Wednesday, September 11, 2019
Trump created the storm, but
Bolton aimed it expertly. An aerial view of the White House post-Bolton would
reveal a devastated landscape.
John Bolton’s tenure was a
complete disaster. The national security architecture after Bolton looks like
the Bahamas after Hurricane Dorian.
Seventeen months ago, before
Bolton became Donald Trump’s third national security advisor, the United States
still had a deal that had stopped Iran’s nuclear program in its tracks. More,
it had rolled it back to a fraction of its original size and boxed it into the
most intrusive inspection regime ever negotiated. It was a deal for the ages.
All of Trump’s military, intelligence and security advisors and our closest
allies urged Trump to stay in the accord. Bolton destroyed it in two months,
pushing Trump to violate it and impose draconian sanctions on Iran
“Withdrawing from the Iran
Nuclear Deal should be a top Donald Trump administration priority,”
Bolton tweeted in
July 2017, months before his appointment. “The declared policy of the United
States should be the overthrow of the mullahs’ regime in Tehran,” he shouted at
an MEK rally in July 2017, promising them
that they would all celebrate in Tehran “before 2019.”
Today, Iran is slowly pealing
away from the deal, too, taking baby steps towards restarting capabilities that
someday could allow it to make the material for a bomb, should it decide to do
so. No new deal. No better deal. No regime change. No celebration in Tehran.
“Trump has spent years making a mess of Iran policy for no reason other than
right wing politics and incompetence,” tweeted former
Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes as news of Bolton’s sacking spread.
Before Bolton, the United
States had kept Russia from building a particularly dangerous class of missiles
for over 30 years. Bolton blew apart the landmark Intermediate Nuclear Forces
Agreement that President Ronald Reagan had painstakingly negotiated with
then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. The treaty had broken the back of the
nuclear arms race. For the first time, the two nuclear superpowers agreed to
destroy, not just limit, nuclear weapons. It paved the way for other sweeping
nuclear reductions treaties and big unilateral cuts—most done under Republican
presidents.
Bolton hated these agreements.
In 1999, he ridiculed the
liberal “fascination with arms-control agreements” and blustered about
“the Church of Arms Control,” insisting that America could rule the world
through force of arms, not pieces of paper. In a classic Bolton move, he used
the real fact of Russian violations of the INF treaty, not to insist on their
compliance with the pact, but to destroy it entirely. “Violations give America
the opportunity to discard obsolete, Cold War-era limits on its own arsenal and
to upgrade its military capabilities to match its global responsibilities,”
Bolton wrote in
2014.
The U.S. abrogation of the
treaty was a gift to
Vladimir Putin. It did not reverse the Russian violations; it permitted them.
Today, there are no limits whatsoever on what missiles of this range Putin can
deploy.
Bolton was also on course to
destroy the last remaining nuclear reduction treaty, the New START agreement
that limits US and Russian long-range nuclear weapons. Again using the phony
right-wing tactic of blasting agreement because they do not cover all possible
threats, Bolton trashed the
accord as “flawed from the beginning” because it only limited long-range
weapons (hence the name, “strategic arms reduction treaty”) and not short-range
weapons as well.
Before Bolton, there were also
fragile negotiations with the Afghanistan Taliban. Bolton “waged a last-minute
campaign to stop the president from signing a peace agreement at Camp
David,” reports The
New York Times.
Before Bolton, there was the
real possibility of a deal with North Korea that would have traded sanctions
relief for serious nuclear dismantlement. Bolton killed it at the Hanoi summit
by convincing Trump that Democrats would criticize him if he did not bring home
Kim Jung-un’s complete surrender of all his nuclear, biological and chemical
weapons. “John Bolton appears to have locked the U.S. administration into a
policy death spiral,” I wrote at
the time. The spiral has now dragged Bolton to his political death.
Finally, and very seriously,
before Bolton there was a functioning national security interagency process
where leaders and experts from all agencies and departments could vet policies
and build consensus. The National Security Council had been the principal forum
for consideration of key policies for 72 years. Bolton destroyed it in 17
months.
“There was no process under
John Bolton,” Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power told
Rachel Maddow the night of Bolton’s firing. Bolton halted meetings, restricted
access to Trump and packed the staff with loyal Boltonites. “The national
security adviser’s principal responsibility has traditionally been to oversee a
disciplined policymaking process that includes the State Department, the
Pentagon and intelligence agencies, and to tee up big decisions for the
president,” editorialized The
Washington Post the same night, “Mr. Bolton didn’t do that.”
Bolton could not have wreaked
this destruction if he had not been chosen, empowered and tolerated by Donald
Trump, who must bear ultimate responsibility for Bolton’s legacy — what the
Post summarized as “chaos, dysfunction and no meaningful accomplishments.” It
was Trump who allowed Bolton to come within ten minutes of getting the war with
Iran Bolton had sought for two decades, before halting the strikes. Trump
created the storm, but Bolton aimed it expertly. An aerial view of the White
House post-Bolton would reveal a devastated landscape.
“Any jackass can knock down a
barn,” former House Speaker Sam Rayburn said, “It takes a carpenter to build
one.” Bolton was the biggest jackass in the administration. There are no
carpenters in sight.
