The American president’s national security advisor is second only to the secretary of state in the United States’ foreign policy establishment. The position provides the president with independent advice on foreign policy decisions. It has been held by such luminaries as Henry Kissinger, who was in the job for nearly six years, and Bent Scowcroft, who held the job twice, for more than five years. The incumbent, Jake Sullivan, is near the end of his fourth year.

In stark contrast, under Donald Trump the position fell victim to the president’s impetuous hiring and firing of senior staff. Trump’s first national security advisor, Mike Flynn, lasted 24 days. He was followed by H R McMaster, who served from February 2017 until April 2018, John Bolton, who served 17 months, and Robert O’Brien who served the remaining 16 months of the president’s term.

In At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House, McMaster provides a no-holds-barred account of his own 13 months at the heart of global decision-making, and of the functioning, and dysfunctionality, of Trump’s White House. His account complements John Bolton’s memoir, which was published in 2020.

McMaster served in the US Army for 34 years, including long tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, established himself as an accomplished historian and retired as lieutenant general following his assignment at the White House. He is now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and Arizona State University.

Once on board the White House staff, McMaster quickly realised that his new environment was rife with rivalries and in-fighting. Policy differences and competing egos are part of any administration, but under Trump these reached new heights, mainly because the president enjoyed playing off cabinet members and advisors against each other. In this inflamed and uncertain environment, positions were constantly being revised and briefs rewritten. Consistency was often an afterthought. The inefficiency irked McMaster, who was accustomed to military discipline. ‘Everything was harder than it needed to be’.

In a chapter titled ‘Knives out’, McMaster details his turf battles with secretary of state Rex Tillerson and defense secretary James Mattis, who were intent on elbowing the security advisor aside. He also describes his struggles with Reince Priebus, the chief of staff, and the far-right chief strategist Steve Bannon and his acolytes, whom he likens to the three witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Following one particularly strong pro-Moscow outburst from Bannon at an Oval Office meeting, McMaster bluntly asked him whether he was an apologist for the Kremlin.

Trump fired Priebus and Bannon within seven months of taking up office. Tillerson lasted half a year longer but was sacked shortly after a leaked report that he had made disparaging remarks about Trump. He was also the first cabinet member ever to be sacked on Twitter. McMaster lasted only a week longer, with Trump’s favourable attitude to Russian president Vladimir Putin the main bone of contention.

Just a few days after Russian agents poisoned the retired Russian military operative Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Britain, Trump, against the counsel of his advisers, insisted on congratulating Putin on his recent election victory. At home, McMaster confided to his wife: ‘After over a year in the job, I cannot understand Putin’s hold on Trump’.

McMaster is at his best describing how he and other advisers tried to rein in the impulsive Trump at meetings with foreign leaders. While visiting NATO headquarters in Brussels, they had to dissuade the president from threatening to pull out of the alliance if members didn’t ‘pay their dues’. McMaster had to remind Trump repeatedly that there were no dues but that members had committed to spend the equivalent of at least 2 percent of GDP on their own defence capabilities. At dinner, Trump surprised other NATO members by failing to reaffirm US commitment to Article 5, the mutual defence clause of the treaty, scolded them for failing to ‘pay what they owe’ and then abruptly walked out.

McMaster and his colleagues also tried to dissuade Trump from pulling the US out of the Paris climate accords, suggesting in vain that a threat to withdraw would be equally effective. Trump enjoyed making inflammatory statements and announced to the media that he ‘was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris’. And at the UN General Assembly, he insisted on matching North Korea’s vitriol by describing its leader, Kim Jong-un, as a ‘rocket man on a suicide mission’.

McMaster gives Trump credit for numerous foreign policy achievements, including taking a tougher stance on China and repairing frayed relations in the Middle East. Trump’s unpredictability was useful when dealing with adversaries but played havoc with discussions with allies. And Trump’s anxieties and insecurities left him vulnerable ‘to foreign counterparts who knew how to conjure his emotions’. In the balance, ‘rather than anchoring US policy, Trump often unmoored it’.

With the presidential elections around the corner, McMaster’s lucid account provides a timely reminder of the need for coherence and stability in American foreign policy. Depending on the outcome of the elections, it may also provide decision-makers with a guidebook for dealing with a second Trump presidency.