Peter Bergen, Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos (Penguin Press, 2019), 400 pp., $30.00.

NEAR THE end of Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos, a blistering four-hundred-page attack on the Trump administration’s foreign policy written by Peter Bergen, the CNN analyst affiliated with New America, an avowedly centrist think tank, the author devotes two pages to an event missing from all timelines of the major international events of the last three years: a party thrown in September by Kathleen and David Bradley to celebrate the publication of Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead, the memoir by President Donald Trump’s former defense secretary, retired General James N. Mattis.

Who was there? Tout le monde! Andrea Mitchell, Bob Woodward, Sally Quinn, Susan Glasser—even John Kelly, like Mattis, a retired general hired and quickly fired by Trump. “This was no MAGA rally,” Bergen quips, but rather a gathering of “the great and the good.”

In a vast neo-Georgian house a stone’s throw from the British embassy, the courtly Bradley and his elegant wife, Katherine, presided over dinners and parties for the great and the good. Heads of state, foreign ministers, four-star generals, senators, leading TV news anchors and the occasional CIA director all enjoyed the Bradleys’ generous hospitality, including delicious butler-served meals under the warm light of candle-lit chandeliers.

I’ve attended a couple of those gatherings. I’ve also met Bergen and found him, as advertised, charming and erudite; as is well known, he produced the first TV interview, in 1997, with Osama bin-Laden. About a decade ago, Bergen and I commiserated over the opportunity lost when the moderator of a small, private dinner with Mideast dissidents, held at a members-only club in Washington, became inebriated and rambled, leaving our Arab guests little opportunity to discuss the human rights issues they had hoped to spotlight. With five previous books to his credit, including three New York Times bestsellers and four Washington Post non-fiction books of the year, Bergen unquestionably ranks among the best-credentialed, and most highly regarded, members of the foreign policy establishment. Indeed, many of the same bold-faced names from the Mattis party turned out for Bergen’s own book launch in January.

So it comes as a genuine surprise, and a disappointment, that in Trump and His Generals the author repeatedly employs language beneath a figure of his stature. Some formulations are simply infelicitous, as when Bergen refers to the day Trump “was installed as” president; or when he writes that General Mike Flynn, prior to his embroilment in the Russia probe, “was a genuine war hero, with the blood of the Afghan and Iraq Wars on his hands.” It is not to the heroes of armed conflict that society ascribes bloody hands.

In other cases, while lamenting the “cavalier” attitude of the president towards national security and the crudity of his language in meetings with senior staff, Bergen adopts a tone far too casual for a work of serious contemporary scholarship worthy of the crème de la crème of the foreign policy establishment. “Jared Kushner,” we hear, “shoved a shiv in [Chris] Christie’s back … Welcome to Jersey!” John Bolton is introduced as “a ferocious bureaucratic infighter who had worked in the Washington swamp since the era when Olivia Newton-John’s ‘Physical’ was America’s number one song.” State Department officials “freaked out” over an Afghan official’s comments, while a statement from Kushner’s attorney is deemed “baloney, served with generous helpings of bunkum and balderdash.” Condemning Trump for accepting too readily Vladimir Putin’s denials of complicity in election-meddling, Bergen abandons reporting for retorting: “Well, that’s settled then!”

Yet the most surprising defacement of the Bergen standard is the most gratuitous: the author’s frequent resort to scatology and outright profanity, not just in quotation but in passages of omniscient authorial voice. It does not enhance Bergen’s case when he writes that Trump “bitched and moaned” after his travel ban was revised, that he was “pissed off” about his options in Afghanistan, or that Mattis held as one of the imperatives of working for this commander-in-chief “not pissing him off” (a working condition hardly unique to Trump aides).

And on it goes: an entire chapter carries the title “PISSING OFF ALLIES, EMBRACING PUTIN.” President Lyndon B. Johnson issued orders “while taking a crap” in White House restrooms; the chief function that retired Army Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg served for the president was “shooting the shit with him”; and large numbers of Americans oppose the mission in Afghanistan because they believe “it’s always going to be a shithole.”

It gets worse. Attending the United Nations General Assembly, an annual ritual of presidential diplomacy, represented a potential minefield for Trump because he only had to “make one fuckup” for the media to declare the trip a failure. The worst is reserved for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, formerly CIA director and the longest-serving member of Trump’s national security team. Mostly, Bergen curiously ignores Pompeo, affording him none of the portraiture or anecdotal attention lavished on heavyweight colleagues, such as Generals Mattis and Kelly, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, or even Steve Bannon. The marginalization of Pompeo, and the extraordinary vitriol directed at him when his name does come up, paradoxically marks him as a figure of singular importance to the author. Indeed, the first extended reference comes three-quarters into the text: “Agency officials were pleasantly surprised that CIA director Mike Pompeo – who personally could be ‘a dick’ when he dealt with them – had never tried to downplay or politicize the intelligence about Russia.”

It is difficult to imagine the suave and cultivated Peter Bergen using such language in his segments on CNN or while holding forth in the Bradleys’ drawing room. Why the author considers the attendees of those parties more deserving of his manners and erudition than the readers of this book—hard-working citizens willing to fork over thirty dollars for the hardcover edition—is a mystery. But it might illuminate the polling data the author cites to explain Donald Trump’s rise, summarized by Bergen as “the widespread sentiment among ordinary Americans that the elites in both political parties had failed to deliver for them.”

THE INCLUSION of the attack on Pompeo as a manager at the CIA—the quotation of a single anonymous source averring that some unspecified number of anonymous officials at Langley thought the director occasionally acted like “a dick”—warrants our attention not solely for its vulgarity but for what it says about the author’s aims and methodology. Putting aside the near-total absence of other information provided about Pompeo, such as his graduation from West Point or his management of the State Department, what are we to conclude from this nugget? That Pompeo was so personally unpleasant as to be unfit to run the CIA? The author does not aim that high, as he nowhere asserts that animosity towards Pompeo was the consensus view at Langley; nor is any effort made, for the sake of serious scholarship or some semblance of balance, to report the secretary’s perspective, or that of his supporters at CIA. It is, rather, a drive-by attack, employing the harshest of street profanities, a moment that tells us far more about Peter Bergen than about Mike Pompeo.

Presumably, the offending quote came from the one hundred interviews the author conducted with current and former Trump aides. As with the works of Bob Woodward, another mandarin of the Washington establishment who produces gossipy palace-intrigue chronicles of the presidency in real-time, it is seldom difficult to discern who served as a source. In a prefatory note, Bergen discloses that all quotations are based on “at least one person’s account of a meeting or event,” with some based on multiple accounts of the same session. Since Trump is not cited as an interviewee, it follows that for every quote attributed to him in conversation with a single other person, the source was the participant not named Trump.

As with the Woodward canon, the likely cooperation of certain characters in the story is also telegraphed by the kid-gloves treatment they receive in it. Praised for his thoughtfulness and reading habits, Mattis fits this category, as do the others Bergen lists as members of the “axis of adults.” These are the accomplished ex-aides who, in their accounting, struggled to keep the reckless Trump from harming himself and the country and who, having failed at the task, now whisper harsh comments about him to like-minded journalists: John Kelly, Rex Tillerson, and Gary Cohn.

The archetypal background source in these pages, however, is likely McMaster, the learned lieutenant general who served as Trump’s national security adviser from February 2017 to April 2018, and who draws Bergen’s most glowing commendations. A span of one hundred pages sees McMaster described as “arguably the most capable military officer of his generation,” “a man of boundless energy who didn’t so much enter a room as bound into it,” a “charming, funny, and well liked” figure who “exuded a contagious confidence” and “the coiled energy of a boxer,” a technocrat who “quickly moved to make Trump’s National Security Council a more professional institution,” “beloved” by the NSC staff when the president fired him.

The pattern of single-source quotation and favorable portrayal also suggests the cooperation of Joseph Votel, the former four-star Army general who, until March 2019, led United States Central Command: the command that oversees all U.S. military operations in the Middle East and Afghanistan. “A lanky six-foot two, [Votel’s] black glasses and earnest demeanor gave him the look of a very fit Clark Kent,” Bergen writes, noting elsewhere, with appreciative biographic attention, that the commander in the fight against ISIS was a Minnesota native “and a big Vikings fan.”

Those disfavored, most notably supporters of Trump, are dismissed summarily. Retired General Jack Keane, a widely respected architect of the surge strategy in Iraq under President George W. Bush and an informal adviser to the president today; Colonel Douglas Macgregor, a decorated combat veteran with a Ph.D. in international relations; and Heather Nauert and Morgan Ortagus, the last two spokeswomen for the State Department, are all described, because of some prior association with Fox News, as “Fox News talking heads.” Van Jones, on the other hand, is a “CNN commentator,” and Fareed Zakaria a “CNN host.”

REFERENCING EVENTS that occurred as late as October 2019, Trump and His Generals carries the immediacy of cable news. But the product often feels rushed, owing both to the lazy, crude language permitted to remain in the final draft, as described above, and to the numerous grammatical errors and internal inconsistencies which, under a more forgiving publication timetable, might have been caught and fixed.

“On the campaign trail,” one sentence begins, “Trump had campaigned on the promise…” The Eisenhower Executive Office Building is described as “wedding-cakelike.” Aides “tried to reduce the amount of times that Kellogg could get in to see Trump.” There are others, omitted here in favor of this epic run-on sentence:

Mattis had worked with General David Petraeus on the 2006 counterinsurgency manual that helped to revolutionize the US approach to the Iraq War by emphasizing that fighting insurgents required assuming greater risks for American troops, who had to get out of their massive bases and live among the Iraqi people if they were to have a chance of really understanding and ultimately defeating the Iraqi insurgency.

Questionable claims, of varying consequence, dot the narrative. On the lower end of the spectrum is the assertion that The Apprentice “turned Trump from a blowhard local businessman well known to the readers of the gossipy New York Post into a national celebrity.” In fact, the future president’s reality show debuted on NBC in 2004, seventeen years after Trump’s first appearance on the cover of People, the Bible of celebrity coverage, and a dozen years after he played himself on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, one of tv’s highest-rated programs. “Imagine Houston run by an efficient version of the Taliban,” Bergen riffs at another point, straining readers’ imaginations, “and you get an approximation of Riyadh.” The most egregious is Bergen’s claim that Iran proved willing to negotiate away its nuclear program, despite the author’s admission later in his text that the regime was “allowed under the agreement” to continue enriching uranium.

Nor does the indictment of the president always cohere. “There tended to be very little difference between what Trump said in public and what Trump said in private when it came to his key obsessions,” Bergen writes—apparently forgetting his earlier description of a private meeting between the president-elect and Fran Townsend, the former homeland security adviser in the Bush-Cheney administration who met with Trump to discuss a possible return to government service. “Trump,” Bergen writes, “was charming and asked a number of sharp questions about national security, presenting quite a different persona than the boorish tycoon known to the public.”

THESE DEFICIENCIES aside, what is the central thesis of Trump and His Generals? It is never plainly stated, but a general contempt for the president emerges. Bergen laments that Trump, suffering from “a particular kind of determined Know Nothingism … fiddled while the world burned.” “Trump,” the author declares, “was gradually eroding the U.S.-led global order that had generally worked in America’s favor.”

This sweeping pronouncement ignores the central economic datum on which Bergen’s cohort in the liberal intelligentsia predicate their entire set of prescriptions for fixing American capitalism: namely, that the real average wage for American workers, as the Pew Research Center reported in 2018, “has about the same purchasing power it did forty years ago. And what wage gains there have been have mostly flowed to the highest-paid tier of workers.” The fact is that somewhere along the line, decades ago, the postwar international architecture stopped working in America’s favor—or at least in Americans’ favor. Trump’s grasp of this fact enabled him to tap into what Bergen, again, calls “the widespread sentiment among ordinary Americans that the elites … had failed to deliver for them.”

Yet even the president’s supporters would be hard-pressed to quarrel with Bergen’s assertion that Trump “played on America’s racial divisions, promoted baseless conspiracy theories, lied or made false claims thousands of times when he was president, and made most matters of state about himself.” Some who sport MAGA hats like it that way; many more wish the president would rein in his proclivity for indiscipline, adopt a less serrated tone, and focus on the policy achievements they cherish him for delivering. “Americans aren’t hiring angels as their CEO,” Bergen notes correctly, citing the personal and professional failings of several recent presidents, “but they are hiring someone who will successfully perform the people’s business.”

One of the dirty little secrets of Bergen’s work, however—unknown to those colleagues of Bergen’s at CNN and New America who congratulated him on this book without taking time to read it—is how frequently the author credits Trump’s performance of the people’s business, and how often, conversely, the author finds reason to criticize the conduct of Trump’s immediate predecessor.

“The Obama White House had a well-deserved reputation for micromanaging military operations,” Bergen writes, and instituted rules of engagement that “severely constrained the Pentagon’s ability to support the Syrian forces fighting ISIS.” “The rise of ISIS,” he adds, was made possible by “Obama’s unwillingness to intervene in a decisive manner in the Syrian war and also his haste to disengage from Iraq at the end of 2011.” “Obama and his national security team had underestimated the strength of ISIS,” Bergen observes, and when the terror group “started seizing large chunks of territory … the Obama administration dithered … for many weeks.” Tasked with deciding whether to arm the Kurds in Syria, Bergen reports, “the Obama team debated these options for so long that it eventually ran out of time to implement them.”

Most scorching is Bergen’s assessment of how President Barack Obama handled the Iran account—the very subject on which the author, zestfully rebutting much-loathed neocons like John Bolton, exalts the nuclear deal as a paradigm of diplomacy and national security policymaking. Bergen briefly betrays some understanding that, far from drawing Tehran into the league of civilized nations, the nuclear deal emboldened the regime’s regional aggression. “Obama seemed to have given Iran a free hand in the Middle East,” Bergen acknowledges halfway through his text.

In fact, the tens of billions of dollars in cash that the United States gave Iran and the business contracts that were signed by the Iranians generated revenue not for the Iranian people but for the regime and key components such as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which accelerated its operations across the region in countries such as Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.

Equally surprising is Bergen’s admiration for Trump, particularly his talent for disruption. The author cites approvingly the commander-in-chief’s determination to debrief ground-level troops before conferences with uniformed commanders, a means by which Trump seeks to hold the brass accountable: “This was the way Trump ran his hotels and golf clubs; he didn’t just talk to the general manager, he also spoke with the doorman and the concierge and the guy doing the greens.”

The pattern was set early on. “In his first months in office, when Trump encountered a national security problem he tended to ask the same five questions,” Bergen writes.

“Why do we care?” “What does it matter to the American people?” “Why can’t others do it?” “Who’s paying for it?” “Why can’t others pay?” […] These were all very good questions. They were also unsettling questions for many in the foreign policy and national security establishment in Washington because they hadn’t been asked in a long time.

Bergen assails the president for kowtowing to Putin but concedes that the Trump administration “generally took a tough line on Russia.” When the administration withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal and re-imposed sanctions on Tehran, aimed at depriving the regime of the funds it uses to bankroll terror groups across the Middle East, the early results, Bergen admits, were impressive. “The new round of U.S. sanctions more than halved Iran’s oil exports,” he writes. “As a result, Iran had to reduce its support for key regional proxies such as Lebanese Hezbollah … A key goal of Trump’s ‘maximum pressure’ campaign against Iran … had started to work.”

“Trump got one really big foreign policy issue at least in part right, which was China,” Bergen continues, praising the president for taking a long-overdue stand against Beijing’s predatory trade and commercial practices. As well, Bergen admires how Trump “skillfully switched the security conversation with the Chinese” from their annexation of the South China Sea to the shared danger of Kim Jong-un’s nuclear weapons, a sleight of diplomatic hand that “helped to get the Chinese to play a role in the enforcement of United Nations sanctions against North Korea.” And the administration’s success in securing the release of hostages from Pyongyang and elsewhere “was certainly something the president could celebrate.”

In Syria, Bergen reports, the commander-in-chief “did push down to his military commanders the authorities for taking action against ISIS” and “did away with the self-imposed limits that the Obama team had put on military action” in the theater. “So Trump could certainly take credit for hastening the demise of ISIS’ geographical ‘caliphate,’” Bergen writes. The national security team also “deftly defused an ISIS plot” to insert bombs into laptop computers aboard U.S.-bound planes, and the president, “visibly moved” by the images of Syrian children suffering from chemical weapons attacks, delivered “one of his best speeches” when he announced airstrikes he had ordered in response.

At one point, Bergen edges dangerously close to endorsing the president’s view of himself as a besieged figure, unjustly preyed upon by intellectually dishonest elements in academia, the news media, and think tanks.

His critics had predicted that if he moved the embassy to Jerusalem, it would inflame the whole Middle East. They said that pulling out of the Iran deal would deeply anger European allies and set Iran down the path to nuclear enrichment again. They said that slapping tariffs on steel and aluminum would damage the American economy, and pulling out of the Paris climate agreement would accelerate global warming … [T]hese bad things didn’t immediately come to pass…

To the contrary, Bergen acknowledges,

Trump did avoid making major unforced foreign policy errors … [and] did have some foreign policy wins … Trump oversaw an effective campaign against ISIS; he made a long-term military commitment to Afghanistan … he drew a clear “red line”… in Syria … and … his first overseas trip as president, to Saudi Arabia … was generally seen as a success because of his effective outreach to Arab states … Two and a half years into his term, Trump had largely achieved his goals: the Pentagon was considerably better resourced while ISIS was defeated. At the same time, Trump was drawing down from the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.

IN SHORT, Bergen’s praise for the forty-fifth president is so pervasive, so recurrent, that it may leave some readers wondering if the author isn’t quite happy to pay “the cost of chaos” exacted by Trump’s mercurial, unrestrained, and largely successful approach to the conduct of foreign policy and national security. Trump and His Generals went to press as the impeachment inquiry, focused on Ukraine, was just gaining traction; but the certain resolution of the matter by the Republican-controlled Senate in Trump’s favor renders the episode something of an anomaly for Bergen, extraneous to his attacks on Trump and his treatment of “his” generals. Instead the author, perhaps unwittingly, pays the incumbent the supreme compliment when he notes: “The most reliable guide to what Trump did when he was in office was what he had said when he was campaigning."

James Rosen is an investigative reporter for the Sinclair Broadcast Group and the author, among other books, of Cheney One on One.

Image: Reuters