Former Defence Secretary James Mattis declined to carry out orders from President Trump or otherwise limited his options in order to manage the escalation of tensions with North Korea, Iran and Syria, a report from The New Yorker has suggested.
“The president thinks out loud. Do you treat it like an order? Or do you treat it as part of a longer conversation? We treated it as part of a longer conversation”, a former senior national security official told The New Yorker, adding that they had “prevented a lot of bad things from happening”.
According to the report, in 2017 following a series of North Korean ballistic missile tests, Trump ordered the Pentagon to begin removing the spouses and children of military personnel from South Korea, where the US military has a base. An administration official told the magazine that “Mattis just ignored” the order.
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Another example the official told The New Yorker was in the fall of 2017, as White House officials were planning a private meeting at Camp David to develop military options for a possible conflict with North Korea. Mattis allegedly ignored a request from then-national security adviser H.R. McMaster to send officers and planners and stopped the meeting.
The defence chief also sought to ward off possible conflicts in the Middle East. As Iraq was preparing for parliamentary…