John Bolton: A complex worldview that just might work for Trump

Long before John Bolton was named as President Trump’s new national security adviser, a position he assumes on Monday , his name sparked diametrically opposite reactions in Washington.
Some have long lauded the former undersecretary of state and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations for his near absolute commitment to national sovereignty. Others have despised what they see as his lack of humility and reflex toward military force.
But who is the real John Bolton? Sometimes, he’s a man of deep civility. One old friend and Yale Law School contemporary, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, says so. In a 2013 discussion with Duke Law students, Thomas recalled the time Bolton found the future justice’s lost wallet.
“He found my wallet and returned it, and I got to meet him,”Thomas explained.”He treated me very honestly and decently and gave me some advice about studying that helped me from then on, [regarding] outlining and reducing outlines. He always treated me, not as a black student, but as a fellow student. And I really appreciated that at Yale.”
Many of Bolton’s acquaintances would suggest that Thomas’ experience casts a revealing and accurate light on Bolton’s character. If politics is not on the agenda, Washington figures such as Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page say that Bolton, who grew up in working-class Baltimore, is respectful, even kind.
But if politics is the topic, as it often is, the man can be more than a little different. In his positions under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, Bolton was renowned for his blunt style dealing with underlings and superiors alike, including those presidents.
As Peter Baker reported in 2008, Bolton fell out with Bush over what he regarded as the president’s insufficiently hawkish approach to countering North Korea. Although Bush might not have liked Bolton’s repudiation —”I don’t consider Bolton credible,”he told Baker at the time — the ambassador’s record on North Korea fits another major politician. And that man is going to be Bolton’s new boss.
Trump often argues that previous administrations utterly failed to resolve the challenge of a North Korea armed with nuclear weapons. Bolton’s ideology is not well-understood. Though he expresses his views with great force that sometimes seems to shade into stridency, Bolton is a hawkish nationalist and not a neoconservative.
Reuel Marc Gerecht, neoconservative scholar at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, who was an acquaintance of Bolton’s when they were colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute, says Bolton is”not really interested in democracy”but rather in the binding of American sovereignty and security. Gerecht offers the anecdote of a trip to France with Bolton and another AEI scholar, Gary Schmitt, during the Iraq War.
“We were being interviewed by French journalists,”Gerecht explains,”and the journalist asked John his opinion about whether Iraq could become a functioning democracy under American guidance. John pointed to Gary and me and said, ‘That’s not for me. Ask them.'”
Translation: Questions about democracy are for the neoconservatives, not for Bolton.
In a 2007 interview with BBC host Jeremy Paxman, Bolton argued that consolidating Iraqi democracy should no longer be considered a relevant American policy interest.”I don’t think there’s an American interest in what kind of Iraq emerges from the present circumstance,”Bolton said, adding,”I think the American strategic interest is in making sure that no part of Iraq be used by terrorists against us. That’s what we should focus on, not how to structure the country.”

It’s America first, stupid
Bolton’s deep suspicion of big ambitions as opposed to American strength and security does not begin and end with the occupation of Iraq.
During his 2005-06 tenure at the U.N., Bolton frequently blocked efforts to create new multilateral power structures. And he didn’t have much time for people, such as U.N. Deputy Secretary General Mark Malloch Brown, whom he believed were interfering in American domestic politics. It would be a mistake, however, to equate Bolton’s aversion to multilateralism with a dislike of alliances.
While Gerecht said Bolton is both”tenacious”and predisposed to”ruffling feathers,”he rejects as”false”the suggestion that Bolton has no regard for foreign allies. On the contrary, Bolton cares particularly about effective”transatlantic diplomacy.”

This seems clear in relation to Britain.
In a recent Fox Business appearance, Bolton challenged host Lou Dobbs in his assertion that America should distance itself from supporting aggressive British responses to Russia’s March 4 nerve agent attack on a former MI6 agent, Sergei Skripal.
Instead, the new national security adviser suggested that Britain should expel Russia’s entire diplomatic staff and shutter its embassy and all its consular offices.
United Kingdom’s Prime Minister Theresa May should find ardent U.S. support, Bolton said.
This leads to the big question about America’s policy toward Russia and Trump’s relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Bolton’s appointment to head the National Security Council is no victory for Moscow. Indeed, Russian state-funded media outlets such as RT now overflow with stories about Bolton, treating him as a”hawk”who might start World War III.
Bolton’s impact as national security adviser won’t be defined solely by his own views, but rather by his management of the National Security Council bureaucracy. So, what might we expect there? Bolton’s critics fear that on sensitive issues such as North Korea and Iran, he won’t offer policy suggestions other than the ones that fit his objectives. The current White House national security team is concerned that Bolton might purge its more moderate voices.
Gerecht disagrees, saying that the 69-year-old Bolton”knows how to work the system”and has”never been fearful of debate”and thus is not as likely as critics assume to throw dissenting voices overboard. One compensating influence here might be Mike Pompeo’s arrival at State Department headquarters in Foggy Bottom.
Pompeo, a former Republican congressman, has won fans for his energetic pursuit of the CIA’s core mission, which is human intelligence collection. Assuming he adopts the same approach at State, Pompeo will probably use his close relationship with Trump to push hard for more attention to be paid to foreign service officer reporting. If Bolton resists, the dispute could become a flashpoint for a new area of palace intrigue.
While Bolton is disliked by many in the State Department and intelligence services for his outspokenness, others value his ferocious work ethic and intellect. Rosemary Kimball, widow of Frank Kimball, a 36-year career USAID officer who worked closely with Bolton, says her husband always referred to Bolton as”the smartest, most level-headed man in the room.”Similarly, a mid-level Bush administration official who worked closely with Bolton suggested that while he can be prickly, he is”fucking formidable”and”one of the hardest working people I’ve ever met.”
The official added a caveat:”If you want to be smart, you appoint John Bolton to a position where his views are congruent to your own.”
This is necessary because Bolton will be”relentless”in advancing his views. We thus arrive back at the question of if Bolton will carry his existing agenda into his new, much more influential job. The national security adviser’s job is to manage the National Security Council and give the president various policy options. If Bolton skews the options, he’ll invite conflict with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.
Mattis has a fiercely powerful intellect of his own, but he deferred to Rex Tillerson, Pompeo’s predecessor, on efforts to renegotiate the Iran nuclear deal and to achieve a diplomatic breakthrough with North Korea. Whether Pompeo and Mattis will build a similar partnership is unclear, but it bears noticing that Bolton is deeply skeptical of the Tillerson-Mattis belief that a peaceful resolution to the North Korean nuclear crisis is possible. There is little time to resolve disagreements.
Intelligence assessments are that North Korea will be able to put a nuclear warhead on an intercontinental ballistic missile within the next six months. So, it seems highly likely that Bolton will push Mattis for military options immediately after he steps into the White House.
With Mattis also focused on checking Chinese and Russian threats, he’ll probably resist anything that he thinks risks drawing the U.S. military into simultaneous conflicts with North Korea and Iran.

The Iran problem
If Bolton is a hawk on North Korea, when it comes to Iran, he’s a dragon.
He isn’t so much opposed to the Iran deal as he is to the Islamic Republic of Iran itself. A fiery critic of Iran’s leaders, including the more moderate groupings around President Hassan Rouhani, Bolton believes Iran can be constrained only by force. He wants Trump to withdraw from the Iran nuclear agreement and then introduce a range of new sanctions targeting the mullahs’ ballistic missile program.
If this fails, Bolton says America should consider joint military action with Israel. Such views lead some to suggest that separating neoconservatism from Bolton’s views is to make a distinction where there is no difference. For Bolton, the priority is not a democratic Iran, but a pro-American Iran. Bolton has been flexible in pursuit of this end.
Enter the Iranian Mujahedin, or MEK. It was listed by the State Department as a terrorist organization between 1997 and 2012, is Marxist, and seeks the overthrow of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his theocratic regime. Its logo is the communist sickle, but the MEK uses old-fashioned greenbacks in large amounts to secure its American lobbyists.
Luminaries who have spoken for the MEK include senior U.S. political figures such as Rudy Giuliani, former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, and former CIA Director Porter Goss. Their efforts eventually helped remove the group from the terrorist list. But very few have made as many speeches for the MEK as has Bolton.
While Bolton refused to comment when asked if he was paid for his speeches, the Wall Street Journal’s Farnaz Fassihi and Seymour Hersh have accused Bolton of receiving payments. Another source, speaking to the Washington Examiner, supported these claims.
Bolton’s MEK connections may simply reflect his belief that the group serves an America-first agenda. After all, for Bolton and the MEK, the ayatollah’s fall is a shared win. But how does this play into Bolton’s advice to Trump on Iran?
It seems obvious why Trump and Bolton have clicked so well. Neither has much time for deference or protocol, both revel in speed of action, and both prioritize the pursuit of near-term U.S. interests. Will he last longer than his predecessors, H.R. McMaster and Michael Flynn? We’re about to find out.
by Tom Rogan,Washington Examiner

At the 2017 U.N. General Assembly, President Trump asked French President Emmanuel Macron to relay a private message to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. Trump wanted to meet, in secret, with the Iranian leader, according to Western and Iranian officials. Macron called Rouhani and asked if he was interested. The Iranian leader and members of his delegation were astonished. Trump had just given a blistering speech in front of more than a hundred world leaders declaring that Iran was a corrupt dictatorship whose leaders had turned a wealthy country “into an economically depleted rogue state whose chief exports are violence, bloodshed, and chaos.” He had called on “the entire world to join us in demanding that Iran’s government end its pursuit of death and destruction.” From the U.N. pulpit, Trump warned Tehran’s revolutionary leaders, “Oppressive regimes cannot endure forever.” Rouhani rebuffed the overture. He told Macron that he had had enough problems at home after taking a telephone call from President Obama, in 2013—and Obama hadn’t publicly insulted him. “We said, ‘Are you joking?’” the foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, told me.

A year later, the three leaders were again at the United Nations. At the end of his meeting with Trump, Macron said that he was scheduled to see Rouhani later that day. Did Trump want him to relay another message? “No,” Trump reportedly replied. “They have to suffer more first.”

In the past month, the Trump Administration has been “dramatically accelerating”—in the words of the Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo—its efforts to inflict more pain on Iran. On April 8th, in an unprecedented step, Trump designated Iran’s Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization. No leader of any nation has ever designated another country’s standing Army as a terrorist organization—not even George W. Bush before the invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, in 2003. The move was all the more striking because the United States and Iran are not at war—yet.

Iran’s parliament responded in kind, passing legislation that designated the U.S. Central Command—or centcom, the military branch that runs operations in the Middle East and South Asia—as a terrorist organization. In a show of support, Iranian legislators also wore uniforms of the Revolutionary Guard into parliament.

This week, the Administration extended its “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran. The White House announced that it would sanction any country or company—even longtime allies—that buys Iranian oil. The five largest importers of Iranian oil are China, India, Japan, South Korea, and Turkey. In the past, Washington has granted waivers as long as imports from Iran at least decreased. No longer. The U.S. goal is to eliminate all Iranian oil sales, a move designed to cripple the country economically. Since Trump announced that he would re-impose sanctions, last May, Iran has lost at least ten billion dollars—around thirty million dollars a day—in oil revenues, the State Department claimed this week. No past punitive U.S. or international sanctions—applied during the 1979-1982 hostage crisis, the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, or by the U.N. between 2006 and 2016—totally cut off Iran’s exports.

“We will continue to apply maximum pressure on the Iranian regime until its leaders change their destructive behavior, respect the rights of the Iranian people, and return to the negotiating table,” Pompeo said, on Monday. Trump, who last year abandoned the 2015 nuclear deal brokered by six major powers, has demanded that Tehran negotiate a new and bigger pact that also covers Iran’s missiles, support for extremist movements, intervention in the Middle East, and human-rights abuses.

On Wednesday, Iran dismissed the U.S. threat but expressed concern that escalating tensions could trigger a military confrontation. “President Trump believes that by pushing us, by imposing economic pressure on us, we will sell our dignity. Not gonna happen,” Zarif said, at the Asia Society, in New York, on Wednesday. “We don’t look at history in terms of two-, four-, and six-year terms as usually people do over there—the members of Congress or in the Administration or in the Senate. We look at history in millennia. And our dignity is not up for sale.”

The matching terrorist designations by both countries have fuelled speculation in Washington’s foreign-policy community, and among elected officials of both parties, about intentional or accidental military conflict. Last month, Senator Richard Durbin, of Illinois, and Senator Tom Udall, of New Mexico, warned in a Washington Post op-ed of the similarities between the U.S. language against Iran today and the rhetoric about Iraq under Saddam Hussein.
“Sixteen years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, we are again barrelling toward another unnecessary conflict in the Middle East based on faulty and misleading logic,” they wrote. “The Trump administration’s Iran policy, built on the ashes of the failed Iraq strategy, is pushing us to take military action aimed at regime change in Tehran. We must not repeat the mistakes of the past, and Congress must act urgently to ensure that.”

In New York, on Wednesday, Zarif said that he did not believe President Trump wants a war with Iran, but said that others in the Administration—as well as countries with influence at the White House—did. “It is not a crisis yet, but it is a dangerous situation. Accidents, plotted accidents, are possible,” Zarif said. “The plot is to push Iran into taking action. And then use that.” He charged that “the B-Team,” after their initials—the national-security adviser, John Bolton; the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu; the Saudi crownprince, Mohammed bin Salman; and the U.A.E. crown prince, Mohammed bin Zayed—wanted some kind of military showdown between the United States and Iran. “I wouldn’t discount the B-team plotting an accident anywhere in the region, particularly as we get closer to the [2020 U.S.] election,” Zarif said. “The B-Team wants regime change at the very least. They want the disintegration of Iran, as their objective.”

Zarif’s comments underscored a widely held view among diplomats and analysts in Washington that Trump, Bolton, and Pompeo ultimately differ in their goals on Iran—and on how far they are willing to go to achieve them. The President campaigned against another war in the region—citing the trillions of dollars spent in the lengthy wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Senior Western diplomats who are engaged with the White House believe that, despite his inflammatory language, the President still does not want to deploy troops to fight Iran. Shortly after Bolton was appointed last year, a Western envoy recalled hearing Trump say to him, with teasing seriousness, “You’re not going to bring me into a war, are you?“ The President also said publicly that he was willing to meet Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Bolton, however, has long advocated regime change—and the use of military force to achieve it. In 2015, he wrote an op-ed in the Times titled “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran.” “The inconvenient truth is that only military action like Israel’s 1981 attack on Saddam Hussein’s Osirak reactor in Iraq or its 2007 destruction of a Syrian reactor, designed and built by North Korea, can accomplish what is required,” he wrote. “Time is terribly short, but a strike can still succeed.” (Iran was actually then well into negotiations with the six major powers about the nuclear deal that was signed three months later.)

Before going to the White House, Bolton was also a longtime supporter of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (M.E.K.), or People’s Warriors, an exiled group that advocates overthrowing the Iranian government. The M.E.K. was on the U.S. list of terrorist organizations until 2012 and was long allied with Saddam Hussein. Bolton was a keynote speaker at its annual conference, in Paris, for eight years. At its 2017 annual conference, he vowed that their rally on the fortieth anniversary of the revolution, this past February, would be held in Tehran.

Pompeo also called for regime change when he was in Congress, representing Kansas. Since becoming Secretary of State, he has claimed that the Administration is instead seeking to change the regime’s “behavior.” But, last May, he outlined a list of twelve demands for Iran so sweeping that they were widely perceived as a call for regime change. At a closed-door meeting with a group of Iranian-Americans in Dallas, last week, Pompeo reportedly said, “Our best interest is a non-revolutionary set of leaders leading Iran.” Yet he also said,this week, that the United States does not support the M.E.K.

Iran’s reciprocal threats have escalated the risks of confrontation. After the United States issued its global ban on importing Iranian oil, Tehran threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which up to thirty per cent of seaborne global oil trade flows. Zarif vowed that Iran would flout the U.S. ban on oil sales. “We will continue to use the Strait of Hormuz as a safe transit passage for the sale of our oil,” Zarif said, on Wednesday. “But if the United States takes the crazy measure of trying to prevent us from doing that, then it should be prepared for the consequences.”

In his speech at the Asia Society, Zarif did hold out one possibility for talks with the United States. For the first time, he offered publicly to arrange a swap of American and Iranian prisoners held in each country’s jails. There are at least six Americans, dual-nationals or U.S. permanent residents, imprisoned in Iran, with another two out on bail. Iran has not said how many of its citizens are being held in U.S. prisons, but a review of publicized cases indicates that there may be more than a dozen Iranians or dual-nationals charged, indicted, or convicted. Iran made the offer privately last year. But the Trump Administration had not shown an interest in pursuing it until recently, and only after pressure from families of detainees, according to U.S. sources familiar with the overture.

“I put this offer on the table publicly now,” Zarif said. “Exchange them. All these people that are in prison inside the United States, on extradition requests from the United States, we believe their charges are phony. The United States believes the charges against these people in Iran are phony. Why? Let’s not discuss that. Let’s have an exchange. I’m ready to do it. And I have authority to do it. We informed the government of the United States six months ago that we are ready. Not a response yet.”

Under the Trump Administration, the prospects of dialogue with the Islamic Republic on detainees, diplomatic détente, or any other subject seems more remote than ever—and the risk of escalating tensions is ever higher.

Robin Wright has been a contributing writer to The New Yorker since 1988. She is the author of “Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion Across the Islamic World.”
Robin Wright, The New Yorker