My my my. What a depressing way to start the new week.
I've begun skimming many articles...as a means to keeping my sanity.
For my way of thinking, the question is, can we ride out the storm?
Or will we all be lost at sea.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/20/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The Bolton Administration Has Already Begun
By John Feffer, Informed Comment
20 May 18
The hard-right national security adviser successfully tanked the Iran deal.
His next target? The North Korea talks.
For a man with a reputation for venting spleen and flying off the handle,
John Bolton bided his time before finally rising to the position of power
he
now occupies.
The former U.S. ambassador to the UN spent much of the last decade
consolidating his political base through stints at right-wing institutes
like the American Enterprise Institute, media appearances on Fox, and the
occasional reckless op-ed. He considered running for president in 2012 and
2016 but chose not to take the risk. Instead, he raised large amounts of
money for extreme right-wing Republican candidates like Senator Tom Cotton
(R-AR).
When Donald Trump appeared on the political scene, Bolton eagerly endorsed
the candidate in the presidential race and offered himself up as a
potential
secretary of state. Trump won, but Bolton didn't get the call. A similarity
in temperament and a difference in ideology seemed to doom his appointment.
The White House, after all, couldn't possibly accommodate two filterless
hotheads.
Moreover, Bolton's continued support for the Iraq War and a more
interventionist U.S. foreign policy seemed to put him forever at odds with
the new president. "Bolton's lambasting of global aristocrats aside, there
isn't much in the man's worldview that rings consonant with President
Trump's 'America First' foreign policy," wrote Daniel DePetris in The
American Conservative.
That was then. Now John Bolton is Trump's national security advisor.
After a steady diet of levelheaded corporate execs and restrained military
men, Trump clearly wanted a little more hot sauce in the Oval Office. As
for
the differences in ideology, those were largely fictitious. Trump has no
ideology, and Bolton is smart enough to tailor his message to his audience.
Trump is a very powerful boat with no rudder. Unfortunately, Bolton is now
his rudder. Which effectively means, when it comes to foreign policy, that
it's Bolton's administration now.
Bolton's Impact
National security advisor is the perfect position for Bolton. He didn't
have
to go through any messy confirmation hearings. He doesn't have to perform
any of the ceremonial tasks of a secretary of state.
He can instead focus on what he does best: steering government policy far
to
the right. Only a few weeks into his job, he can already put one notch in
his gun for helping to steer the United States out of the Iran nuclear
deal.
This should have been an easy task, since Trump had already made clear his
distaste for the agreement. But there was still significant disagreement
within the administration. Bolton, it appears, tilted the balance away from
those, like Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who preferred to remain within
the
agreement. Writes Mark Langler in The New York Times:
"Even if Mr. Mattis had wanted to fight for the deal, it is not clear how
much he would have been heard. Mr. Bolton, officials said, never convened a
high-level meeting of the National Security Council to air the debate. He
advised Mr. Trump in smaller sessions, otherwise keeping the door to his
West Wing office closed. Mr. Bolton has forged a comfortable relationship
with the president, several people said, channeling his "America First"
vocabulary.
Now that he has this comfortable relationship, Bolton will move on to more
challenging assignments. "By working in the West Wing, the national
security
adviser spends more time with the president than the secretaries of State
or
Defense, and so can always get the last word," writes Jonathan Swan in
Axios. "But Bolton is signaling restraint until Trump makes a decision."
So, for instance, with the Iran deal decision made, Bolton has been coy
about whether he's still pushing a regime-change strategy toward Iran. In
public, of course, he must defer to the president. In private, Bolton would
never keep his ideas to himself. As one of the biggest boosters of the
militant, cult-like People's Mujahedin of Iran (or MEK), Bolton is no doubt
whispering into Trump's ear at every possible opportunity that Iran is on
the verge of regime collapse and a cadre of Ahmed Chalabis are ready to
take
over. All it needs is a tightening economic noose and a military nudge from
Israel.
Meanwhile, as the president's enforcer, it's Bolton's job to play the bad
cop. He's already done so with Europe, raising the possibility of
sanctioning European businesses that continue to work with Iran. Bolton
must
love the opportunity to kill two multilateral birds with one unilateral
stone.
However, the test of Bolton's impact shouldn't be Iran, where his views
intersect with Trump's. The real challenge will be on issues where Bolton's
stated preferences are diametrically opposed to current policy.
From Regime Change to Rapprochement?
John Bolton has never concealed his desire to see the collapse of the
current government in North Korea. In February, even after the two Koreas
had cooperated in the Winter Olympics, Bolton continued to argue in the
Wall
Street Journal that the United States should launch a preemptive military
attack on Pyongyang and its nuclear facilities.
The Journal piece featured a bizarre, legalistic argument based on his
interpretation of a British attack on a Canadian steamboat in U.S.
territory
in 1837. (No, I'm not making this up). Bolton didn't bother to devote any
space to the likely consequences of a preemptive attack on North Korea
that,
unlike the British example, could escalate to an exchange of nuclear
weapons
and involve the deaths of more than a million people.
It was pure Bolton: a legal intellect plus an instinct for bombast - and
minus any acknowledgement of real-world consequences.
Now, as national security advisor, Bolton must wrap his mind around the
reality of the potential summit between his boss and Kim Jong Un, scheduled
for June 12 in Singapore. This might seem to put Bolton in a bind, forcing
him to make arguments that run counter to his long-held preferences.
But remember: Bolton knows how to bide his time. He knows that the track
record of U.S.-North Korean negotiations isn't very good. He knows that a
failed summit could easily push Donald Trump to the other side of the
spectrum - or perhaps, given North Korea's reaction to the recent
U.S.-South
Korean military exercises, the summit might not happen at all. A Trump
scorned will likely find regime-change arguments more compelling.
In the meantime, Bolton is doing what he can to subtly undermine the
upcoming summit. He's ratcheted down expectations by saying that the Trump
administration isn't "starry-eyed" about the meeting. He's loaded the
summit
agenda by adding "their ballistic missile programs, their biological and
chemical weapons programs, their keeping of American hostages, the
abduction
of innocent Japanese and South Korean citizens over the years." It would be
hard enough to negotiate a nuclear agreement even without adding these
other
elements (though North Korea has already released the "American hostages").
But perhaps the most sinister tactic Bolton has deployed involves his
references to Libya. In interviews, he has said that Libya's
denuclearization in the 2000s can serve as a model for the North Korea
talks.
Libya? The country that gave up its nuclear weapons program and then,
within
a few years, experienced civil war, foreign intervention, and regime
collapse? Is that really the kind of model you want to highlight with a
country like North Korea, which is worried about precisely such a scenario?
An anonymous source in the Trump administration told Abigail Tracy of
Vanity
Fair that Bolton is sending his own message to the North Koreans: "I mean,
there is only one reason you would ever bring up Libya to the North
Koreans,
and that is to tell them, 'Warning: don't go any further because we are
going to screw you'. So yeah, I completely agree that that is a dog whistle
to the North Koreans, telling them, 'don't trust us.'"
Of course, Bolton's mere presence in the administration, even if he just
stands quietly in the corner and scowls, sends the message that this
government is not to be trusted. Perhaps that's the real reason for North
Korea's sudden summit skepticism.
War at the Top?
John Bolton isn't stupid enough to contradict his boss, at least not
directly. He's a sycophant to his superiors and a sunvabitch to his
subordinates. The interesting part comes with his relations to his equals.
The most interesting part will be his relationship with Secretary of State
Mike Pompeo.
Thomas Wright, in Politico, argues that Bolton and Pompeo are cruising for
a
mutual bruising. He argues that it's not hawks versus doves in the Trump
administration, but "litigators versus planners."
"The litigators, led by Trump and deputized to Bolton, see national
security
policy as a way of settling scores with enemies, foreign and domestic, and
closing the file. They will torpedo multilateral deals, pull out of
international commitments and demonstrate American power before moving on
to
the next target.
Planners, on the other hand, are worried about the day after - for
instance,
how the United States addresses Chinese economic power in the wake of a
pullout from the Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal.
It's not yet clear whether Pompeo is a litigator or a planner, and thus
whether he'll team up with Bolton or side with the quintessential planner,
Jim Mattis, to challenge the national security advisor's blow-'em-all-up
philosophy. Wright expects a showdown.
I'm not sure. I expect tactical alliances between Bolton and Pompeo (on
Iran) and tactical disagreements (on China). Where they disagree, Bolton
probably will gain the upper hand, if not immediately then eventually,
because he knows better how to manipulate the levers of power.
But on the general direction of Trump's foreign policy, Bolton and Pompeo
are in agreement. The faux-isolationism of Trump during his presidential
campaign fooled a number of neoconservatives into voicing their opposition.
But it didn't fool either Bolton or Pompeo.
Let's be clear: There is no American "retreat" from the world. Under the
rubric of "America First," the Trump administration has created a new kind
of multilateral engagement - aligned with the hard right in Israel and
Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, allied with authoritarian and
far-right
leaders like Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Vladimir Putin in Russia, and
Viktor Orban in Hungary, and in support of a range of plutocratic interests
over and above the wellbeing of the majority and the planet as a whole. (I
long for Angela Merkel to just come out and say it: "Gott im Himmel, we
must
oppose this new Axis of Autocracy!)
So, not a retreat from the world but a retort to the world: Move this way,
not that. As the Washington Examiner recently editorialized, "Trump's
foreign policy record is one of America continuing its role as global
leader
- even if we're leading in a direction that displeases John Kerry."
But please, let's not talk about Trump's "foreign policy record." This is
not the world of Donald Trump. The world of Trump is Mar-a-Lago, Fox News,
and his Twitter account. His worldview is limited by his over-inflated ego
and bank account.
No, this is the world of John Bolton. And, for a limited time before he
blows it up, we're just living in it.
e-max.it: your social media marketing partner
