Woodward also portrays Mattis as sometimes advocating for his more traditionalist foreign-policy positions in passably Trumpian terms. Yes, by Woodward’s account he pointedly informed Trump that America’s forward military deployment in Korea is intended to avert World War III. But by the same account Mattis also made a cost-benefit argument designed to appeal to a transactional president far more interested in fending off external threats than in leading the free world: that the alliance with South Korea was, as Woodward put it, “one of the great national security bargains of all time.” Part of Mattis’s case against pulling U.S. forces out of Afghanistan, in Woodward’s account, was that Trump, who often styles himself the anti-Obama, shouldn’t leave behind a safe haven for terrorists the way his predecessor did in Iraq.

This, Woodward writes, is the Mattis way: “avoid the confrontation, demonstrate respect and deference, proceed smartly with business, travel as much as possible, get and stay out of town.”

But Woodward’s book itself has presented the starkest test yet of the Mattis way. The defense secretary may be proceeding with business as usual in South Asia this week, but The Town and the confrontation have now come to him. And the open question is whether the survivor can survive the test. Mattis was quick to assert that the “contemptuous words about the President attributed to me in Woodward’s book were never uttered by me or in my presence,” and so far that seems to have done the trick. Trump has taken Mattis’s denial and run with it—repeatedly airing the defense secretary’s statement on Twitter, characterizing the quotes as fabrications, and praising Mattis to reporters as “a terrific person” doing “a fantastic job as secretary of defense.”