During Donald Trump’s presidency, many senior national security roles came to resemble the post of Hogwarts’ Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher: The jobs were fraught with peril, most occupants came to regret their choice, and few lasted more than a year. The upside is that, though the Trump era has only just ended, a first batch of memoirs have come out from those who served in the Trump White House. H.R. McMaster’s Battlegrounds, however, is likely to prove frustrating to anyone hoping for substantive insights into the Trump administration. As McMaster himself notes, despite his role as national security adviser during the critical first two years of the Trump presidency, this book isn’t a tell-all. Instead, he presents a curiously sanitized policy process, one in which the National Security Council staff plan and execute an idealized strategy largely without the involvement of the principal. The book thus ends up being more of a window into McMaster’s worldview and his criticisms of America’s post-Cold War foreign policy.
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