McMaster: Trump's Foreign Policy Judgment 'Clouded'

Former President Donald Trump administered "long-overdue correctives to a number of unwise policies" when he was president and "could see the contours of complex situations and was in the habit of challenging assumptions and conventional wisdom," but his conflicted vision of the world and America's role in it "clouded his judgment," retired Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster said.

The Republican presidential nominee, who McMaster said many "despise" and see as a "narcissist," "articulated a fundamental shift in national-security strategy and new policies toward the adversarial regimes of China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba" and recognized that America "had to compete more effectively to promote American prosperity, preserve peace through strength, advance U.S. influence, and protect the American people," McMaster said in a piece for the Atlantic published Monday.

He "repaired frayed relationships among Israel and its key Muslim-majority neighbors, and at the same time pursued normalization of relations between them, something that many observers had dismissed as a futile endeavor."

But Trump, instead of anchoring his agenda, often "unmoored it," wrote McMaster, who lasted as Trump's national security adviser for just over a year.

McMaster said Trump vacillated on China, canceled U.S.-South Korean military exercises, and even absolved North Korea's Kim Jong Un of personal responsibility in Otto Warmbier's murder.

McMaster wrote that by reversing course on Pakistan, Trump was "inviting its virulently anti-American prime minister, Imran Khan, to sit next to him in the Oval Office" and "after making the righteous decision to kill Qassem Soleimani and his Iraqi terrorist puppet, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, in Baghdad in January 2020, Trump chose not to respond to subsequent Iranian and Iranian-proxy attacks on U.S. and allied forces, aircraft, and facilities, including shipping and oil infrastructure — raising doubts among U.S. allies in the Gulf about America's reliability."

The former president also abandoned his South Asia strategy and "would continue to delude himself about [Russian President Vladimir] Putin," wrote McMaster.

Despite inconsistencies, "many of the decisions that Trump made in the first year of his presidency endured," he added.

Trump's instincts in foreign policy "were often correct," McMaster wrote.

"He demonstrated the ability to evolve in his thinking and to make tough decisions that improved American security, prosperity, and influence in the world," McMaster said.

If reelected, would he be able to "learn from his experience and evolve in these traits of character? Only if he does can he avoid playing the role, once again, of the antagonist in his own story," McMaster added.