Disturbed as I have been by Trump’s lechery and lies, yesterday’s news of his firing of General H. R. McMaster and replacing him with John Bolton has added a new sinister potential to his presidency. With the appointment of Bolton, Trump now has another aggressive hardliner whose positions on Iran and North Korea match the virulent rhetoric of his speeches and tweets.
Of course, Bolton has his supporters who believe that he has the force to stabilize Trump and establish consistency leading the country toward the foreign policy they dream of. They applaud the unapologetic rhetoric of his “America First” worldview. They love that he has always advocated that the United States should take a hard nationalistic approach to China, Iran, North Korea and Russia. And they get all tingly when he espouses unilateralism over the multilateralism, even when our allies are involved.
Bolton, no doubt, is intellectually qualified for any top position in the administration. And his conservative objections to the Iran deal and North Korea’s behavior have some merit. What corrodes his policy formations, though, is his “everlasting itch” to launch preemptive strikes. Bolton has argued that the United States should drop any diplomatic means to arrest North Korea’s nuclear program and simply bomb them; he urges policy makers to tear up the Iran deal, and then bomb that country too. His bellicose language isn’t just rhetoric. In the lead up to the 2003 war in Iraq, Bolton vehemently pushed for the invasion, claimed the conflict would end swiftly and has continued to indefatigably defend the greatest strategic blunder of the twenty-first century, (thus far). Like Rumsfeld, Bolton fantasized about Iraqi welcoming American troops and insisted that Saddam’s tyranny would miracuously be transmuted into glittering democracy. Like Rumsfeld, Bolton still maintains that the invasion was the right call even though everyone knows that the administration lied about Iraq’s build up of weapons of mass destruction.
With Bolton as national security advisor and Pompeo shortly to become secretary of state, one sees a trio of characters more unsettling than the Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld triumvirate whose disastrous policy needlessly sacrificed over four thousand American troops and a half million innocent Iraqis. And just as in that war, neither Bolton nor Trump can be trusted to evaluate intelligent reports honestly about Iran’s compliance with the six-party deal or tell the truth regarding Iran’s nuclear program.
Bolton graduated from Yale Law school. Yet some of his comments resemble the bluster of a barroom bully. At least when he speaks about legal matters he observes a more decorous style: “It is a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law, even when it seems in our national interest to do so-because over the long term, the goal of those who think that international law really means anything are those who want to constrain the United States.” Though the style here is less blunt than his usual dogmatic pronouncements, the content thumps the reader with Bolton’s sledge-hammer philosophy. What exactly does Bolton mean by any international law that would constrain the United States or its policies? Does Bolton mean policies such as propping up dictators in south east Asia or Latin America? Policies conspiring with military juantas to assassinate democratically elected leaders? Policies spraying Agent Orange across large swaths of Vietnam?
Over the coming months or weeks we will all have to watch the administration closely and be ready to pressure congress and protest in the streets if Trump or Bolton or Pompeo begin browbeating the legislative branch “for open war.” Like Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, neither Trump nor Bolton have ever experienced the horrors of combat. Trump dodged the draft through the phony flat-foot ruse. Bolton joined the Maryland National Guard to avoid the possibility of going to Vietnam. Men who falsely or assiduously evade the grotesque horror of war are sometimes those most ravenous for unspeakable violence, mayhem, death and dismemberment which their policies perpetrate.
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