Why not call James Mattis to testify in public

Jim Mattis resigned as defense secretary in December 2018. Since then, he has been publicly nearly silent, though his resignation letter pointed to stark differences between himself and the president on a range of foreign policy issues. Now he has spoken up — not with the force and clarity one might expect given his reputation, but with a mumbled essay that says nothing much at all.

Mr. Mattis’s re-entry into the public sphere takes the form of an excerpt from his forthcoming book, blandly titled “Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead,” adapted into an essay for The Wall Street Journal. The excerpt, The Washington Post writes, “warns of the dangers of a leader who is not committed to working with allies.” NPR says that the book “sideswipes President Trump’s leadership skills.”

Based on the excerpt, even “sideswipe” may be too strong a verb for the criticism of the president Mr. Mattis doles out. His disapproval is so veiled that it is practically shrouded. Mr. Mattis’s essay touches briefly on his interactions with Mr. Trump when the president first asked him to take the post and explains his decision to return from retirement as one motivated by a sense of duty. As to why he resigned, he offers: “I did as well as I could for as long as I could. When my concrete solutions and strategic advice, especially keeping faith with our allies, no longer resonated, it was time to resign … ”

Presumably this is a reference to his disagreements with Mr. Trump over the president’s denigration of our allies and coziness with Russia, which Mr. Mattis pointed to in his resignation letter. But in his first big appearance after his departure from the Pentagon, he still doesn’t say that outright. The closest Mr. Mattis comes to explicitly criticizing the president is declaring that “A polemicist’s role is not sufficient for a leader. A leader must display strategic acumen that incorporates respect for those nations that have stood with us when trouble loomed.” But Mr. Mattis then immediately weakens that point with a vague gesture at how “tribalism must not be allowed to destroy” the American experiment. The hostility and “mutual disdain” of both “tribes” is the problem, he suggests — not the “disdain” of any one person in particular.

All this leads to the question: Whom, exactly, is Mr. Mattis’s essay for? Why write in language comprehensible only to readers who have trained themselves to parse a very particular kind of political code — and why unveil this gentlest of criticism now, when the president has done plenty of damage in the intervening months since Mr. Mattis’s resignation? Is this really something that needed to wait until it could be used to promote book sales? What is the point?

Mr. Mattis seems to be speaking from a place of deep conviction on the importance of alliances and of good leadership. The trouble is that, for such a famous iconoclast — someone who, as he writes, prioritizes “blunt” truths and the importance of duty — his essay falls into a bland and familiar genre: that of former Trump allies and appointees soft-pedaling their criticism and trying to convince themselves that their service was worth it. Mr. Mattis was praised during his time in office as the “last adult in the room” able to pull the country back from the brink of the president’s worst impulses. But when it comes to Mr. Trump, it’s hard to gauge how much the presence of those adults was really worth.