high.”
In an interview with USA Today, McMaster said he believes United States-backed peace talks in Afghanistan will end in “failure,” prompting major terror threats for the nation.
McMaster blasted President Trump over his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and said he believes there’s been a politicization of the military that’s weakened national security.
“We’re creating this destructive cycle and these centripetal forces that are pulling us apart from each other,” McMaster said. “We’re forgetting who we are as Americans.”
McMaster, a former Army lieutenant general, also lamented that the nation is “in many ways more at risk today than we were on Sept. 10, 2001.”
McMaster’s comments come on the heels of his new book, Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World. He said his goal with the book is to offer a critique of Trump’s foreign policy approach, with a focus on North Korea and Afghanistan.
In his book, McMaster writes about how he disagreed with Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accords and his negotiations with the Taliban, referring to the latter as “wishful thinking.”
He said Trump saw his summit with Kim Jong Un, in which the president was once nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, as “irresistible.”
McMaster also said he “can’t really explain” Trump’s deferential relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
McMaster resigned in 2018 on relatively amicable terms with Trump, unlike his successor, John Bolton, who was fired in 2019. The current national security adviser is Robert O’Brien.
