President Donald Trump selected John Bolton to replace H.R. McMaster as National Security Adviser. Here is a look at Bolton's background. USA TODAY
New National Security Adviser John Bolton won't try to moderate Donald Trump's foreign policy ideas, he'll try to implement them.
Will newly appointed National Security Adviser John Bolton help feed Donald Trump’s foreign policy instincts? Let’s hope so.
The established narrative from the president’s critics has been that President Trump lacks the knowledge, experience and temperament to successfully manage America’s national security affairs. By this reasoning he had to be surrounded by an “axis of adults” to restrain his impulsiveness, lest the U.S. blunder into global conflict based on a stray Tweet or sudden tantrum.
When Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster was appointed National Security Adviser in 2017, a New York Times column praised him as a “stabilizing force” to balance out “the hot heads who occupy Mr. Trump’s inner circle.”
With McMaster’s departure, the Times says, “if President Trump wanted a national security adviser who would match his blunt, hard-edge, confrontational approach to the world, then Mr. Bolton fits the bill.” The recent leadership switch at the State Department from moderate Rex Tillerson to more hawkish CIA Director Mike Pompeo was also framed as a potentially destabilizing move towards enabling Trump to be Trump.
But the Trump administration’s foreign policy has been successful because of the president, not despite him. His “blunt, hard edge” style is better suited for the dangerous world we live in than the cool detachment of Obama-era “leading from behind.” And if President Trump has disrupted the old way of doing things, it is only because the status quo was failing. He is winning in ways the old model would never have predicted.
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When the president made good on his campaign promise to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and move the U.S. Embassy there from Tel Aviv — a move Bolton had long recommended — establishment foreign policy circles were stunned. It was called a disastrous blunder that would undo decades of effort towards the Mideast peace process, fuel Palestinian rage, and alienate Arab leaders.
Yet, the expected uprising never materialized, and a few months later the White House hosted the first ever publicly announced meeting between Israeli national security officials and counterparts from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman and the United Arab Emirates, among other countries, discussing the growing humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip.
The diplomatic implications of Arab countries that don’t recognize Israel attending that meeting are striking. The get-together was brokered by Mideast peace envoy and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner, once dismissed as a diplomatic neophyte, but now seen as the key to bringing Saudi Arabia on board the peace process through his close relationship with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Elsewhere in the Middle East, President Trump’s bold approach to combating the Islamic State — which Bolton also supported — virtually destroyed their self-proclaimed Caliphate over the course of a single year. We knew his strategy was particularly successful when the president’s critics and former White House administration officials rushed to claim that it was the Obama team’s plan all along.
But if it was their plan, why did President Obama fail with it and Trump succeed? The question answers itself. On the nuclear agreement with Iran, which Trump has called “the worst ever,” the president’s new team members will be in place in time to formulate a strategy for the required waiver review in May, which may spell the deal’s doom.
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With respect to North Korea, critics feared that President Trump’s tough, almost contemptuous exchanges with “Rocket Man” Kim Jong Un, and veiled threats of preemptive military strikes might lead to devastating conflict. John Bolton and Mike Pompeo have taken similarly hawkish stances on dealing with Pyongyang. Yet instead of going to war, Kim reached out to the president, saying he is "committed to denuclearization."
The two will meet in May, another diplomatic first. President Trump praised China’s President Xi Jinping for helping bring North Korea to the table, while simultaneously slapping Beijing with tariffs seeking to reduce China’s trade surplus with the U.S.
Previous presidents kept the China trade and North Korean issues separated, but trade is Washington’s primary point of leverage in the Sino-American relationship. If the president can get a better trade deal for American workers while also encouraging Beijing to make Pyongyang see reason and abandon its nuclear weapons, he could be in the running for a Nobel Peace Prize. And Bolton and Pompeo are likely to help him get there.
James S. Robbins, a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors and author of This Time We Win: Revisiting the Tet Offensive, has taught at the National Defense University and the Marine Corps University and served as a special assistant in the office of the secretary of Defense in the George W. Bush administration. Follow him on Twitter: @James_Robbins.
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