From Fear (Bob Woodward, 2018) p196
He’s frustrated. It’s too disjointed. Besides what we are doing with the Saudis, everything else is kind of hodgepodge.
“I’ve got something I want to talk to Mattis about, and I’ll bring it over and diagram it for him.” Bannon had come up with what he called “the strategy of the United States.”
At 8 a.m. on a June Saturday, Bannon arrived at the Pentagon, he had coffee with Donnelly and Mattis’s chief of staff, retired Rear Admiral Kevin Sweeney. They then gathered with Mattis around the small conference table in the secretary’s office.
“Here’s my problem,” Bannon said. “You guys haven’t thought about the Pacific at all. You haven’t thought about China. There’s no in-depth. You are so tied to CentCom”-the Central Command that covered the Middle East and South Asia.
Since Mattis had been the CentCom commander from 2010 to 2013, Bannon thought that Mattis had brought that mind-set to the job of secretary of defense. He reminded Mattis that Chinese policy leaders and intellectuals were split on their views of the United States. One group saw the US. as an equal partner, a co-hegemon. The other, the hawks, looked at the United States as a lesser power and treated it like one.
Mattis countered. Annihilating ISIS was the assignment President Trump had specifically given him.
“I’ll basically cut a deal with you,” Bannon proposed. If Mattis would support the containment of China, he would back off on the pressure to get the US out of Afghanistan. Afghanistan was a linchpin in the Chinese One Belt, One Road plan to expand its trading network to Europe.
“Steve,” Mattis said, “I’m kind of one of those global trading guys. I think all that trade stuff’s pretty good.”
Bannon was appalled. Trump was right. The generals didn’t know anything about business and economics. They never really cared about the cost of anything.
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