On his first morning as President Trump’s national security adviser, in 2017, H. R. McMaster invited me to drop by his office. He had heard that The New York Times was getting ready to report on a classified U.S. operation that attempted to sabotage North Korea’s missile programs with cyberstrikes. “Is this the revelation of the modern-day Enigma codes?” he asked, the military historian searching for an analogy from the World War II operation to crack German ciphers.
It was a bracing start for what turned out to be a wild 13-month effort to devise a modern-day security strategy for a president with no experience, more interest in cutting deals than designing a long-term strategy — and an unwillingness to sit for intelligence briefings, much less discussion of containing an angry, decaying Russia or of a 50-year plan to compete with a rising China. So “Battlegrounds” is, at its heart, the McMaster strategic plan that might have come to fruition had he worked for a president who was interested in strategic plans.
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