Retired Gen. Jack Keane has managed to keep hold of President Donald Trump's ear on foreign policy, including in Iran and Syria. | Alex Brandon/AP Photo
The Fox News general who 'spooked' Trump out of attacking Iran
President Donald Trump may have tired of the men he once called ‘my generals,’ but one retired military leader still has his ear on key foreign policy matters.
As President Donald Trump wrestled on the evening of June 20 with how to respond to Iran’s downing of a U.S. drone, Jack Keane was making his second appearance of the day on the Fox News Channel.
Keane, a retired four-star Army general, said that Trump, who had speculated earlier in the day that the Iranian action might have been a fluke rather than a deliberate provocation, had a point. Mistakes happen.
“Our viewers may have forgotten, but during the tanker war in the late ‘80s when Reagan did take some action, we actually made a mistake,” Keane said, referring to President Ronald Reagan. “We had a USS warship shoot down an Iranian airliner in Iranian airspace. Two-hundred ninety people killed. Sixty-six of them were children. And we took that for a Tomahawk F-14. That was clearly a mistake by the ship's crew in doing that. And we acknowledged that we made a horrific mistake.”
Keane’s reference to the United States’ accidental downing of an Iranian commercial airliner in 1988 made a profound impact on the president, who was “spooked” when he learned of the incident, according to two sources briefed on his reaction. The president made repeated comments about the tragedy on the evening of the 20th, leading aides to believe that Keane’s brief history lesson exacerbated Trump’s pre-existing doubts about carrying out the strike.
Though it is unclear just how decisive Keane’s description of the decades-old incident was in the president’s decision to call off the airstrikes — Trump also had repeated conversations with Fox News host Tucker Carlson before he made the call — it wouldn’t be the first time the 76-year-old former Army vice chief of staff has, wittingly or not, served as a shadow foreign policy adviser to the commander in chief.
It’s hardly unusual for presidents to rely on outside advisers. Yet Trump has done so more than most, keeping a kitchen cabinet of friends from his previous life in real estate and entertainment. Equally unusual: the special influence wielded by those, like Keane, who make frequent appearances on the president’s favorite television network.
But it is also something of an oddity that Keane, who retired from military service in 2003, has maintained his stature in the Trump era. He is in many ways the sort of interventionist the president campaigned against. A key architect of the Iraq surge along with American Enterprise Institute scholar Frederick Kagan, Keane advised President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Gen. David Petraeus on its implementation.
Currently the chairman of the board of the Institute for the Study of War, Keane has served as an adviser for several other high-profile political figures, including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and he is in frequent contact with Foggy Bottom’s current leader, Mike Pompeo.
It doesn’t hurt Keane’s standing in the West Wing that he has more often than not defended the president’s policies on television, including Trump’s most recent tête-à-tête with North Korean strongman Kim Jong Un. While Keane acknowledged in an interview with Fox News’ Bill Hemmer that the president’s jaunt into North Korea was “largely a symbolic gesture,” he said that the meeting had served to restart negotiations between the two countries.
“So I consider that progress,” he said. “Personal diplomacy here has moved the ball again.”
The president has watched the former Army vice chief of staff on Fox for years. But the two became friendly when Trump — on the recommendation of the late Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes — summoned Keane to Trump Tower shortly after his election in November 2016, according to a member of the Trump transition team.
The president-elect, who continued to call Keane “my No. 1 guy,” went on to offer him the job of secretary of Defense — twice. Keane, whose wife Theresa had passed away during the summer of 2016, declined Trump’s first offer, but the two exchanged phone numbers and have stayed in touch. The president came back again after Defense Secretary Jim Mattis resigned in December 2018. Keane again begged off.
Though the Trump administration was initially stacked with senior military officials, the president has either shooed out or alienated many of them, including Mattis; former White House chief of staff John Kelly, a former head of Southern Command; and former national security adviser H.R. McMaster, a lieutenant general known as one of the Army’s top intellects. But he has continued to rely intermittently on Keane’s counsel.
Trump told NBC News the day after changing his mind on the airstrikes that, given a Pentagon estimate that the retaliatory strikes could leave 150 civilians dead, he didn’t believe the strikes were a “proportional” response to the downing of an unmanned drone.
But the president has also suggested he might have taken other factors into account, telling advisers in recent days that greenlighting targeted strikes only to reverse course at the last minute attracted more media coverage than would have a straightforward decision not to respond to the downing of the drone.
The gruff, straight-shooting Keane has not hesitated to tell the president when he thinks he’s wrong. He has criticized him for canceling troop exercises in South Korea and wasn’t shy about expressing his disappointment with the Trump administration’s second bombing of Syria in April 2018, which he derided in an interview with Fox News as “very weak.”
And Keane was apoplectic when the president abruptly announced his decision in December to pull American troops out of Syria, tweeting, “Our boys, our young women, our men, they’re coming back and they’re coming back now. We won.”
Keane also aired his disagreement on TV, calling the move a “serious strategic mistake” that would have “dire consequences” and telling Fox Business Network anchor Trish Regan, “I think it’s a decision the president will come to regret, to be frank about it.”
But he also worked behind the scenes to change the president’s mind, paying a visit to the White House this February to plead his case. He arrived toting a map of the Levant, according to two people familiar with the encounter, and explained to Trump why the U.S. withdrawal from Syria was a boon for Iran.
During the visit, Keane also argued that U.S. isn’t fighting large-scale combat operations anymore, but in many cases, including in Syria, lending assistance to others who are. He told Trump that in pulling troops from Syria he wasn’t ending a war, but ending critical aid to 60,000 Syrian troops trying to do so.
In late February, Trump announced that the administration planned to leave a “small force” so that ISIS “doesn’t start up again.”
“A lot of people like that idea and I’m open to ideas,” he told reporters from the Oval Office.
Others, including Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton, as well as a slew of voices on Capitol Hill, had been pushing the president to reverse course, but some credited Keane with being the decisive voice in Trump’s ear.
Said a source familiar with the meeting: “He single-handedly convinced Trump to keep troops in Syria."
Eliana Johnson is a White House reporter and a CNN contributor.
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