Patrick Shanahan

President Trump was elected as a dove who swore that he would extract America from expensive conflicts in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. Yet more than two years later, America remains mired in those wars and the US has come closer to conflicts that could have caused tens of millions of casualties. This covert hawkishness, which has largely remained hidden from public scrutiny, has not been driven by any ideological quest to re-establish American global predominance. Instead it is war driven by whim. This has led to an almost total collapse in confidence between the US intelligence community and the Pentagon, on the one hand, and the president on the other.