The New Yorker's Susan Glasser told CNN on Friday that U.S. allies had been "dreading" the departure of Defense Secretary John Mattis from the get-go, seeing his resignation as "a worst case scenario."
"This is a day that America's allies had been dreading and fearing and hoping wouldn't come for the entire almost two years of the Trump presidency," Glasser said. "This is a worst-case scenario from their point of view." The reporter, who was previously the editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy, admitted she herself was shocked.
"I knew there was a rift, obviously, between President Trump and Secretary Mattis for a long time," she said. "but I had been assured, as I'm sure many others had been, by sources close to Mattis for a long, long time, that he would not leave unless there was some absolutely unbridgeable gap or something absolutely directly that he was ordered to do by President Trump that struck at a matter of principle."
"It shouldn't really be either shocking or surprising that President Trump has brought things to this state," Glasser said, adding that Mattis's resignation occurred as she was writing her year-end column.
"Having Secretary Mattis resign in the middle of it was that it was very easy to incorporate into an account of a year in which President Trump has made it very, very clear that he will not be constrained, that he is firmly in control of his national security team, and he is Trump unbound," she said. "I think that's the story of 2018."
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