‘Strategic empathy’: H.R. McMaster on foreign policy and China

Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, national security adviser to President Donald Trump from 2017 to 2018, explains in the first line of his new book, “Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World,” why he chose not to write a tell-all memoir of his time in the White House. 

“I wanted to ... help transcend the vitriol of partisan political discourse,” writes Mr. McMaster, a historian, author, and highly decorated commander who led U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

Now retired from the military and a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, Mr. McMaster instead examines U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War and finds it deeply flawed. The reason? “Strategic narcissism,” an overly U.S.-centric worldview that has blinded American policymakers. In