What?s not is that the president also disappointed?and surprised?his own top national security officials by failing to include the language reaffirming the so-called Article 5 provision in his speech. National security adviser H.R. McMaster, Defense Secretary James Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson all supported Trump doing so and had worked in the weeks leading up to the trip to make sure it was included in the speech, according to five sources familiar with the episode. They thought it was, and a White House aide even told The New York Times the day before the line was definitely included.
It was not until the next day, Thursday, May 25, when Trump started talking at an opening ceremony for NATO?s new Brussels headquarters, that the president?s national security team realized their boss had made a decision with major consequences?without consulting or even informing them in advance of the change.
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The president appears to have deleted it himself, according to one version making the rounds inside the government, reflecting his personal skepticism about NATO and insistence on lecturing NATO allies about spending more on defense rather than offering reassurances of any sort; another version relayed to others by several White House aides is that Trump?s nationalist chief strategist Steve Bannon and policy aide Stephen Miller played a role in the deletion. (According to NSC spokesman Michael Anton, who did not dispute this account, ?The president attended the summit to show his support for the NATO alliance, including Article 5. His continued effort to secure greater defense commitments from other nations is making our alliance stronger.?)
Either way, the episode suggests that what has been portrayed?correctly?as a major rift within the 70-year-old Atlantic alliance is also a significant moment of rupture inside the Trump administration, with the president withholding crucial information from his top national security officials?and then embarrassing them by forcing them to go out in public with awkward, unconvincing, after-the-fact claims that the speech really did amount to a commitment they knew it did not make.
The frantic, last-minute maneuvering over the speech, I?m told, included ?MM&T,? as some now refer to the trio of Mattis, McMaster and Tillerson, lobbying in the days leading up to it to get a copy of the president?s planned remarks and then pushing hard once they obtained the draft to get the Article 5 language in it, only to see it removed again. All of which further confirms a level of White House dysfunction that veterans of both parties I?ve talked with in recent months say is beyond anything they can recall.
And it suggests Trump?s impulsive instincts on foreign policy are not necessarily going to be contained by the team of experienced leaders he?s hired for Defense, the NSC and State. ?We?re all seeing the fallout from it?and all the fallout was anticipated,? the White House official told me.
They may be the ?adults in the room,? as the saying going around Washington these past few months had it. But Trump?and the NATO case shows this all too clearly?isn?t in the room with them.
