Trump and His Generals by Peter Bergen

Trump and His Generals by Peter Bergen

From one of America's preeminent national security journalists, an explosive, news-breaking account of Donald Trump's collision with the American national security establishment, and with the world

It is a simple fact that no president in American history brought less foreign policy experience to the White House than Donald J. Trump. The real estate developer from Queens promised to bring his brash, zero-sum swagger to bear to cut through America's most complex national security issues, and he did. If the cost of his America First agenda was bulldozing the edifice of foreign alliances that had been carefully tended by every president from Truman to Obama, then so be it.

It was clear from the first that Trump's inclinations were radically more blunt force than his predecessors'. When briefed by the Pentagon on Iran and the Strait of Hormuz, he exclaimed, The next time Iran sends its boats into the Strait: blow them out of the water Let's get Mad Dog on this. When told that the capital of South Korea, Seoul, was so close to the North Korean border that millions of people would likely die in the first hours of any all-out war, Trump had a bold response, They have to move. The officials in the Oval Office weren't sure if he was joking. He raised his voice. They have to move

Very quickly, it became clear to a number of people at the highest levels of government that their gravest mission was to protect America from Donald Trump. Trump and His Generals is Peter Bergen's riveting account of what happened when the unstoppable force of President Trump met the immovable object of America's national security establishment--the CIA, the State Department, and, above all, the Pentagon. If there is a real deep state in DC, it is not the FBI so much as the national security community, with its deep-rooted culture and hierarchy. The men Trump selected for his key national security positions, Jim Mattis, John Kelly, and H. R. McMaster, were products of that culture: Trump wanted generals, and he got them. Three years later, they would be gone, and the guardrails were off.

From Iraq and Afghanistan to Syria and Iran, from Russia and China to North Korea and Islamist terrorism, Trump and His Generals is a brilliant reckoning with an American ship of state navigating a roiling sea of threats without a well-functioning rudder. Lucid and gripping, it brings urgently needed clarity to issues that affect the fate of us all. But clarity, unfortunately, is not the same thing as reassurance.

Peter Bergen is vice president of New America in Washington, DC, and a CNN national security commentator, where he writes a weekly online blog. He is also a professor and codirector of Arizona State University's Institute on the Future of Conflict, and has taught at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. Bergen has written four prior books about terrorism, three of which were New York Times bestsellers and three of which were named the finest nonfiction books of the year by the Washington Post. His novels have been translated into twenty languages and adapted into four films, and his writing has featured in publications such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, Time, Foreign Affairs, and Vanity Fair. Bergen staged Osama bin Laden's first broadcast interview in 1997 for CNN, in which bin Laden declared war on the United States for the first time in front of a Western audience. He and his children, Pierre and Grace, live in Washington, DC, with his wife, documentary filmmaker Tresha Mabile.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780593171561
ISBN 10	059317156X
Title	Trump and His Generals
Author	Peter Bergen
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Diversified Publishing
Year published	2019-12-24
Number of pages	640
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.