H. R. McMaster

...he [an aide] asked me why I was spending more time packing books than clothes.

I explained to him that I intended to draw on history to help frame contemporary challenges to national security. An important first step in developing policy and strategy, I believed, was to understand how the past produced the present. I also believed that the history of how previous presidents, their cabinets, and the National Security Council staff made decisions, developed policies, and crafted strategies held lessons for how to deliver the best advice and sound options to the president. For me, history was an avocation.

A THEME in this book, strategic narcissism, and the corresponding tendency to artificially separate interconnected problem sets, encourages short-term, simplistic solutions to complex problems. Bias against the long-term approach, like other maladies affecting U.S. policy, stems from a lack of empathy. Jamil Zaki, professor of psychology at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab, observes in his book, The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World, that both time and distance diminish empathy because humans’ “caring instincts are short sighted.” Our ability to feel empathy about future developments is limited because “we tend not to feel for our future selves. It goes against our instincts, therefore, to tackle problems that we have not yet been forced to confront. If the consequences of action or inaction are far off and afflict strangers yet to be born, we are less likely to sacrifice or invest today.” That tendency is evident across the globe on the interrelated problems of climate change, pollution, energy security, and food and water security.

Like discussions with President Trump concerning the Iran Nuclear Deal, those concerning the Paris climate accord were animated. I was far from an expert on the subject, but it was clear to me that the issue of climate change tended to move people toward polar extremes. Climate activists endorsed impractical measures, while climate deniers and skeptics disregarded compelling evidence that global warming is happening, that it is caused by humans, and that, if unchecked, it will have disastrous consequences. Perhaps naïvely, I thought that if we simply focused on what Americans agreed on, we could develop options for a climate strategy, get beyond disagreements between those on the fringes of the issue, and make real progress.

I recommended to the president that the United States stay in the Paris Agreement, an environmental accord adopted by nearly every nation in 2015 to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and limit the global temperature increase in the twenty-first century to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. I believed that climate change was manmade and that we had to develop a sound, multinational solution. The agreement was nonbinding, so I did not see the downside of staying in it. Besides, I felt that withdrawing would result in a loss of American influence not only on the range of climate-related issues, but also on other challenges that required multinational efforts.

Those who argued for leaving, however, believed that if the United States failed to meet its targets for carbon reduction in the agreement, activists would initiate litigation against the government and industries. They also believed that meeting the targets would limit economic growth and impose costs on the American people even as the world’s greatest polluters not only agreed to less ambitious goals, but also received payments from the United States and others as an incentive to convert to renewable energy sources. The agreement, like the Iran nuclear deal, was not ratified by Congress; many saw it as an infringement on sovereignty. In Trump’s Rose Garden speech in June 2017 announcing his decision to initiate the withdrawal process, he said the deal “disadvantages the United States to the exclusive benefit of other countries, leaving American workers, who I love, and taxpayers to absorb the cost in terms of lost jobs, lower wages, shuttered factories, and vastly diminished economic production.”23 In short, the president believed that the accord would be an economic burden to the United States and, additionally, that it would result in a large-scale loss of jobs, putting the U.S. at an international disadvantage, all the while doing nothing to stop climate change in the long term.