The hard-right national
security adviser successfully tanked the Iran deal. His next target? The North
Korea talks.
By John Feffer, May
16, 2018
For a man with a reputation
for venting spleen and flying off the handle, John Bolton bided his time before
finally rising to the position of power he now occupies.
The former U.S. ambassador to
the UN spent much of the last decade consolidating his political base through
stints at right-wing institutes like the American Enterprise
Institute, media appearances on Fox, and the occasional reckless op-ed. He
considered running for president in 2012 and 2016 but chose not to take the
risk. Instead, he raised large amounts of money for extreme right-wing
Republican candidates like Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR).
When Donald Trump appeared on
the political scene, Bolton eagerly endorsed the
candidate in the presidential race and offered himself up as a potential
secretary of state. Trump won, but Bolton didn’t get the call. A similarity in
temperament and a difference in ideology seemed to doom his appointment. The
White House, after all, couldn’t possibly accommodate two filterless hotheads.
Moreover, Bolton’s continued
support for the Iraq War and a more interventionist U.S. foreign policy seemed
to put him forever at odds with the new president. “Bolton’s lambasting of
global aristocrats aside, there isn’t much in the man’s worldview that rings
consonant with President Trump’s ‘America First’ foreign policy,” wrote Daniel DePetris in The American
Conservative.
That was then. Now John Bolton
is Trump’s national security advisor.
After a steady diet of
levelheaded corporate execs and restrained military men, Trump clearly wanted a
little more hot sauce in the Oval Office. As for the differences in ideology,
those were largely fictitious. Trump has no ideology, and Bolton is smart
enough to tailor his message to his audience.
Trump is a very powerful boat
with no rudder. Unfortunately, Bolton is now his rudder. Which effectively
means, when it comes to foreign policy, that it’s Bolton’s administration now.
Bolton’s Impact
National security advisor is
the perfect position for Bolton. He didn’t have to go through any messy
confirmation hearings. He doesn’t have to perform any of the ceremonial tasks
of a secretary of state.
He can instead focus on what
he does best: steering government policy far to the right. Only a few weeks
into his job, he can already put one notch in his gun for helping to steer the
United States out of the Iran nuclear deal.
This should have been an easy
task, since Trump had already made clear his distaste for the agreement. But
there was still significant disagreement within the administration. Bolton, it
appears, tilted the balance away from those, like Defense Secretary Jim Mattis,
who preferred to remain within the agreement. Writes Mark Langler in The New York
Times:
Even if Mr. Mattis had wanted
to fight for the deal, it is not clear how much he would have been heard. Mr.
Bolton, officials said, never convened a high-level meeting of the National
Security Council to air the debate. He advised Mr. Trump in smaller sessions,
otherwise keeping the door to his West Wing office closed. Mr. Bolton has
forged a comfortable relationship with the president, several people said,
channeling his “America First” vocabulary.
Now that he has this
comfortable relationship, Bolton will move on to more challenging assignments.
“By working in the West Wing, the national security adviser spends more
time with the president than the secretaries of State or Defense, and so can
always get the last word,” writes Jonathan Swan in Axios. “But
Bolton is signaling restraint until Trump makes a decision.”
So, for instance, with the
Iran deal decision made, Bolton has been coy about whether he’s
still pushing a regime-change strategy toward Iran. In public, of course, he
must defer to the president. In private, Bolton would never keep his ideas to
himself. As one of the biggest boosters of the
militant, cult-like People’s Mujahedin of Iran (or
MEK), Bolton is no doubt whispering into Trump’s ear at every possible
opportunity that Iran is on the verge of regime collapse and a cadre of Ahmed Chalabisare ready to take
over. All it needs is a tightening economic noose and a military nudge from
Israel.
Meanwhile, as the president’s
enforcer, it’s Bolton’s job to play the bad cop. He’s already done so with
Europe, raising the possibility of
sanctioning European businesses that continue to work with Iran. Bolton must
love the opportunity to kill two multilateral birds with one unilateral stone.
However, the test of Bolton’s
impact shouldn’t be Iran, where his views intersect with Trump’s. The real
challenge will be on issues where Bolton’s stated preferences are diametrically
opposed to current policy.
From Regime Change to
Rapprochement?
John Bolton has never
concealed his desire to see the collapse of the current government in North
Korea. In February, even after the two Koreas had cooperated in the Winter
Olympics, Bolton continued to argue in
the Wall Street Journal that the United States should launch a
preemptive military attack on Pyongyang and its nuclear facilities.
The Journal piece
featured a bizarre, legalistic argument based on his interpretation of a
British attack on a Canadian steamboat in U.S. territory in 1837. (No, I’m not
making this up). Bolton didn’t bother to devote any space to the likely
consequences of a preemptive attack on North Korea that, unlike the British
example, could escalate to an exchange of nuclear weapons and involve the
deaths of more than a million people.
It was pure Bolton: a legal
intellect plus an instinct for bombast — and minus any acknowledgement of
real-world consequences.
Now, as national security
advisor, Bolton must wrap his mind around the reality of the potential summit
between his boss and Kim Jong Un, scheduled for June 12 in Singapore. This
might seem to put Bolton in a bind, forcing him to make arguments that run
counter to his long-held preferences.
But remember: Bolton knows how
to bide his time. He knows that the track record of U.S.-North Korean
negotiations isn’t very good. He knows that a failed summit could easily push
Donald Trump to the other side of the spectrum — or perhaps, given North Korea’s reaction to
the recent U.S.-South Korean military exercises, the summit might not happen at
all. A Trump scorned will likely find regime-change arguments more compelling.
In the meantime, Bolton is
doing what he can to subtly undermine the upcoming summit. He’s ratcheted down
expectations by saying that the Trump
administration isn’t “starry-eyed” about the meeting. He’s loaded the summit agenda by
adding “their ballistic missile programs, their biological and chemical weapons
programs, their keeping of American hostages, the abduction of innocent
Japanese and South Korean citizens over the years.” It would be hard enough to
negotiate a nuclear agreement even without adding these other elements (though
North Korea has already released the “American hostages”).
But perhaps the most sinister
tactic Bolton has deployed involves his references to Libya. In interviews,
he has said that Libya’s
denuclearization in the 2000s can serve as a model for the North Korea talks.
Libya? The country that gave
up its nuclear weapons program and then, within a few years, experienced civil
war, foreign intervention, and regime collapse? Is that really the kind of
model you want to highlight with a country like North Korea, which is worried
about precisely such a scenario?
An anonymous source in the
Trump administration told Abigail Tracy of Vanity
Fair that Bolton is sending his own message to the North Koreans: “I mean,
there is only one reason you would ever bring up Libya to the North Koreans,
and that is to tell them, ‘Warning: don’t go any further because we are going
to screw you’… So yeah, I completely agree that that is a dog whistle to the
North Koreans, telling them, ‘don’t trust us.’”
Of course, Bolton’s mere
presence in the administration, even if he just stands quietly in the corner
and scowls, sends the message that this government is not to be trusted.
Perhaps that’s the real reason for North Korea’s sudden summit skepticism.
War at the Top?
John Bolton isn’t stupid
enough to contradict his boss, at least not directly. He’s a sycophant to his superiors and
a sunvabitch to his subordinates. The interesting part comes with his relations
to his equals. The most interesting part will be his relationship with Secretary
of State Mike Pompeo.
Thomas Wright, in Politico, argues that Bolton and Pompeo are
cruising for a mutual bruising. He argues that it’s not hawks versus doves in
the Trump administration, but “litigators versus planners.”
The litigators, led by Trump
and deputized to Bolton, see national security policy as a way of settling
scores with enemies, foreign and domestic, and closing the file. They will
torpedo multilateral deals, pull out of international commitments and
demonstrate American power before moving on to the next target.
Planners, on the other hand,
are worried about the day after — for instance, how the United States addresses
Chinese economic power in the wake of a pullout from the Trans Pacific
Partnership trade deal.
It’s not yet clear whether
Pompeo is a litigator or a planner, and thus whether he’ll team up with Bolton
or side with the quintessential planner, Jim Mattis, to challenge the national
security advisor’s blow-‘em-all-up philosophy. Wright expects a showdown.
I’m not sure. I expect
tactical alliances between Bolton and Pompeo (on Iran) and tactical
disagreements (on China). Where they disagree, Bolton probably will gain the
upper hand, if not immediately then eventually, because he knows better how to
manipulate the levers of power.
But on the general direction
of Trump’s foreign policy, Bolton and Pompeo are in agreement. The
faux-isolationism of Trump during his presidential campaign fooled a number of
neoconservatives into voicing their opposition. But it didn’t fool either
Bolton or Pompeo.
Let’s be clear: There is no
American “retreat” from the world. Under the rubric of “America First,” the
Trump administration has created a new kind of multilateral engagement —
aligned with the hard right in Israel and Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia,
allied with authoritarian and far-right leaders like Recep Tayyip Erdogan in
Turkey, Vladimir Putin in Russia, and Viktor Orban in Hungary, and in support
of a range of plutocratic interests over and above the wellbeing of the
majority and the planet as a whole. (I long for Angela Merkel to just come out
and say it: “Gott in Himmel, we must oppose this new Axis of Autocracy!)
So, not a retreat from the
world but a retort to the world: Move this way, not that. As the Washington
Examiner recently editorialized, “Trump’s foreign policy
record is one of America continuing its role as global leader — even if we’re
leading in a direction that displeases John Kerry.”
But please, let’s not talk
about Trump’s “foreign policy record.” This is not the world of Donald Trump.
The world of Trump is Mar-a-Lago, Fox News, and his Twitter account. His
worldview is limited by his over-inflated ego and bank account.
No, this is the world of John
Bolton. And, for a limited time before he blows it up, we’re just living in it.
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