The Harris-Trump Debate Taught Us Very Little About U.S. Plans for the World

On Tuesday night, tens of millions of Americans watched as Vice President Kamala Harris marched up to former President Donald Trump and shook his hand—it was their first-ever meeting—before they tussled on stage for 90 minutes on a range of domestic and foreign-policy issues. 

One person who has had the closest possible look at Trump’s chaotic policymaking is H. R. McMaster, a decorated Army veteran and historian who served as the former president’s national security advisor for about 13 months before, in his own words, he was “used up.” (Or as Trump put it in Tuesday’s debate: fired.)

Since leaving government in 2018, McMaster has written two books reflecting on those tumultuous 13 months, the latest of which is At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House. McMaster openly criticizes Trump’s leadership while also finding plenty of faults with Harris, President Joe Biden, and former President Barack Obama. He steadfastly refuses to endorse or repudiate candidates for political office. 

I spoke with McMaster about the presidential debate and other topics on FP Live. Subscribers can watch the full discussion on the video box atop this page. What follows is a condensed and edited transcript. 

Ravi Agrawal: Let’s begin with the debate. What were your overall impressions?

H. R. McMaster: I was glad that there seemed to be an acknowledgment that we’re in a period of extreme danger. President Trump alluded to this when he said this could be World War III. Vice President Harris didn’t really dispute that.

But what was disappointing, Ravi, was I didn’t really hear very much about what a response might be, including what I think is really an urgent effort to rebuild our defense capacity. It would have been great to hear either candidate say, “Hey, it’s a lot cheaper to prevent a war than to have to fight one.” We have underinvested in defense given what we’ve seen our adversaries and potential enemies doing from a perspective of aggression and how they’ve modernized their militaries. 

It would have been great to hear about the economic dimension of those threats as well. For instance, the degree to which China has gained control over supply chains critical to our defense industrial base and our economy overall. Overall, the debate seemed to me to be very performative rather than formative. 

RA: Well, hopefully one day they’ll agree to debate on FP Live.

HRM: They need you to moderate it, Ravi.

RA: There was one part, as I was listening to it, that made me think specifically of you. Trump said, “When somebody does a bad job, I fire them. And you take a guy like Esper, he was no good. I fired him. So he writes a book. Another one writes a book.” So, he mentioned the former defense secretary, Mark Esper, and that other person he refers to could easily be you, General. And you’ve written two books now. How do you feel when you hear Trump say a version of “he was no good, I fired him”?

HRM: I got used up with Donald Trump; we both came to that conclusion. I attribute it in part to these three millstones that ground down our relationship. And you heard a lot of this in the debate last night. I called it the three A’s in the book: Afghanistan, allies, and authoritarians. 

Afghanistan was talked about quite a bit.

Viewing allies within Trump’s point on burden-sharing, which was important, but not crossing the line to diminish the psychological strength of an alliance by saying, “We’re not going to defend you if you don’t pay your dues.”

And then authoritarians, and the degree to which Trump was driven by this really strong desire to have some kind of an entente with [Russian President] Vladimir Putin. I continually tried to tell him, “Others have tried that before, too, and it didn’t work. Your two predecessors tried it. And Putin actually has aspirations and objectives in mind that go far beyond anything that’s in reaction to us.” So I tried to disabuse him of that idea that he could have a big deal with Putin. Instead, what Putin respected was strength. So there’s a chapter in the book entitled “Weakness is Provocation.”

RA: I know you like to say that you are nonpartisan. But, just coming back to my previous question, unlike many people Trump has fired, you haven’t yet come out and said you will not support Trump again. Why is that? 

HRM: It’s because it seems like about half the American population is ready to vote for him.

As a retired military officer, I don’t want to specifically endorse a candidate.

As you know from the book, I don’t pull any punches on criticizing Trump for his inconsistency in policy. Afghanistan was a case in point there. He is easily distracted, as you saw during the debate as well. Whenever there is anything that is ad hominem criticism about his rallies, he does get easily distracted. And then, of course, Jan. 6 and the election denial during which he abdicated his responsibility under the Constitution.

But I think the American voters, and your readers who are very engaged on these issues, are quite capable of reading the record and making his or her own choice. I made a unique contribution to the record as a historian and as a military officer and as someone who had the privilege of serving in that position to at least give my honest take. My observations of the good, the bad, and the ugly. And a lot of it was good, actually, in terms of some significant and long overdue shifts in U.S. foreign policy. 

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RA: If Trump wins, how should people with your background and standing think about whether or not to serve in a second Trump administration, given how many people like you tried it and were then fired? 

HRM: You should absolutely serve if you can make a positive difference. I write in the book that I’m never going to serve with President Trump again because we’re used up with each other and I wouldn’t do him any good. I wouldn’t do the country any good in that job. But there are some talented people who still have a good relationship with him, who I think could serve him well in various capacities, like state or defense, that are confirmable positions.

It’s likely that people who are in unconfirmed positions might be problematic in terms of really not being motivated by helping Donald Trump crystallize his own agenda. He needs help there in framing these complex challenges, understanding his concrete goals, and then what actions, what statements, what initiatives, what operations will contribute to accomplishing those objectives. But there will be other people who come in with their own agenda and want to manipulate those decisions consistent with that agenda.

I think this happens in any administration, but it’s probably to a higher degree in the Trump administration. There are people who defined their role as saving the country and the world from the president. And I think that’s problematic because nobody’s elected those people. If you feel as if you cannot carry out the president’s policies and decisions, then you should resign.

But I was never put in a position in those 13 months where the president made a decision that I thought was illegal or immoral. There were decisions I disagreed with, but it wasn’t my job to get him to agree with me on everything. It was my job to help him determine his foreign-policy agenda and make his own decisions because he was the one who got elected. 

RA: You were obviously not in the White House on Jan. 6, 2021. If you were national security advisor on that day, what would you have done? 

HRM: I would have resigned that day.

RA: I found it worrying when Donald Trump was asked in the debate if he had any regrets about Jan. 6 and he showed none. How should these hypothetical potential Trump second-term officials process that lack of regret about a day that was shameful in American history?

HRM: They should process it as a profound disappointment and an indication of an aspect of his character that’s profoundly weak. He’s unable to get beyond himself. Donald Trump, and this is not a surprise to anybody, is mainly about Donald Trump. I write that when his interests align with those of the country, he can be quite effective and disruptive. I think all of us could agree that there’s a lot that needs to be disrupted in Washington and in the area of foreign policy and defense policy.

But what really bothers me, Ravi, is this continued assault on our confidence in our democratic principles and institutions and processes, especially the process of the election. And what he’s been doing in recent weeks weakens our country because it weakens our confidence in not only who we are as a people, but in our elections.

I think a period of maximum danger for the United States is between Election Day on Nov. 5 and Inauguration Day on Jan. 20. It’s likely we’re going to be at each other’s throats, and that’s going to embolden our adversaries even further.

RA: Putin came up in the debate last night. [Hungarian Prime Minister] Viktor Orban came up, and Trump cited him directly as someone who liked him. You’ve traveled with Trump all over the world. Talk to us a little bit about the reaction he has to strongmen, to leaders like Putin and [Chinese President] Xi Jinping?

HRM: He sees them regarded by their populations in the way he wants to be regarded by Americans: as a strongman himself. That’s part of it.

But another part of it is they know how to push his buttons. They understand that flattery gets you a long way. But they also play to his contrarian nature, his deep skepticism about sustained U.S. commitments abroad, especially military commitments. They push on his belief that our allies have been free-riding on the largesse of American taxpayers. 

Then, of course, they also play to President Trump’s penchant for criticizing his predecessors, especially George W. Bush and the invasion of Iraq in 2003. So rather than blaming al Qaeda or ISIS or Russia enabling the [Bashar al-]Assad regime’s serial episodes of mass homicide in the Syrian civil war, they try to push his buttons by saying that really it was the United States that was at fault.

RA: Trump said last night that if he was president, the war in the Middle East wouldn’t have ever started, in part because Iran would not have had any money. What was your reaction to that? 

HRM: I think it might be true. If you look at the policies and actions of the Biden administration, they came in obsessed with resurrecting the failed Obama policy toward Iran. And that failed policy was based mainly on this obsession with trying to integrate Iran into the regional and international order and the belief that Iran would then moderate its behavior. The mechanism for doing that would be to resurrect the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action], or the Iran nuclear deal. 

RA: But General, according to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Iran is a week or two away from potentially being able to put together a nuclear bomb. And there’s an argument that could be made that Iran has gotten there in part because there was no JCPOA. 

HRM: I know that’s the argument and that’s worth listening to and debating. But I look at the weakness of the verification and certification mechanisms in that deal, at the sunset clauses, at how before the ink was even dry, they were saying, “Here are all the sites you can’t look at.” Do you really trust [Supreme Leader] Ayatollah [Ali] Khamenei? What the deal effectively did was give them cover to continue to work toward a threshold capability while they received the tremendous benefit of sanctions relief.

The Biden administration relaxed enforcement of the sanctions and unfroze so many assets. 

But there’s a broader context we have to consider. Again, I think it’s the perception of weakness going back to the disastrous and deadly humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan in August of 2021. That’s when Vladimir Putin said, “OK, these guys are done. It’s time for me to take on Ukraine and accomplish my objective there.” 

RA: There are many points that you could look at as moments that led to a global perception of American weakness and therefore decisions by other world leaders to attack or harm American interests. I’m interviewing you on Sept. 11. And there are other moments of American weakness—whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Ukraine. When you came into office as national security advisor, what were the big, structural foreign-policy changes that you wanted to enact, whether or not you were able to?

HRM: The story in the book is largely our effort to do that with mixed results. I think there is a really important question of how did we get to where we are today? There is a fair criticism of the George W. Bush administration, that the Bush administration underappreciated and undervalued the risk and cost of action. Of course, the case in point there is the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

But also, I think you have to go back to the period of very high optimism in the 1990s and the broad acceptance in this foreign-policy community of three assumptions about the nature of the post-Cold War world. First, that an arc of history had guaranteed the primacy of our free and open societies over closed authoritarian systems. Related to that was the second belief: that great-power competition, great-power rivalry was a relic of the past. The third, based on a misinterpretation of the results of the Gulf War, was that our technological military prowess would guarantee our security well into the future. That was a setup for strategic shocks and disappointments in the 2000s.

On this anniversary of Sept. 11, we should remember there are two ways to fight: asymmetrically and stupidly. These mass murderers picked asymmetrically and used box cutters and airplanes to murder nearly 3,000 people on Sept. 11. That justified, in my view, the invasion of Afghanistan and the destruction of the Taliban regime, the defeat of the Taliban regime, and the effort to destroy al Qaeda. The mistake we made there was a hangover from the RMA, the revolution in military affairs, of the light footprint. 

So rather than focus on consolidation of gains to get sustainable political outcomes, [then-]Secretary [of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld says, “Just get out.” It is the same thing in Iraq. And it was the short-term approach to those long-term problems, in my view, that lengthened those wars and made them more costly. And that’s why we went from a period of overconfidence, overoptimism, and maybe hubris to a period of profound pessimism and even resignation under the Obama administration.

And I think as President Obama came in, he defined his policy mainly as a reaction to George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. They undervalued the risk and cost of disengagement and of inaction. And, of course, in 2014, after ISIS takes over territory the size of Great Britain and becomes the most destructive terrorist organization in history, conducting nearly 100 external attacks between 2014 and 2018.

RA: FP’s new print issue is a collection of letters from around the world, from eminent thinkers with one piece of foreign-policy advice for the next president, whoever he or she may be. If you had one piece of advice for the next president to focus on in foreign-policy terms, what would that be? 

HRM: It would be that we need a very strong multinational response to the axis of aggressors and that a response has to be an integrated response that involves really a significant buildup of our military capabilities to deter war, but maybe an economic response as a matter of urgency to address the fragility of our supply chains, and especially to counter China’s weaponization of its mercantilist statist economic model against us.