All the buffers are gone. Donald Trump's soothing communications director Hope Hicks, his economic realist Gary Cohn, his surprisingly grounded Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and now his battle tested national security adviser H.R. McMaster. McMaster’s seat at the national security table will now be filled by the consummate supporter of one American foreign policy disaster after the next: John Bolton.
Whereas Tillerson and McMaster argued for maintaining the Iran nuclear deal, Bolton penned a 2015 New York Times op-ed advising, "To Stop Iran's Bomb, Bomb Iran." And as Trump prepares for talks with Kim Jong Un, Bolton will be making “the legal case for striking North Korea first” while yes-man Mike Pompeo cheerleads from his new post as Trump’s top diplomat.
But with a hollowed out State Department and a pr*sident itching for bellicose distraction from the Russia probe, the environment is ripe for Bolton to become the most consequential appointment to the West Wing since Trump took office. As Vox's Zack Beauchamp writes, "American foreign policy may be soon be shaped by someone who seems to truly believe that war is the answer to the world’s most pressing problems." And anyone who gets us into a war will surely leave the biggest imprint on the U.S. and even the world for years and maybe decades to come.
Steve Clemens, who in 2006 helped torpedo Bolton's Senate confirmation as George W. Bush’s U.N. Ambassador, told MSNBC that Bolton’s presence would bring out the fullest expression of "vile pugnaciousness" in Trump’s West Wing to date. Here's a glimpse of Bolton's handiwork in Bush's State Department.
He was involved in shaping US intelligence in the runup to the war — and not in a good way. In 2002, Bolton’s staff prepared a speech alleging that Cuba had an active biological weapons program. This wasn’t true, and the State Department’s lead bioweapons analyst at the time would not sign off on the claim. Per the analyst’s sworn testimony to Congress, Bolton then called the analyst into his office, screamed at him, and then sent for his boss. In this conversation, per the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, he derisively referred to the analyst as a “munchkin” and attempted to get him transferred to a different department.
This was cruel and unprofessional, but also dangerous. Carl Ford, then the assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research, testified that Bolton’s assault on the analyst had a “chilling effect” throughout the department, freezing out dissent on proliferation issues beyond Cuba. John Prados, a fellow at George Washington University’s National Security Archives, came to an even broader conclusion in a study of declassified Bush administration documents: Bolton bears a significant amount of blame for the politicized intelligence used to justify the decision to attack Iraq.
Although Bolton’s actions did not concern Iraq directly, they came to a high point during the summer of 2002 — the exact moment when Iraq intelligence issues were on the front burner — and they aimed at offices which played a central role in producing Iraq intelligence,” Prados writes. “Analysts working on Iraq intelligence could not be blamed for concluding that their own careers might be in jeopardy if they supplied answers other than what the Bush administration wanted to hear.”
During Bolton’s unsuccessful confirmation hearing, Ford testified that Bolton was a “bully” who “kisses up and punches down.” Remind you of anyone?
It's hard to imagine and painful to even write, but with Bolton, there's likely nowhere to go but down.
