The Room Where It Happened

“They didn’t do nearly enough to establish order, and what they did do was so transparently self-serving and so publicly dismissive of many of Trump’s very clear goals (whether worthy or unworthy) that they fed Trump’s already-suspicious mind-set, making it harder for those who came later to have legitimate policy exchanges with the President.” 

One of Bolton’s key contentions is that the so-called “adults in the room” did more harm than good by working against the president’s objectives. As this resentment stewed, it resulted in a deep mistrust of later officials, much to Bolton’s frustration. Whether or not Bolton realizes it, he too could be construed as the one of the so-called “axis of adults.” He actively works against Trump’s initiative to “end the endless wars” throughout the book. Elsewhere, his foreign policy work in Ukraine reflects an entirely different attitude toward the country than Trump’s.

“While foreign-policy labels are unhelpful except to the intellectually lazy, if pressed, I liked to say my policy was ‘pro-American.’ I followed Adam Smith on economics, Edmund Burke on society, The Federalist Papers on government, and a merger of Dean Acheson and John Foster Dulles on national security.” 

Given that Bolton spends very little time explaining the broader philosophy guiding his decisions, this rare explication of his worldview is worth unpacking. For example, “pro-American” may seem like an obvious label for anyone working in US national security. Yet Bolton’s “Americanism” defines itself by its elevation of the national interest and US sovereignty above all other concerns, including human rights abuses and the promotion of democracy abroad. A particularly stark example of this attitude emerges after the death of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi by agents of the Saudi government. Bolton’s unwillingness to censure Saudi Arabia and its Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman grows out of a simple and cold calculus: If the US doesn’t sell weapons to the Saudis, the Russians will.