Fear: Trump in the White House

“Here’s the decision, Mr. President,” Graham said, repeating what he’d already told Trump. A containment strategy—let North Korea get the advanced missile with a nuclear weapon, betting you could shoot it down, or that they would be deterred and never shoot—or telling China that the United States would stop North Korea from getting the capability.

What do you think? Trump asked McCain.

“Very complicated,” he said. “They can kill a million people in Seoul with conventional artillery. That’s what makes it so hard.”

Graham offered a hawkish view: “If a million people are going to die, they’re going to die over there, not here.”

“That’s pretty cold,” Trump interjected. He said he believed that China loved him. He seemed to say it almost 10 times, and that it gave him great leverage.

During a spring meeting in the Oval Office, discussion turned to the controversy in South Korea about the deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defense system, which had become an issue in the South Korean presidential race. The system would help protect South Korea from a North Korea missile attack. More crucially, it could be used to help protect the United States.

“Have they already paid for it?” Trump asked.

“They didn’t pay for it,” McMaster said. “We paid for it.”

“That can’t be right,” Trump said. He wanted an explanation so McMaster set out to get some answers from the Pentagon.

“It’s actually a very good deal for us,” McMaster said when he returned in the afternoon. “They gave us the land in a 99-year lease for free. But we pay for the system, the installation and the operations.”

Trump went wild. “I want to see where it is going,” he said. Finally some maps came in that showed the location. Some of the land included a former golf course.

“This is a piece of shit land,” said the former golf course and real estate developer. “This is a terrible deal. Who negotiated this deal? What genius? Take it out. I don’t want the land.”

The major missile defense system might cost $10 billion over 10 years, and it wasn’t even physically in the United States, Trump said. “Fuck it, pull it back and put it in Portland!”

Trump was still outraged by the $18 billion trade deficit with South Korea and wanted to pull out of what he called the “horrible” KORUS trade deal.

Rising tensions around THAAD were bad enough. South Korea was a crucial ally and trade partner. Trump met with McMaster and Mattis. Both said that given the crisis with North Korea, it was not the time to bring up the trade deal.

“That’s exactly when you bring it up,” Trump said. “If they want protection, this is when we get to renegotiate the deal. We have leverage.”

Trump later told Reuters that the initial cost for THAAD was an estimated $1 billion. “I informed South Korea it would be appropriate if they paid,” he said. “It’s a billion-dollar system. It’s phenomenal, shoots missiles right out of the sky.”

On April 30, McMaster called the South Korean national security chief. He told Chris Wallace on Fox News, “What I told our South Korean counterpart is until any renegotiation, that the deals in place, we’ll adhere to our word.”

As a first step, the South Korean trade ministry later agreed to start to renegotiate the KORUS trade deal.

CHAPTER

14

In February, Derek Harvey, a former Army colonel—one of the premier fact-driven intelligence analysts in the U.S. government—was appointed director for the Middle East on the National Security Council staff. It was a plum position in a region that was on fire.

Harvey, a soft-spoken, driven legend, approached intelligence like a homicide detective—sifting through thousands of pages of interrogation reports, communications intercepts, battle reports, enemy documents, raw intelligence data and nontraditional sources such as tribal leaders.

The result was at times unorthodox thinking. In some circles he was referred to as “The Grenade” because of his ability and willingness to explode conventional wisdom.

Before the 9/11 terrorist attacks Harvey had written a paper concluding that Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network posed a strategic threat to the United States. He was almost alone in forecasting the persistence and power of the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan after the U.S. invaded. His argument was often that certain aggressive, ambitious ideas were “doable but not sellable,” meaning the political system would not provide or sustain them, such as maintaining tens of thousands of U.S. troops in Afghanistan for years.

Harvey went to see Jared Kushner, who had a small office adjacent to the Oval Office.

Kushner sat back, crossed his legs and listened to Harvey’s case.