The cracks in the relationship between President Trump and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis that led to the Pentagon chief’s resignation were apparent from the start.
During his 2017 Senate confirmation hearing, the retired Marine general — who said Thursday he would leave the Pentagon on Feb. 29, 2019 — backed the U.S. staying in the Iran nuclear deal. That came even as President-elect Trump said he considered the pact disastrous and angled to fulfill a core campaign promise to dismantle it.
“I think it is an imperfect arms control agreement. It is not a friendship treaty. But when America gives her word, we have to live up to it and work with our allies,” Mattis told the Senate Armed Services Committee, outlining the same differences with Trump over allies and U.S. commitments echoed in his resignation letter.
Trump voided the deal four months later and began a series of decisions over the past two years that ran counter to Mattis’ advice. Trump’s sudden withdrawal of U.S. ground troops from Syria and Afghanistan was the final break for Mattis.
“My views on treating allies with respect and also being clear-eyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors are strongly held and informed by over four decades of immersion in these issues,” Mattis wrote to the president. “Because you have the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects, I believe it is right for me to step down from my position.”
Here are flashpoints that doomed the White House-Pentagon relationship.
[Opinion: Apparently Jim Mattis wasn’t on board with Trump’s Syria withdrawal after all]
Syria
Last month, Mattis said, “I never give a timeline” when asked about the monthslong operation to eliminate the remaining pockets of Islamic State fighters in Syria.
“As we moved against them, and they’re now down to less than 2 percent of the ground they own, we can see that the most important effort is the sustaining,” he said.
Trump tweeted Wednesday, “We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency.”
Afghanistan
Trump begrudgingly agreed in August 2017 with Mattis and other advisers to send thousands more troops to Afghanistan.
“We are there because, if we want to protect ourselves from what happened on 9/11 and so many other countries, this is worthwhile,” Mattis said last month.
But on Friday, Trump reversed that decision and scrapped the defense secretary’s strategy for the 17-year-old war by ordering 7,000 troops — about half of the deployed force — be brought home.
“My original instinct was to pull out. And historically, I like following my instincts,” Trump said when he announced the new policy last year.
NATO
Mattis spent much of his tenure shoring up the U.S. relationship with NATO allies and speaking publicly about the importance of the alliance.
“In my initial job interview with the president, he brought up his questions about NATO. And my response was that I thought that if we didn’t have NATO that he would want to create it because it’s a defense of our values, it’s a defense of democracy,” Mattis said during a 2017 “Face the Nation” interview.
But Trump took a much more confrontational approach, suggesting at various points that the alliance was obsolete and publicly needling member nations to spend more on defense.
“What good is NATO if Germany is paying Russia billions of dollars for gas and energy? Why are there only 5 out of 29 countries that have met their commitment? The U.S. is paying for Europe’s protection, then loses billions on Trade,” Trump tweeted during a NATO meeting in Belgium in July.
Space Force
Trump has championed a Space Force but Mattis was a key critic and had a hand in scuttling Congress’ first push for a new military space service, last year.
“I do not routinely comment on potential floor amendments of pending legislation. However, this particular issue warrants a response,” Mattis wrote to lawmakers in July 2017. “I strongly urge Congress to reconsider the proposal of a separate service Space Corps.”
Mattis called the proposal a “narrower and even parochial approach” to space operations. Now, Trump has made the creation of Space Force a key priority for 2019.
Korea exercises
Trump surprised the Pentagon with an announcement at his June 2017 summit with North Korea leader Kim Jong Un that the U.S. would halt what he called expensive and provocative war games with the South.
The president and Mattis then appeared to contradict one another two months later about the future of those joint exercises, a staple of the U.S. security relationship with South Korea.
“We took the step to suspend several of the largest exercises as a good-faith measure coming out of the Singapore summit. We have no plans at this time to suspend any more exercises,” Mattis said during a rare press conference at the Pentagon in August 2017.
The next day Trump tweeted out a statement saying, “There is no reason at this time to be spending large amounts of money on joint U.S.-South Korea war games.”
