to be able to be there to articulate and protect department of defense interests. department of defense interests, which really means american national security interests. secretary mattis is signaling he s afraid if he s not there at the next summit, something bad might happen, the department s interest might not be represented fully. and the reason for that is because president trump got awfully close at that last summit meeting to withdrawing and it required the intervention of cabinet level officials and it sounds like also some foreign officials to keep him from doing so and in fact, it was so bad when he went to give the press conference, not everybody knew most people didn t know except for donald trump what he was going to say. the senate got word of this and in the last house, they passed legislation tieing the president s hands. the gram menendez bill would have to be passed again but c contains a provision that says