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Former Secretary of Defense James Mattis on Wednesday castigated President Donald Trump as "the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people"

"We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children."

The comments from Mattis are a significant moment for a man who has kept mostly silent since leaving the administration. The retired Marine general had been pressed many times to comment on Trump, troop policies, the Pentagon, and other current events and had always refused because he didn't want to get involved and be a contradictory voice to the troops. Instead, Mattis always insisted he had said everything he wanted to say in his resignation letter.

President-elect Donald J. Trump’s choice for defense secretary, Gen. James N. Mattis

The retired Marine general provided his written responses on an array of policy questions to the Senate Armed Services Committee, which is meeting Thursday morning to take up his nomination for defense secretary, as well as to consider the legal waiver that would be needed so that he could serve in the Pentagon’s top civilian job.

The document is intended to serve as a guide to lawmakers who will be questioning General Mattis, and it will become part of the permanent hearing record.

The prospects for James N. Mattis to serve as secretary of defense in the Trump administration received a boost on Tuesday when two experts in military policy recommended that an exception be made so Mr. Mattis, a retired four-star general, can assume the top Pentagon post.

Military officers are barred by law from serving as defense secretary unless they have been retired for seven years.

John McCain, the Arizona Republican who leads the Senate Armed Services Committee and has strongly supported General Mattis’s nomination

After long refusing to explicitly criticize a sitting president, former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis accused President Donald Trump on Wednesday of trying to divide America and roundly denounced a militarization of the U.S. response to civil unrest.

The remarks by Mattis, an influential retired Marine general who resigned over policy differences in 2018, are the strongest to date by a former Pentagon leader over Trump’s response to the killing of George Floyd, an African-American, while in Minneapolis police custody.

“Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort.

Defense secretary nominee Mattis warns world order under historic threat

Defense secretary nominee Gen. James Mattis issued a grave warning Thursday at his Senate confirmation hearing, saying the established world order is under its “biggest attack” since World War II as he called for boosting military readiness and America’s alliances.

Citing Russia’s aggressions and other concerns, he said: “I think [the world order is] under the biggest attack since World War II … from Russia, from terrorist groups and with what China is doing in the South China Sea.”

The president had a vague notion of the killer part when he appointed Mattis. He had no notion of the morally and strategically informed restraint, of the intellectual sophistication, of the selflessness.

In office, he had to spend most of his time buttressing the alliances that the president despised, and affirming values of fairness and legality that Trump could not comprehend. Success in government is often measured less by the brilliant things one does than by the stupidities one prevents. By that standard, Mattis’s tenure as secretary of defense was a success.

Mattis indeed had his walking points, and he leaves with his head held high. But he is alone. The clusters of sub-Cabinet officials who privately boasted about their walking points have, with very few exceptions, stuck it out. They give sickly smiles when, at a seminar or dinner party, someone describes the president’s character as it is; they give no evidence of sticking their necks out to take positions that might incur the wrath of the America Firsters; they have taken the mad king’s shilling, and they are sticking with the king.

North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un’s regime as a threat to regional security

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis

“North Korean provocations continue to threaten regional and global security despite unanimous condemnation by the United Nations Security Council,” Mr. Mattis said

US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis has warned Syria it would be "very unwise" to use poison gas in Eastern Ghouta amid reports of chlorine attacks.Mr Mattis did not say President Trump would take military action, but the US struck Syria last April after a suspected gas attack in northern Syria.Fierce fighting is continuing and the Syrian army says it has surrounded a major town in the rebel-held enclave.More than 1,000 civilians have been reported killed in recent weeks.The Syrian military has been accused of targeting civilians, but it says it is trying to liberate the region - the last major opposition stronghold near the capital Damscus - from those it terms terrorists.

Mr Mattis said Mr Trump had "full political manoeuvre room" to respond to chlorine use.

The Syrian army says it has completely surrounded the town of Douma and cut the remaining rebel-held area into two, according to a statement made by the Lebanese Hezbollah militia, which is fighting on the side of the Syrian government.

The Donald Trump Cabinet Tracker

The Senate hasn’t formally rejected a Cabinet pick since it voted down President George H.W. Bush’s nomination of John Tower for defense secretary in 1989

Trump may have more luck with the Senate than his immediate predecessors, and he has Democrats to thank. When they held the majority in 2013, they changed the rules so that executive-branch nominations are no longer subject to the 60-vote threshold for filibusters. That means Trump could conceivably win Senate approval of his entire Cabinet without a single Democratic vote.

Who knows what might happen now with Mattis, but it’s hard to imagine a successor who would be as clever, effective, and able to restrain Trump as he’s apparently been. An impulsive president who is unschooled in diplomacy and foreign affairs could be even more dangerous without hobbles like Mattis in place.

The dysfunction at the heart of Woodward’s account demonstrates the paradox at the heart of the Trump White House: Everything is irreparably and disastrously broken, and yet what comes next could be even worse.

Mattis’s testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, which convened today to consider his confirmation, raises doubts on that score

The strategic vacuum in which America’s endless wars drag on went unremarked upon.

On multiple occasions, Mattis referred to his determination to enhance the “lethality” of U.S. forces as if an inability to kill people and break things has hampered the effectiveness of U.S. forces. The problem is not a lack of lethality. It’s misguided policies based on a flawed understanding of what armed force can and cannot do, and when it should or should not be employed.

On face, however, the splits with Tillerson and Corker both center around the same material question of whether the United States will start a shooting war, most likely with North Korea.

, Corker told the Times that he worried Trump didn’t understand the stakes of his statements on foreign-policy questions, viewing it as a “reality show of some kind.”

“He doesn’t realize that, you know, that we could be heading towards World War III with the kinds of comments that he’s making,” said Corker, who is the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and close to Tillerson, and therefore particularly well-placed to analyze Trump’s foreign-policy choices.

Mattis’s drive, born of his devotion to the Corps, is his most telling trait. He works insanely hard, propels himself extremely quickly, making himself, every day, a better Marine. Much of the work is intellectual.

Each mission gives him another body of knowledge, another strength, greater capacity to live execute his devotion to his country.

“If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you,” Mattis and West write.

President Trump’s abrupt installation of a group of hard-line loyalists into senior jobs at the Pentagon has elevated officials who have pushed for more aggressive actions against Iran and for an imminent withdrawal of all American forces from Afghanistan over the objections of the military.

During a meeting at the White House, Mr. Trump’s message to Mr. Miller, the official said, was to do nothing new or provocative.When jobs open in the last days of an administration, they are usually filled by deputies, whose only charge is to keep the wheels of government turning at least until Inauguration Day.

“I’m only 2-on-a-scale-of-10 concerned,” said Kori Schake

The risks of working for Trump were elaborated upon well in 2017 by my Atlantic colleague David Frum; our colleague Eliot Cohen also went back and forth on it and even changed his mind. The danger was obvious: You will end up selling your soul and you will likely fail to do much good

The counterargument was also obvious: The interests of the United States of America require that this train wreck of an administration—staffed with the likes of Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, and His Faux-Britannic Excellency Sebastian Gorka—should have at least some non-stupid, non-craven, non-nutball types in the executive branch.

I argued at the time that there was no way to put child-safety bumpers on all the sharp edges of the White House, and that if Trump was going to drive the country into a ditch, the sooner we got on with it, the better. I am not sure now if I was wrong, but the best evidence against my position is that Esper may well have prevented a war with North Korea by averting Trump’s idiotic evacuation order for Americans in South Korea. If that’s the case, I’d have to say it was worth it to have someone in the right place.

Mr. Trump has made similar comments before. But the fact that he made them in a joint interview with two European publications — The Times of London and Bild, a German newspaper — and did so days before assuming the presidency alarmed European diplomats.

“They have sanctions on Russia — let’s see if we can make some good deals with Russia,”

Mr. Trump was critical of Russia’s military intervention in Syria, including airstrikes in Aleppo that American officials say have hit hospitals and killed civilians, saying it had led to a “terrible humanitarian situation.”

Trump worries Nato with 'obsolete' comment

A statement by US President-elect Donald Trump that Nato is "obsolete" has caused "worry" in the alliance, Germany's foreign minister says.

Shares in BMW, Volkswagen and Daimler fell after he warned that cars built in Mexico, where they have invested in factories, would be taxed at 35% if exported to the US.