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Column: The real reason Trump's choice of John Bolton should terrify you

 
John Bolton speaks during the Conservative Political Action Conference meeting in National Harbor, Maryland, on March 3, 2016. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Andrew Harrer.
John Bolton speaks during the Conservative Political Action Conference meeting in National Harbor, Maryland, on March 3, 2016. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Andrew Harrer.
Published March 23, 2018

President Donald Trump's choice of John Bolton as his new national security adviser — and his ongoing escalation of trade hostilities and reshuffling of his legal team — have all been widely interpreted as evidence that Trump is finally governing and conducting himself as he wanted to all along. He's tired of advisers who are steering him away from his true agenda and persona, goes this narrative; instead, he's finally getting back to the basics that make Trump who he really is.

But this framing is built on a distortion that underplays just how dangerous Trump's evolution really threatens to become. What's really happening is that Trump is increasingly surrounding himself with advisers who are better than the "adults in the room" at manipulating his erratic and shifting impulses and whims, by giving a shape to them that he can accept and act upon.

Axios reports that sources close to Trump say he "feels" that Bolton "will finally deliver the foreign policy the president wants" on Iran and North Korea. What makes this account almost certainly dead on is the word "feels." As Michael Warren of the Weekly Standard points out, Bolton has skillfully used his conservative media perches to send messages to Trump that nudge him toward "more hawkish stances," by "casting them as fulfillments of Trump's own pledges and true beliefs."

Bolton wants to bomb Iran. There is no particular reason to believe that Trump either favors or opposes that stance. Trump knows that the Iran nuclear deal is bad because Barack Obama negotiated it; Trump knows Trump is strong and Obama is weak; and Trump knows his supporters cheered when he vowed to rip the agreement to shreds. But Trump has not meaningfully articulated why we should pull out of it, because he can't.

And so, when Trump was debating whether to certify the Iran deal last summer, and was unhappy with advisers urging him to do so on substantive grounds, then-adviser Stephen Bannon handed him a piece by Bolton urging him to decertify. Bolton's piece cast that as the only course consistent with Trump's "view that the Iran deal was a diplomatic debacle," because Obama had given Iran "unimaginably favorable terms." Trump has no idea whether this is true or not — it isn't — but it persuaded Trump to come close to decertifying, though ultimately the adults prevailed that time.

The point is that Trump doesn't grasp the details, but Bolton skillfully gave shape to his impulses. Now Bolton will be in an even better position to persuade Trump to kill the Iran deal, and if and when that happens, to push Trump more in the direction of his own bellicose designs, which Bolton will almost certainly cast as in keeping with Trump's vow to be tougher than Obama.

Or take North Korea. Everyone knows that when Trump agreed to meet with Kim Jong Un, he did so on an impulse, with no thought-through rationale or sense of the risks and complexities involved. Bolton wants to go to war with North Korea and has dismissed talks. But he cleverly greeted Trump's announcement by describing it as "shock and awe" and an opportunity for Trump to give North Korea an ultimatum if it does not immediately begin "total denuclearization." This, too, gave a shape to Trump's impulse that he will very likely find flattering, but also one that might move Trump toward Bolton's position.

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If Trump now "feels" that Bolton will give him the policies he wants on Iran and North Korea, it's because Bolton is skilled at making Trump feel that way. And that's ominous, because it means Bolton may be able to push Trump toward believing that Bolton's goals are a realization of his own foreign policy vision, such as it is.

And that foreign policy vision is formless. During the campaign, Trump opposed the Iraq War, sending the message that he won't get drawn into the misguidedly idealistic or stupidly conceived military adventurism so typical of our clueless, corrupt elites. But Trump has never been either antiwar or an isolationist. His posture was rather that he will magically smash our enemies and aggressively represent our interests abroad effortlessly, without any serious cost, because he's tougher, stronger and smarter than those elites. How hard will it be for Bolton to shape those impulses into something more in line with his own vision?

On trade, the process leading up to Trump's decision to impose tariffs was a joke with no regard for specifics. But it did showcase the rising star of trade adviser Alex Navarro, who unabashedly stated that he had provided the "analytics" to "confirm his intuition," which is "always right."

Trump just pushed out legal adviser John Dowd, who advised careful cooperation with special counsel Robert Mueller, and has added Joe diGenova, who has fed Trump's fantasies of a deep state plot against him, signaling the much more aggressive confrontation with Mueller that Trump clearly craves, without having the foggiest strategic rationale. In both cases, these people are successfully giving shape to Trump's impulses.

As New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg recently observed, one after another, the people who are supposed to be "checking Donald Trump's worst instincts and most erratic whims" have departed. But this doesn't mean Trump is getting back to being who he always wanted to be. It means he is increasingly listening to people who are good at exploiting and shaping those instincts and whims.

© 2018 Washington Post

"We are confident that Saddam Hussein has hidden weapons of mass destruction and production facilities in Iraq."

John Bolton in 2002, while serving as President George W. Bush's undersecretary of state for arms control and international security

"There's an all-purpose joke here. Question: How do you know that the North Korean regime is lying? Answer: Their lips are moving."

Bolton, this month on Fox News

"By eliminating Saddam's threat to Middle Eastern peace and security, the 2003 invasion fully justified itself. Leaving him in power would have all but guaranteed further conflict with other Arab states, and a resumed quest for weapons of mass destruction."

Bolton in a July 2016 op-ed in the Telegraph headlined "The Only Mistake of the Iraq War Was That We Didn't Get Rid of Saddam Hussein Sooner"

"Iraq today suffers not from the 2003 invasion, but from the 2011 withdrawal of all U.S. combat forces. What strengthened Iran's hand in Iraq was not the absence of Saddam, but the absence of coalition troops with a writ to crush efforts by the ayatollahs to support and arm Shiite militias. When U.S. forces left, the last possibility of Iraq succeeding as a multi-ethnic, multi-confessional state left with them."

Bolton in the same July 2016 op-ed

"The inescapable conclusion is that Iran will not negotiate away its nuclear program. Nor will sanctions block its building a broad and deep weapons infrastructure. 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. Time is terribly short, but a strike can still succeed."

Bolton in a March 2015 New York Times op-ed, "To Stop Iran's Bomb, Bomb Iran"

"The threat is imminent, and the case against pre-emption rests on the misinterpretation of a standard that derives from pre-nuclear, pre-ballistic-missile times. Given the gaps in U.S. intelligence about North Korea, we should not wait until the very last minute. That would risk striking after the North has deliverable nuclear weapons, a much more dangerous situation."

Bolton in a February 2018 Wall Street Journal op-ed, "The Legal Case for Striking North Korea First"