Review: H.R. McMaster’s “Battlegrounds”

“As citizens, though, thankfully we can do more than just hope. We can engage in the sort of good-faith, learned analysis which General McMaster has provided us in Battlegrounds.”

As I argued in the lead-up to the 2020 election, our politics has grown myopically focused on a single man, Donald J. Trump. The amount of attention heaped upon this President—attention that he himself craves and his media “enemies” readily provide—has left many of the great points of public concern in American life not only unaddressed from a policy perspective but largely undiscussed in the public square.

This astounding lack of substantive public conversation during the Trump years has been most apparent in the realm of foreign policy. The Trump administration scored major foreign policy successes, yet many of these went undiscussed or at least failed to gain much news traction. President Trump presided over the trouncing of ISIS (though his isolationist impulses have threatened the staying power of that victory), as well as the formation of formal diplomatic ties between Israel and major Sunni powers (like the United Arab Emirates) in the face of the mutual threat posed by Iran. And the negative economic impacts of the trade war aside, the Trump administration’s raucous relationship with China has certainly borne fruit or at least promises to do so in due course, since it has forged what seems to be a most necessary bipartisan consensus that simply enhancing China’s economic liberalization is no longer an adequate strategy for dealing with the techno-authoritarianism and grievance nationalism of the People’s Republic of China.

Even while he warrants scorn for his unnecessary and misguided straining of political and economic ties with many of our closest allies and for apologizing for the human rights abuses of some of our most depraved foes, President Trump deserves credit for these significant successes. However, his foreign policy wins often flew under the radar, as they were swallowed up by more click-bait prone news cycles, largely of President Trump’s own making, such as his strange bromances with thugs such as North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.