Leaky, Leaky

Probably not even him.

When President Donald Trump addressed NATO leaders during his debut overseas trip little more than a week ago, he surprised and disappointed European allies who hoped—and expected—he would use his speech to explicitly reaffirm America’s commitment to mutual defense of the alliance’s members, a one-for-all, all-for-one provision that looks increasingly urgent as Eastern European members worry about the threat from a resurgent Russia on their borders.

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[T]he president also disappointed—and surprised—his own top national security officials by failing to include the language reaffirming the so-called Article 5 provision in his speech. National security adviser H.R. McMaster, Defense Secretary James Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson all supported Trump doing so and had worked in the weeks leading up to the trip to make sure it was included in the speech, according to five sources familiar with the episode.

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It was not until [...] Trump started talking at an opening ceremony for NATO’s new Brussels headquarters, that the president’s national security team realized their boss had made a decision with major consequences—without consulting or even informing them in advance of the change.

  Politico

Let me guess: He'd already been dissed and bested in a handshake by Emmanuel Macron and was pissed off.

Added a senior White House official, “There was a fully coordinated other speech everybody else had worked on”—and it wasn’t the one Trump gave. “They didn’t know it had been removed,” said a third source of the Trump national security officials on hand for the ceremony. “It was only upon delivery.”

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{T]he episode suggests that what has been portrayed—correctly—as a major rift within the 70-year-old Atlantic alliance is also a significant moment of rupture inside the Trump administration, with the president withholding crucial information from his top national security officials—and then embarrassing them by forcing them to go out in public with awkward, unconvincing, after-the-fact claims that the speech really did amount to a commitment they knew it did not make.

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They may be the “adults in the room,” as the saying going around Washington these past few months had it. But Trump—and the NATO case shows this all too clearly—isn’t in the room with them.

Nobody knows what he's going to do or say. Probably not even him.

Given that all of Trump’s top officials like McMaster and Mattis had spent months promising that the president didn’t really mean it when he called NATO “obsolete” and insisting the Article 5 commitment from the U.S. was unshakable, [Strobe] Talbott noted, “all we needed was for the commander in chief to say it, and he didn’t say it”—an omission that “from that day forward … [means] the Atlantic community was less safe, and less together.”

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It’s destroyed the credibility of Trump’s advisers when they offer reassurances for allies to discount the president’s inflammatory rhetoric—and cast into doubt the kind of certainties necessary for an uncertain world to function.

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McMaster, a widely respected three-star general before he took the job, had been presumed by the Trump-wary foreign policy establishment to be a smart pick because of his track record of being unafraid to speak truth to power (and a book on Vietnam in which he specifically argued that LBJ’s generals had failed by not doing so). But he’s now being pilloried by some early supporters for his very public efforts to spin Trump’s trip as a success—and claim the president supported the Article 5 clause he never explicitly mentioned.

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“I had a very high-placed Asian official from a major ally in Asia not long ago, where you’re sitting, who shook his head with sorrow, and said, ‘Washington, D.C. is now the epicenter of instability in the world,’” Talbott recounted. “What it means is something that our friends and allies around the world have taken for granted for 70 years is no longer something that they can take for granted.”

Angela Merkel has said as much.

The whole world is less safe with tRump in office.

Great picture of NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg's reaction to Trump, by the way.