US Defense Secretary James Mattis abruptly said he was quitting on Thursday after falling out with President Donald Trump over his foreign policies, one day after Trump rebuffed top advisers and decided to pull all US troops out of Syria.<\/p>\n
Mattis announced plans to resign after a face-to-face meeting with Trump in which they aired their differences, a senior White House official said.\u201cBecause you have a right to a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects, I believe it is right for me to step down from my position,\u201d Mattis said in his resignation letter, released by the Pentagon.<\/p>\n
Trump announced on Wednesday that US troops in Syria would be withdrawn, a decision that upended American policy in the region. On Thursday, officials said the president was considering a substantial U.S. pullout from the 17-year-long conflict in Afghanistan.<\/p>\n
His letter indicated that he disagreed with Trump\u2019s isolationist policies, writing that it was his belief the United States needed to maintain strong alliances and show allies respect. Trump has withdrawn the United States from several international agreements since taking office in January 2017.<\/p>\n
\u201cGeneral Jim Mattis will be retiring, with distinction, at the end of February, after having served my Administration as Secretary of Defense for the past two years,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The two men met in the Oval Office on Thursday afternoon. During the session, Mattis told Trump of his plans to resign, the senior White House official said.\u201cHe and the president had differences on some issues. I don\u2019t know if it was specifically Syria,\u201d the official said.<\/p>\n
Mattis joins a long list of former Trump administration senior figures who have either quit or been removed, some unceremoniously like Secretary of State Rex Tillerson who Trump fired via Twitter in March.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s White House has had the highest turnover of senior-level staff of the past five presidents, according to the Brookings Institution think tank.<\/p>\n
Speculation that Mattis might not last long in his post grew in October when Republican Trump said in a CBS interview that the general was \u201csort of a Democrat\u201d and might be leaving.<\/p>\n
Mattis, along with other national security aides, was said to have opposed Trump\u2019s decision to remove U.S. troops from Syria. Many U.S. lawmakers have expressed concern about the decision and asked Trump to reconsider.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
US Defense Secretary James Mattis abruptly said he was quitting on Thursday after falling out with President Donald Trump over his foreign policies, one day after Trump rebuffed top advisers and decided to pull all US troops out of Syria. Mattis announced plans to resign after a face-to-face meeting with Trump in which they aired […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":50602,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50601"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50601\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50603,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50601\/revisions\/50603"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}