Battlegrounds

by H.R. McMaster

As I got on the flight to Palm Beach, Florida, to be interviewed by a man I had never met, I thought that, if given the opportunity, I would try to help restore America’s strategic competence. And I thought that the first step might be to begin with historian Zachary Shore’s concept of strategic empathy, what Shore describes as “the skill of understanding what drives and constrains one’s adversary,”18 as a corrective to strategic narcissism. During the interview at Mar-a-Lago, President Trump seemed sympathetic to my observation that the United States had not competed effectively in recent years and that, as a result, determined adversaries had gained strength and our power and influence had diminished. As defense expert Nadia Schadlow observed in her 2013 essay “Competitive Engagement,” “being successful in a competition requires knowing and understanding both one’s competitors and oneself.”19 I began with those tasks when I assumed my duties as national security advisor just three days after the call I received in Philadelphia.