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Having wrongly claimed that Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction, former Pentagon official and national security advisor John Bolton knows a thing or two about big mistakes. Had he expressed any regret about advancing the lie that led America to invade Iraq, he might be considered a pretty good judge of when a White House is dangerously out of control—and that’s the case Bolton attempts to make in a tell-all book of his time as President Donald Trump’s national security advisor, In The Room Where It Happened.
Yet the incident Bolton singles out as “the most irrational thing I ever witnessed any President do,” according to The New York Times’ review of his book, has nothing to do with Trump asking foreign leaders for political help or cozying up to dictators. No, the worst thing Bolton witnessed Trump do is decide not to start a war with Iran.
“The moment he cites as the real ‘turning point’ for him in the administration had to do with an attack on Iran that, to Bolton’s abject disappointment, didn’t happen,” writes Jennifer Szalai in the Times’ review of the book. “In June 2019, Iran had shot down an unmanned American drone, and Bolton, who has always championed what he proudly calls ‘disproportionate response,’ pushed Trump to approve a series of military strikes in retaliation. You can sense Bolton’s excitement when he describes going home ‘at about 5:30’ for a change of clothes because he expected to be at the White House ‘all night.’ It’s therefore an awful shock when Trump decided to call off the strikes at the very last minute, after learning they would kill as many as 150 people.”
Bolton was plotting to start a war with Iraneven before American troops hit the ground in Iraq. Trump may not deserve much praise for his foreign policy, but at least he resisted the urge to slaughter more innocent people in another Bolton-backed war.
Bolton’s book will be big news regardless of whether the White House succeeds in stopping its publication due to concerns about classified information—read Reason’s Scott Shackford’s in-depth take on all of that here. Among the dribs and drabs that have leaked so far, the biggest bombshell seems to be the allegation that Trump’s impeachable conduct with Ukraine was not a one-time mistake but part of a pattern. In addition to pressuring the Ukrainian government to investigate Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, Trump also directed U. S. policy towards Turkey and China with an eye toward winning reelection.
“Trump commingled the personal and the national not just on trade questions but across the whole field of national security,” Bolton writes in an excerpt of the book published by The Wall Street Journal. Much of Trump’s trade war with China, Bolton alleges, was conducted with the intent of helping the president win reelection and little more. “I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my White House tenure that wasn’t driven by re-election calculations,” Bolton writes.
