Now that Joe Biden is the presumed next president, former defense secretary Jim Mattis has made a U-turn on his purported support for President Trump's signature call to put America first.

According to Breitbart News's Joel Pollak:

Former Secretary of Defense James Mattis declared in an article in Foreign Affairs on Monday that the "America First" foreign policy had damaged national security, and called on Joe Biden to "eliminate 'America first'" from U.S. strategy.

Mattis resigned in December 2018, citing policy disagreements with the president, who had just ordered a troop drawdown in Syria. In his resignation letter, Mattis said that the U.S. needed to do more to show "respect" to American allies.

That's shocking.  Does Mattis know how bad that sounds?  If the former secretary of defense is not 100% in favor of putting "America first," then who exactly is first?  This isn't some Silicon Valley lateralistic power-structure gnome or Antifa creature talking collective leadership.  Anyone in the ultra-hierarchical U.S. military would absolutely know that human beings will always choose a leader, a special person to serve as "first."  Mattis certainly would.  Mattis achieved high rank in the military on precisely this logic himself.

Yet he makes a grotesque statement about not putting his country first, that very country where he has literally asked men and women to fight and die for, even though something else, some global vision led by George Soros and his puffed up Eurochicken allies, or the moral shambles of the Fourth World–controlled United Nations, is really to him what's now first.  America's just a bit player in this scheme, see — never mind the combat deaths.  What's got primacy now is Countries That Don't Pay Their Way.  This is nonsense.  You can get people to fight and die for their countries and homelands.  You'll never find one who'll die for Soros.

It's incredible.  This is like the CEO of Pepsi declaring he's now against "Pepsi first," in the name of "Coca-Cola first" or, better still, a monopoly consortium trust of like-minded colas.  Only in the U.S. government do you find such a class of leaders willing to dump America as a priority in favor of some dreamy vision they themselves like better.  And not surprisingly, it's they who squander U.S. military might on nation-building wars in third-world hellholes, along with U.S. lives.

It's also bad for national security in a broader sense.  Imagine what the Russians and Chinese must be thinking as they read Mattis's words, about the importance of ending "America first," remembering that this guy once headed the mighty U.S. military with those self-induced pabulum uniworld doubts rolling around in his head.  Where does he place America's interests?  Second?  Third?  Last?  They missed their chance to find out, but lucky for them, he might be back.

It points to some big-time deceptive hypocrisy.  The Trump administration, after all, made no secret of its vow to put America first.  Mattis served in the Trump administration but secretly didn't believe it?  People of principle resign when they don't agree with a critical policy of government.  Not Mattis.  Mattis charged right in on newly elected President Trump and auditioned in bad faith for the Defense Department job, liking the power, liking perks, and exiting only when he was apparently fired for wanting to keep U.S. boots on the ground in Syria.  Now it's looking more like he sought the job to steal power from President Trump, making and enacting his own policy instead of serving the elected president.  Tragically, the president has been very poorly served by his purported lieutenants, particularly those in the pencil-pushing Pentagon "perfumed prince" category, and to the Americans who elected Trump, this is genuinely disturbing.

And this is far from the only post-office potshot Mattis has thrown in President Trump's direction.  Pollak notes that he's been pretty ugly:

In June, Mattis gave a statement to The Atlantic in which he called Trump a threat to the Constitution, comparing him to a Nazi and repeating false claims that Trump had used the military to clear peaceful protesters from Lafayette Square.

Last question: So why is Mattis saying this rubbish now?  Why not last September or next March?  Why now?  Most likely it's because he's doing what he always does: watching a new administration roll in and looking for a new position of power.  What this sounds like is a swampy frog singing for his supper, with an incoming Joe Biden administration, looking again for a piece of the action, same as he obtained with an unsuspecting President Trump.  Biden has no principles other than America last, so he should be a perfect match as Mattis is now packaging himself.

The rest of us can only look down on him as a consummate swamp creature with disgust.

Image credit: GreatAgain.gov via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.