John Bolton Has a Hilarious Way to Stop Trump From Pulling Out of NATO

Former national security adviser John Bolton has an unconventional suggestion for saving the U.S. alliance with NATO through a potential second term under Donald Trump: Just keep the former reality TV host distracted.

“So as Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, you believe that all Americans and everyone should take it very seriously when he says he wants to withdraw from NATO, and a second Donald Trump term, you believe, would mean an almost immediate withdrawal from NATO,” prompted MeidasTouch’s Ben Meiselas on Wednesday.

“Well I think he would do it very early in the term,” Bolton replied. “The remedy I would propose to anybody who doesn’t want us to withdraw from NATO is find a way to distract his attention.

“Since he has a short attention span, that can work, at least for a while, until it pops back into his head,” he said. “This is, I think unfortunately, a very good example of what a second Trump term would be like. A lot of things he talked about in the first term, maybe made some tentative steps toward but didn’t actually carry through on, we’ll see again in a second term.”

According to Bolton, a policy hawk who also served in Ronald Reagan’s administration, the consequences of America’s exit from the Cold War alliance could be dire, effectively resulting in the end of NATO, leaving behind a fractured and significantly weakened European alliance, while devastating America’s international credibility as an ally.

Trump has long criticized America’s relationship with the international military alliance, baselessly insisting that other NATO members have failed to pay their dues, and argued that the U.S. has been shortchanged by other members, even though that’s not how the alliance operates.

The Cold War organization has “no ledger that maintains accounts of what countries pay and owe,” according to former Obama staffer Aaron O’Connell, who explained to NPR in 2018 that “NATO is not like a club with annual membership fees.”

In February, Bolton claimed that Trump had completely fabricated a story in which he allegedly told a European leader that he’d allow Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO allies if they didn’t “pay their “bills.”

“But … the fact that it’s an imaginary conversation that makes Trump look very good—as all of Trump’s imagined conversations do—doesn’t mean that he doesn’t believe what he’s saying,” Bolton said at the time.