What historians will cite many years from now in Mattis’ powerful letter is its carefully crafted language that is as much a warning about the future as it is a resignation.
“I believe we must be resolute and unambiguous in our approach to those countries whose strategic interests are increasingly in tension with ours,” he writes. “It is clear that China and Russia, for example, want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model – gaining veto authority over other nations’ economic, diplomatic and security decisions – to promote their own interests at the expense of their neighbors, America and our allies.”
He then delivers the most salient message for those of us who consider alliances to be our most valuable of all assets.
Writes Mattis: “We must do everything possible to advance an international order that is most conducive to our security, prosperity, and values, and we are strengthened in this effort by the solidarity of our alliances.”
Nothing is wrong, of course, with making deals with adversaries. Some of America’s greatest presidents, including Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, have written themselves into history by doing just that. Nothing is wrong either with demanding more from allies. Great leaders do so all the time.
Yet, as this calendar year closes, it’s worth remembering that the Trump administration hasn’t yet faced a challenge of the magnitude of the 9-11 attacks or the Afghan and Iraq wars that followed.
The unwritten bottom line of the Mattis manifesto – and the message of the last seventy years of global history – is that such moments require more rather than less attention to allies to address strategic competitors.
It is unlikely that the next two years will pass without an unpleasant security surprise.
Such a challenge will be more difficult to face without the experience and cool head of Secretary of Defense James Mattis.
It will be impossible to address without the support of the allies who served as the primary theme of his departure letter.
Frederick Kempe is a best-selling author, prize-winning journalist and president & CEO of the Atlantic Council, one of the United States’ most influential think tanks on global affairs. He worked at The Wall Street Journal for more than 25 years as a foreign correspondent, assistant managing editor and as the longest-serving editor of the paper’s European edition. His latest book – “Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth” – was a New York Times best-seller and has been published in more than a dozen languages. Follow him on Twitter
@FredKempe
and subscribe here to Inflection Points, his look each Saturday at the past week’s top stories and trends.
For more insight from CNBC contributors, follow
@CNBCopinion
on Twitter.