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Foreign policy may not be most voters’ top issue, but it is top of mind on the presidential campaign trail this week.
A new behind-the-scenes account of Donald Trump’s White House raised serious questions about his prior approach to the job of commander in chief, the latest critique in a long line of warnings from former generals who served under Trump.
Trump, meanwhile, has honed his own criticism of the Biden administration — and of Vice President Kamala Harris in particular — for the chaotic end to the decadeslong US war in Afghanistan, even though that plan was initially hatched during Trump’s administration.
The new account of Trump’s time as commander in chief comes from Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, who served as Trump’s national security adviser. McMaster, unlike other generals who served under Trump, had previously held back from sharing direct criticism of his former boss after leaving the White House.
CNN’s Peter Bergen writes about McMaster’s new memoir, “At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House.”
Add this account to the well-documented warnings of other generals who described their time inside the Trump White House, including retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, who was Trump’s chief of staff; retired Marine Gen. James Mattis, who served as Trump’s defense secretary; and Gen. Mark Milley, Trump’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
And adding onto the pile Monday, more than 200 Republicans who previously worked for former Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, former Sen. John McCain or Sen. Mitt Romney signed a letter urging their fellow party members to back Harris for president.
Among those who signed the letter are former George H.W. Bush chief of staff Jean Becker; former McCain chiefs of staff Mark Salter and Christopher Koch; and Olivia Troye, the former homeland security adviser to Vice President Mike Pence.
But Trump is pointing to a failure in the Biden administration as he makes his case for another White House term.
Afghanistan haunts Biden and Harris
Politics were not overtly mentioned at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia on Monday when Trump commemorated the three-year anniversary of the deaths of 13 American service members in Afghanistan, but those deaths are frequently cited on the campaign trail.
Family members of some of the fallen service members appeared onstage at the Republican National Convention in July and condemned Biden.
Speaking on CNN on Monday from Fort Liberty, North Carolina, Paula Knauss Selph, the mother of Army Staff Sgt. Ryan Christian Knauss, who was killed in the attack, had strong words criticizing Biden.
“This administration has tried to sweep it under the rug, and that’s absolutely not going to work for this nation,” she said, adding that Harris holds “the same accountability as President Biden.”
The service members, along with more than 100 Afghans, died in 2021 in a suicide bombing outside the Abbey Gate of Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul at the tail end of two decades of direct American military involvement in Afghanistan.
The Taliban now controls Afghanistan.
Finally withdrawing US service members was Biden’s call, and it occurred on his watch. Republicans, including Trump, have turned the chaotic and deadly withdrawal into a domestic political argument against Biden and, by extension, Harris, who has stepped into Biden’s place to run against Trump in November.
At a stop in Virginia, after his appearance at the cemetery, Trump said the people who died “were killed, in the most embarrassing moment in the history of our country, Afghanistan, because we had an incompetent president with incompetent people leading it, and every one of those people should have been fired.”
Speaking later at a National Guard conference in Detroit, Trump repeated his pledge to purge the Pentagon of every senior military official involved with the withdrawal.
Meanwhile, in a statement commemorating the 13 American deaths, Harris said, “I mourn and honor them.” She also praised Biden for making “the courageous and right decision to end America’s longest war.”
The truth is a little more complicated.
Trump actually promised to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan during his presidency. His administration set the final withdrawal in motion by negotiating and signing a deal with the Taliban in 2020 that stipulated the drawdown of US service members in Afghanistan.
After Trump lost the presidential election, he fired his defense secretary at the time, Mark Esper, purged many top officials at the Pentagon and tried to further accelerate US drawdowns, both in Afghanistan and in Europe.
Biden reversed the drawdown of service members in Europe but delayed by only a few months Trump’s plans to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan despite worsening conditions on the ground and rapid gains by the Taliban.
While Trump criticizes Harris and Biden for pulling out of Afghanistan, he has also promised to be the president who will end all wars.
At the National Guard conference, Trump said Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, want “endless wars.”
He also received the endorsement of Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democrat congresswoman from Hawaii who deployed to Iraq as a member of the Army National Guard and who ran for president as a Democrat in 2020. Gabbard, who is now an independent, picked Trump, she said, because he did not start new wars during his term in office – language that echoes a 2023 endorsement of the former president in The Wall Street Journal by Sen. JD Vance, who argued that Trump’s foreign policy was his top achievement.
Vance is now Trump’s running mate, and the selection signaled a shift by Republicans in general away from helping to promote democracy in other countries.
There is no doubt the Afghanistan withdrawal was a failure. An official After Action Review report from the State Department identified issues in both the Biden and Trump administrations that contributed.
Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee have launched their own review, which will undoubtedly cast a harsher eye on the Biden administration – although an investigator recently resigned from that effort, alleging Republicans on the committee were not willing to place any blame with the US military, including Milley.
CNN’s Aaron Pellish contributed to this report.
This story has been updated with additional reporting.
