As far as I can tell, the difference between departed National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and new pick H.R. McMaster is as stark as you can imagine within the possible parameters of the Trump administration — and in a positive way. Flynn was a paranoid Islamophobe who apparently had no trouble violating long-standing political rules about conducting government business before he was actually a member of the government, and who lied to Vice President Pence about the substance of his contact with the Russian ambassador. H.R. McMaster seems to be a general capable of iconoclastic and fact-based thought; in the shitty context of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, he applied a subtle understanding of how to fight the insurgency, and he’s written a well-regarded, revisionist book on the role of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Vietnam War. This is someone who understands how self-defeating it is to use the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism,” unlike his predecessor.

Indeed, the baseline competence of McMaster raises the question of how Donald Trump could move so rapidly from his first pick to his second. Flynn seemed part and parcel of the anti-Islam, pro-Russian direction that sits nauseatingly at the heart of Trump’s early foreign policy; McMaster seems, if anything, the antidote to that sort of crazy. What does this choice mean? Is Trump really not as serious about his anti-Muslim tendencies as the evidence so far would have us believe? Was he just desperate for a respectable choice that would defuse the sense that his foreign policy team is in disarray? Does he simply intend to ignore McMaster’s counsel? Was McMaster the only choice who would take the job? And, finally, will McMaster be able to effectively serve this deranged president? I am very curious to see how McMaster’s tenure as NSA plays out, and how these questions are answered.