"Mattis was shocked. Once again Trump had not consulted his secretary of defense and made a major announcement with no warning. His first thought: How could we break with our allies? His second was the timing: It was just two weeks after the Ottawa meeting with all the commitments and pledges. He sat there and thought, my God, they're going to think I lied to them. They won't believe I had no idea about this. And now we're going to leave them high and dry. We're going to do what Obama did when he said we're going after the Syrians for the chemical weapons use and the French planes were armed, and they were ready to go when he walked. And the Kurds were going to be left unprotected and possibly slaughtered by Turkey. "John," Mattis said in a call to John Kelly, "I need an hour with the boss." "You got it," said Kelly. Mattis figured that Kelly knew what it was about, but the chief of staff, who had been blindsided by the president so many times and announced ten days earlier that he would soon be leaving, did not ask. Nine months earlier, Mattis had watched Rex Tillerson fired by tweet. The decision announcements by tweet were all wrong, in Mattis's view. Trump lived in his own head and if he wanted, out came an idea or a decision. It did not matter what anybody else thought. Mattis once said, "In any organization you become complicit with what the organization is doing." For nearly two years Mattis had gone along. As commander in chief, Trump called the shots. Mattis decided he was no longer going to be complicit. He went to his Pentagon office and began writing his resignation letter."