“It’s the Perfect Storm”: As John Bolton Arrives, the Deep State Braces for a Turn Toward War
News of John Bolton’s appointment as national security adviser, displacing General H.R. McMaster, landed like a bomb in Foggy Bottom. Washington’s usually staid diplomatic corps was already on edge following the shock expulsion of Rex Tillerson, soon to hand the State Department over to somewhat trigger-happy C.I.A. Director Mike Pompeo. Bolton, however, is his own unique breed of hawk. “Horrified has been the ongoing feeling. Many recall his poor tenure at the U.N. [and] as undersecretary,” a current senior State Department official told me, reflecting on Bolton’s controversial résumé. While serving under Secretary of State Colin Powell, Bolton was both a cheerleader and early architect of the Iraq war. “General expectations keep falling.”
Bolton’s ascension, like Tillerson’s downfall, was seen by many as an inevitability, as Donald Trump reconfigures his inner circle to better reflect his nationalistic impulses. A veteran of the George W. Bush administration with an infamous fondness for military adventurism, Bolton reportedly made an impression on Trump with his frequent diatribes on Fox News, railing against the Iran nuclear deal and calling for more aggressive posturing toward North Korea. “Bolton was always going to end up in the Trump White House sooner or later. His world view, or more accurately, anti-world view, is vastly closer to Trump’s than most of the president’s existing advisers,” said Richard Gowan, a U.N. expert and professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. “He loves to talk about U.S. strength, and he is a notoriously aggressive negotiator. Those are precisely the qualities Trump looks for, and the two men fully deserve one another.”
Denizens of the Deep State fear Bolton for mostly predictable reasons. A nationalist with little patience for the pragmatic realism of the G.O.P.’s old guard or the democracy promotion that defined the early Bush years, Bolton is expected to tell Trump what he has been waiting to hear: that he should ditch the J.C.P.O.A. binding the United States to the Iran nuclear framework, and impose harsh sanctions on Tehran. “Bolton is not interested in [a deal],” a Senate aide told me. “It’s like the perfect storm with where the president has been on it. He has his yes-man.” (Bolton famously wrote a 2015 op-ed titled “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran.”) Others worry that Bolton could be a de-stabilizing force amid the North Korea crisis, sabotaging the potential for high-level talks between Trump and Kim Jong Un. “Bolton, Pompeo, and [Nikki] Haley could turn into a very hawkish triumvirate running the U.S. foreign-policy machine,” Gowan said. “They are likely to be rivals behind the scenes, but on issues like Iran they are actually all certified hard-liners.”
On a more prosaic level, however, there is the fear that Bolton will succeed in navigating the Swamp where so many other Trump advisers have failed. “Everyone that knows him knows that he is very smart, and not only is he very smart, but he is very effective,” a former senior U.S. official cautioned. “Bolton is so dangerous because he is good at what he does.” Ian Bremmer, a foreign-policy analyst and founder of the Eurasia Group, described Bolton as “extremely bureaucratically capable”—an infighter with sharp elbows and a tactile understanding of the media. “He knows how to get in meetings that matter, he knows how to play the media, and he is going to push hard to be a very strong national security adviser with those views vis-à-vis his colleagues in Cabinet.”
While Pompeo has ingratiated himself, for example, by telling Trump what he wants to hear, critics worry that Bolton will push the president further, tapping into his most aggressive instincts at a moment when the United States is facing a foreign-policy minefield. “To be honest, I think the president is more pragmatic,” a former State Department official, who knows Bolton, told me. “[Trump’s] business background seems to lean him more toward looking for a deal, not being wedded to a sharp position.” As the president’s top adviser on national security, however, Bolton will be rivaled only by Chief of Staff John Kelly and Defense Secretary James Mattis for power in the West Wing. “We know that Trump is clearly influenced by some of the last people that he speaks to,” the Senate aide added. “Besides the chief of staff, the national security adviser is usually the last person that speaks to the president before a major decision.”
Along the Acela corridor, Bolton’s official return to the White House, announced Thursday in a tweet dismissing McMaster and thanking him for his service, precipitated a somewhat arcane debate over whether Bolton is indeed a nationalist as opposed to a neoconservative, or if some other term might better encapsulate his worldview. While Bolton served in the Bush administration alongside such neoconservatives as Paul Wolfowitz, he has demonstrated little regard for the value of either democracy promotion or international institutions. In 1994, more than a decade before he would serve as ambassador to the U.N., Bolton infamously said of the 38-story Secretariat building in New York, “If it lost 10 stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.” Jeet Heer at The New Republic lays out three major policy wings on the right, which he identifies as the prudential realists, neoconservatives, and radical nationalists. Bolton, he writes, falls into the latter category.
For many members of the D.C. policy establishment, however, these are distinctions without a difference. “The difference between, in my mind, a conservative hawk who is just hard-nosed about American power and a neocon is that a neocon has a certain amount of wishful thinking or fairy-dust belief that, when you strip away bad things, what happens is good for America,” said Cameron Munter, a former U.S. ambassador who overlapped with Bolton at the State Department. Conservative hawks, he explained, want to use military might to boss people around. Bolton is a magical thinker, now armed with a hammer, who sees a world full of nails. “He is a hawk without thinking through or even understanding what the consequences could be,” said a second former State Department official who served during the Bush years. “Which I always found very difficult to understand because he is not a stupid person.”
The cognitive dissonance is amplified by the distance between Bolton’s positions on Iran and North Korea and the isolationist principles that defined Trump’s thinking for years. “During his campaign, Trump ran on a foreign-policy platform centered on restricting American involvement in foreign wars. But Bolton’s appointment to a key national security post signals an extreme shift in the opposite direction,” Suzanne DiMaggio, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, told me. Back in 2013, for instance, Trump had tweeted, “All former Bush administration officials should have zero standing on Syria. Iraq was a waste of blood & treasure”—a point he sounded repeatedly on the campaign trail. Bolton, meanwhile, “has called for regime change in Iran by force, and a first strike against North Korea,” DiMaggio said. “Both of which would result in catastrophic wars.”
As with the appointment of any new Trump adviser, Bolton’s arrival in the West Wing comes with disclaimers—and the beginning of the countdown clock to his inevitable departure. “There is the whole policy side, and then there is the personality side,” the second former State Department official said. “He has an extremely aggressive, negative personality.” Bolton, this person explained, has demonstrated that he is entirely “capable of being reasonable, capable of listening, capable of taking advice.” But he also has “very serious anger-management problems,” the former official said, recalling Bolton throwing papers, pens, and pencils during arguments. “He is acerbic, condescending, gruff, [and] demeaning when somebody doesn’t agree with him or he doesn’t like your argument. I can’t imagine how he is going to moderate that tendency all the time with Trump.”
Nor is he known for humility in the face of obvious mistakes. Of all the Iraq war defenders, Bolton is among the least apologetic. “I think it is sort of half amazing that he could have been wrong on so many issues, and not only be not apologetic about it, but double down on wrong predictions,” a current State Department staffer told me. With someone like Trump, who has little inclination to look beyond what’s spoon-fed to him, this tendency is particularly dangerous. “When leaders get to an environment where people can no longer give them real news, that’s when things start falling apart,” Bremmer said. “It is one thing for Trump to say that other things are fake news. It is [another] thing for his own advisers to facilitate that. I fear that we are heading into that environment.”
There is one issue in particular that sources I spoke with highlighted as a potential future source of tension between Bolton and Trump: Russia. Bolton has previously characterized Russian interference in the 2016 as an “act of war,” called for harsher sanctions to make Russian President Vladimir Putin and his cronies “feel pain,” and suggested that Trump should be insulted by Putin’s refusal to admit to meddling in the U.S. electoral process. “There’s this accepted story, this narrative, that the reason that Tillerson and McMaster got shown the door is that they tried to speak truth to power . . . If he didn’t like them speaking truth to power, how is he going to like Bolton telling him about Russia?” the former U.S. official mused.
Bolton may struggle, too, to build out the team he needs to be an effective national security adviser. The first former State Department official described Bolton as “sharp elbowed and not someone you’d describe as a consensus builder or team builder”—a problematic disposition for someone tasked with coordinating between agencies. The current State Department staffer, who has interacted with Bolton, echoed the sentiment. “He prides himself on being the anti-diplomat and, unfortunately, in this world, you do still have to work with people and build teams. I would be hard-pressed to find anybody that would want to work with him again,” the staffer said. “Who is dying to go work with Bolton?”
