John Bolton doesn’t officially start as the national security adviser until Tuesday, thank goodness. Already though, the appointment seems like a giant sign posted by the US to tell the rest of the world to go straight to hell.
In naming Bolton his next national security adviser, President Donald Trump comes closer than ever to delivering the presidency he promised on the day he took office under gray skies in a riot-tossed capital.
It’s a harrowing prospect. Trump is removing one after another of the guardrails that many seasoned observers had counted on to keep his unpredictable presidency on its tracks. Even his most dedicated supporters agree, though to them it’s about time. Donald Trump needs no training wheels, they argue.
But his tenure in office so far suggests otherwise. Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster was one such guardrail. McMaster was installed a month into the administration, when Trump had yet to get his bearings, replacing Trump’s reckless first choice, former Gen. Mike Flynn, who resigned just ahead of an indictment and felony guilty plea.
Rex Tillerson will not be remembered as a good secretary of state, but he was another voice of prudence and even wisdom until he was fired last month.
Bolton will join a national security team whose most cautious surviving member may well be a retired four-star Marine general whose nick name is “Mad Dog.” Defense Secretary James Mattis is famous for a lifetime of blunt talk and the occasional outrageously impolitic comments. But in this group, he’s credibly seen as the grown-up willing to talk first and shoot second.
Has there been a cabinet so warlike and averse to diplomacy since Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld arrived to push George W. Bush’s first term toward disaster?
At least Bush, by acknowledging his steep learning curve, assembled a cabinet full of guiding figures. Many of those seasoned hands steered him wrong, especially in the lead-up to and early prosecution of the war in Iraq, but Bush eventually took control, even from his overweening vice president.
Trump is different. It’s not just that he’s new to foreign affairs; he’s new to public leadership, period.
Trump is like a driver with a loose grip on the wheel of a speeding truck with a cargo full of combustibles. If the alignment gets out of whack, and the truck develops a strong rightward veer, the whole thing is headed for the ditch.
John Bolton could be the rightward pull that puts us all in the ditch, if every time Trump changes his focus, the security establishment’s default position is aggression or even war.
“Trump is still very inexperienced in foreign relations,” former ambassador to NATO Nicholas Burns told me in an interview. “He needs someone around him who can speak truth to power and provide objective advice, and someone who will honor the role of diplomacy will play in achieving our goals.”
Trump’s unpredictability -- Burns’ words were “mercurial” and “sometimes uninformed” -- and Bolton’s extravagantly hawkish views make a dangerous mix.
One former critic of Bolton told reporters previously that his tendency at the State Department was to “kiss up and kick down,” a quality that might explain Trump’s interest. But the risk isn’t that Bolton is too timid to check Trump. It’s that Trump won’t know how and when to check Bolton.
Bolton was a key ally of Vice President Dick Cheney in the Bush administration and a voice against diplomacy with adversaries like Iran and North Korea.
Burns said the Bush administration worked to establish talks with Iran, and when Iran refused to come to the table, the US had all the support it needed to impose tough sanctions. Those sanctions, most observers agree, set the stage for the seven-nation agreement brokered by the Obama administration to restrict Iran’s nuclear program.
Bolton opposed efforts to get Iran to the table.
And when he was undersecretary of state for arms control in Bush’s first term, Bolton had helped push Bush to tear up the old 1994 agreement with North Korea. That was a deal that traded food, oil and other necessities for the regime’s agreement to halt development of weapons-grade plutonium. The agreement was seen as only partially successful as North Korea quickly turned to other methods to advance its nuclear ambitions. By the time Bush entered office, the North was bent on building its nuclear program through enriched uranium instead.
Rather than broaden, and toughen, the initial agreement, Bolton urged Bush to walk away completely, which he did. Some have called that decision the necessary precursor to North Korea’s current nuclear arsenal. Bolton, unsurprisingly, disagrees.
But what’s certain is that the tough stance and even the inclusion of the regime as part of Bush’s famous “Axis of Evil” didn’t deter North Korea.
During the 2016 campaign, former Defense Secretary William Perry told me that the Clinton-era agreement had slowed the North Korean nuclear threat. Others have argued that expanding the agreement would have slowed it further. Either way, he said, what’s changed first under Bush and later Obama is the regime no longer desires an arsenal. Now it has one -- and it’s not likely to give it up.
Bolton calls his tough-talking approach a matter of facing reality. But lots of tough-minded warriors have served America as national security leaders before. Many of them -- including even the hawkish Mattis and career combat commander McMaster -- have come to see that a softer voice sometimes carries more power than a threat. That “soft power,” from diplomacy to pursuit of human rights, can in the end reduce the burden we put on our military.
Bolton told Fox News this year that the only kind of diplomacy left to try in North Korea is to invade, and have South Korea take it over. “We have fooled around with North Korea for 25 years, and fooling around some more is just going to make matters worse.”
And if Bolton has his way, we’ll exit the Iran deal, to our peril. That’s a mistake so large that McMaster, Tillerson and even Mattis, an Iran hawk if ever there was one, have opposed it.
Earlier this month, Trump called the Iraq War the “single biggest mistake” America has made in his lifetime. Now he’s about to install one of its least repentant advocates at the head of the National Security Council.
How can Trump reconcile that? He can’t.
But the more frightening possibility is that he feels no need to because he lacks strong convictions one way or another about war and peace. And into that chasm now leap serious men and women with Bolton at their head who do, in fact, have their minds made up.
Michael A. Lindenberger
Michael A. Lindenberger is an editorial writer for the Dallas Morning News. -- Ed.
(Tribune Content Agency)
