The Bulwark Podcast - Amb. John Bolton: I Thought Trump Would Be Disciplined

Episode Date: March 6, 2023

John Bolton thought he could create a coherent foreign policy for Trump, but now sees he was naive. Plus, Charlie Sykes asks Bolton about his early defense of Trump's relations with Putin — and why he didn't testify during the first impeachment. Bolton spoke with Sykes at the Principles First Summit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Happy Monday. Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. It is March 6, 2023. And in case you missed it, the former president spoke this weekend at CPAC with what I think was a clarification and a very clear warning. In 2016, I declared, I am your voice. Today, I add, I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution. I am your retribution.

Well, thanks for making that clear. Look, you know, it is easy to make fun of CPAC, and I'm fully prepared to do that. But there's also I think this is something that people need to understand. There is a real threat there that is masquerading as a clown car comes circus. But it is real. And I think that what Trump was doing was letting everybody know what Trump 2.0 would be about. I mean, you look at CPAC and you realize, well, these are the crazies. These are the extremists. But as I mentioned on Morning Joe on Monday morning, this is what you would get with a second Trump administration. And people should have no doubt about that. Look, before we get

started this morning, just a couple of quick notes. I mentioned this in my newsletter this morning, and look, I know these numbers, these ratings bounce around a lot, but over the weekend, this podcast was rated as the number two political podcast on Apple, actually above Steve Bannon and Candace Owen. So maybe there is hope after all, but the point is, damn, and thank you all. I'm really so grateful for all of our guests and loyal listeners and my producer, Katie and editor Jason. And look, OK, maybe we'll fall out of the top five or the top 10 on some days.

But I just wanted to take a minute to say thank you. And while I'm on this topic, it was really so great seeing so many members of the Bulwark community over the weekend in Washington, D.C. at the principal's first conference. It was a really good reminder that we're not the crazy ones and that we're not alone. So if you're yet a member of Bulwark Plus, I hope you're going to consider joining us. Unlike a lot of other media startups, we have stayed small and lean, and we really depend on the kindness of strangers and people like you. And if you join us, you'll have access to our newsletters, my Morning Shots newsletter, JBL's Triad, Sunny Bunch's Bulwark Goes to Hollywood, Joe Perticone's new newsletter, Press Pass, and all of our podcasts. Not just this one, but also the weekly one that I do with Mona Charon called Just Between Us, if you haven't checked that out.

Her podcast, Beg to Differ, the Next Level podcast, Sarah Longwell's excellent must-listen, the Focus Group podcast, and of course, you'll have first dibs on all of our upcoming live events. So really, I hope you think about becoming a Bulwark Plus member today. Today's podcast is a bit different. I'm going to catch up with my colleague Will Salatin tomorrow, but today I wanted to share the audio of my conversation with John Bolton over the weekend, the former U.S. ambassador, obviously, and a national security advisor to

Donald Trump. Over the weekend at the principals' first conference, I had a chance to sit down with Bolton, and I had some questions. Look, we did talk Ukraine, Russia and China, but we also talked about his serial defense of Trump's relations with Putin, his refusal to voluntarily testify in the impeachment proceedings and his decision to write a book instead of testifying at that impeachment hearing. Here's how it went. Well, thank you all for coming. I don't think I need to give you a long introduction for our guest. Ambassador John Bolton was National Security Advisor to Donald Trump from April 2018 to September 2019, and United States Ambassador of the United Nations during the George W. Bush administration. And he also held a rather remarkable list of high-level positions in both the Reagan and the George H.W. Bush administrations.

He is the author of The Room Where It Happened, a White House memoir published in 2020. Ambassador Bolton, good to talk with you. Okay, so I want to talk about Ukraine. I want to talk about Russia, NATO, the increasing aggressiveness of China, America's role in the world. But I want to start by doing a little bit of housekeeping. What were you thinking going to work for Donald Trump? You are a well-known internationalist, interventionist. He ran on the slogan, America first. What were you thinking?

The better question, if I may say, ought to be, what was Trump thinking? You have a theory? Yeah, I think he wasn't paying attention, which was something I learned very early in the course of being National Security Advisor. You know, I had been on Fox News for many, many years after leaving the UN job. People said, Trump himself said to me, he watched Fox all the time. I don't think I was hiding my views during those interviews. So I assumed he heard what I was saying and understood it. And I had several meetings with him, had met him before the election, met him during the election, several times after

he took office, went through all of the positions I took on all the issues confronting the United States. And he gave me the offer anyway. So my view was I had heard everything that people had said about Trump. I'm accused for a lot of things. I'm almost never accused of being naive. But I did feel that, like every one of his predecessors, the gravity of the decisions that Trump would have to make on national security, the enormous implications of the choices he would make, would bring discipline to his approach and that there would be a way that we could have a coherent policy and that it was worth trying to make that

effort. I learned pretty quickly I was wrong about that, but I just didn't believe going in that the 45th president was immune to the realities of the rest of the world. But the America First slogan, I'm reading your biography here. Bolton is widely considered a foreign policy hawk and is an advocate for military action and regime change by the U.S. in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Venezuela, Cuba, Yemen, and North Korea. And so how did you not think going to work for a guy that was campaigning on America first, how did you not know that that would end badly? Well, I think those are all, overthrowing those regimes, and you probably left out a few, would be very much in America's interest. Obviously, the term America first, given its history, is offensive. But let's also remember John McCain's slogan in 2008 was country first. So I assume he's talking about this country. I don't know. He had another one in mind.

I just thought it was a politician's bumper sticker approach to the world. And as I say, my conviction going in was that faced with very difficult decisions, potentially committing American troops, that Trump would be disciplined. So, I mean, obviously, by the time that you went to work for him, though, it was clear that he had a problematic relationship with Russia and with Vladimir Putin. I want to talk about Russia at great length. And before you took this position, you had defended a lot of what Donald Trump had done with Vladimir Putin. So, for example, the day after he fired FBI Director James Comey, he met with the Russian ambassador and Sergei Lavrov in the Oval Office. You went on Fox News and you defended that. You defended the president

telling them that Israel had an agent in ISIS. Do you regret that? Well, I don't think that's what I did. I think what I said was the president had the authority to declassify information that he felt it was appropriate to do. I don't think he should have done it, but the argument was that somehow he had acted improperly. And in that score, it may have been unwise, but it was certainly not improper. And by the way, he should have fired James Comey on January the 20th, 2017,

for Comey's interference in the 2016 election. So you still support the firing of James Comey? Well, if he had done it on January the 20th, the Democrats would have supported it too, because they felt Comey's two press conferences, which it's hard to forget, cost Hillary the election, and they probably did. Okay, so a little bit later in this year, before you take office, at the Group of 20 meeting in Hamburg, Donald Trump met with Vladimir Putin for two hours without anybody in the room and actually took away the notes from the translator.

And there were aides who were, you know, raised concerns about this, who were upset about what is going on there. And you went back on Lou Dobbs' show on Fox News and you defended the president and the way he was behaving with Vladimir Putin. In retrospect, were you wrong? No. All presidents have one-on-ones with their counterparts. All of them. And it's a good thing to do.

But you suggested at the time that the aides who were concerned should be fired. You called for them to be fired. That's right, for saying basically he shouldn't have met one-on-one. What should they have done? I think they were wrong in believing he shouldn't meet one-on-one. And the fact he took the translator's notes away shouldn't tell you anything. In Helsinki, he also met with Putin one-on-one, and there were two translators in the room, one of which was the American translator. And so for those who say, my God, what did he give away? We talked to the translator after it was over, and he didn't give anything away. Another point is that the president

can't do anything without having aides do it. So if he had made some commitment to Putin, we would have found out about it. Whether he's a good president or a bad president, and I wrote a 500-page book on what my opinion of the presidency is. We'll talk about that. The notion that president can't meet one-on-one with a foreign leader, particularly an adversary, as Reagan met with Gorbachev, this goes back a long way. There's nothing surprising about that. All right. So these aides who are concerned about it, you said they should be fired. Should they have resigned instead? I mean, what should they, if you see the president doing

something that is dangerous, which you recount in your book, what is the responsibility of the person in the administration or the aide when you see the president, and we'll talk about your book, what is the responsibility of the person in the administration or the aide when you see the president? We'll talk about your book where you talk about him trying to get the Chinese president to help him win re-election or taking actions to do favors for dictators, including obstruction of justice, which you've talked about in your book. What is the responsibility? Should the aides not speak out or should they resign and then speak out? What is the obligation? Well, I think it depends on the circumstances that you're in and the nature of the issue. I lasted 17 months, and I was criticized by some people who, of course, said you never

should have taken the job and that you should have resigned on day one or day four, day eight or day 27 or day 84. I mean, we're after Helsinki. That's one series of criticisms. The other criticism was, why did you resign at all? Why didn't you stay in and continue to struggle? I made my decision. We can talk about it further if you'd like. Other people made their decision. There was going to be a national security advisor. I happen to have a pretty high opinion of my abilities. You can agree or disagree with that, too. But I figured as long as I could get things done, I ought to try and stick it out. And whether I stayed too long or didn't stay long enough, people can have their opinions on.

But I think the idea that when somebody sees something they disagree with and think is potentially wrong, they ought to go out and proclaim what's happened to the media as if that will have some effect, I think is naive. I think it's virtue signaling. It makes people feel good for a minute, and then it disappears. Well, but you wrote a 500-page book telling about this. That's right. No, that's exactly right. I did it, as Frank Sinatra would say, I did it my way. Okay.

So in this book, and we can go through the details. I mean, it is stunning stuff. I'd be happy to read passages of it for general edification. It's an audible book, right? I mean, okay. So asking China for help for his re-election campaign, you know, that they would buy more products from American farmers. You wanted to use the actual words the president used, but they would not give you permission for this, is it?

Right, in the pre-publication review. He said that it was a good idea to have these internment camps in China. He was offering favors to dictators, including Turkish strongman. He did not know the United Kingdom was a nuclear power. He did not know that Finland was not part of Russia. And of course, you also write about what you colorfully called the drug deal that was going down in Ukraine. You wrote about all of this. You put it in your book, but you wouldn't testify voluntarily to the House when the impeachment of Donald Trump was up. Why not? I felt that the impeachment effort was very ill-advised. I thought it was inherently political by the Democrats doing, in a way, exactly what they accused Trump of doing,

of using the powers of government for partisan political purposes, which is what he was doing in Ukraine. These are not the same thing at all. I think it is. Let me explain. Okay. No, wait, the impeachment is in the Constitution. It is part of our structure. Calling up and trying to shake down a foreign leader for political dirt is not the same thing. I think it is.

I think it is. What they did was knowingly to try and focus the effort in a very narrow way, among other things, to avoid interfering with the schedule for the Democratic presidential nomination, which was going to take place in 2020. They did it knowing, knowing that they couldn't get two-thirds in the Senate. And I called that impeachment malpractice because of the effect it had on Trump. Nancy Pelosi loves to say Trump will always be impeached. What she omits to say is Trump will always be acquitted. And the maneuver to impeach him and have him acquitted in the Senate empowered Trump. It had exactly the opposite effect of what the advocates of impeachment said.

When you said it was impeachment malpractice, I think you've explained it, but were you also suggesting that they should have looked at a lot of other things? Absolutely. That would have interfered. Here's my point. That would have interfered with the Democratic nomination process in 2020. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, others wanted to get out on the campaign trail. And I was told by Republican senators who had heard from the Democratic leadership in the House, they wanted to get it over with quickly. And that's what it was all about. Well, if this is such a serious matter, get it over quickly to avoid interfering with their nomination process,

that shows the fundamentally political nature of it. So what should they have done? When you say they've broadened it out, should they have looked at the obstruction of justice with Erdogan? Sure. Depends on whether you're serious about achieving an outcome by launching an impeachment process or whether you're virtue signaling. Look at us. Look how righteous we are. When the Watergate hearing started, nobody really knew where they were going to go. But they took their time. Sam Ervin and the Democrats went out of their way to try and bring Republicans in. And ultimately, although

Nixon was not convicted, he was forced to resign. Nothing of that happened here. And I think that's irresponsible from a constitutional perspective. It is ironic, though, that you would suggest that they should have broadened it to include some of the stuff that you have in your book, but were not willing to testify to. So you're criticizing them for not going deeper, but when you had the opportunity at office- And I talked to the Attorney General. To go back. That's right. And I went to the Attorney General. I put that in the book, too. And I told Bill Barr about some of these things with Erdogan and some of the others. That's his job. It's not my job. Okay. So you told Bill Barr? The Attorney General of the United States. You know, I understand what that reaction is. What else are you going to do? You want to rewrite the whole constitution to suit your particular version of

this here? There's a process and there are rules. Trump didn't follow them. And the answer, it's sort of like a man for all seasons. To get Trump will sweep everything else away. You got to be very careful. Okay. I want to talk about Afghanistan in a moment. And I also want to talk about- Can't we talk about Trump some more? Well, if you insist. Because I want to give you a chance to address this criticism, which was that you knew all of this stuff. You had all of this stuff. And instead of sharing it with the Congress of the United States,

you wrote a book, and you sold a book, and therefore you put that ahead of the obligation. You know the criticism. I want to give you a chance to answer that. Look, the idea that I was trying to make money off of the experience is fundamentally irrelevant. When you resign... That's not a denial, by the way.

I'm happy to make money. If none of you here in this room are happy to make money, speak up. When you resign and go on television for two or three or four days, it causes a flash and then it disappears. You have to answer questions from reporters. Do you think it's possible to lay out the complete story? Of course not. So what I did was write a 500-page book that laid it all out in ways that I thought were clear. And I hope it had an effect on the 2020 election. I don't know whether it did or not, but it was much more effective to go that way than to rush into the

spotlight for a few moments. So let's talk about Afghanistan, because you were, of course, very involved from the get-go in Iraq and Afghanistan. The withdrawal from Afghanistan was a fiasco. Who is responsible for that? The Trump administration negotiated the pullout. The Biden administration was charged with handling it. How do you apportion responsibility for what happened there? Well, they're both responsible. It's not simply that the withdrawal itself was a fiasco. The strategic impact of withdrawing from Afghanistan is the catastrophe. And I attribute that to Trump. It was Trump who negotiated with the Taliban to the exclusion of the legitimate Afghan government that we had set up. And that fundamentally said to both the Taliban and to the

people of Afghanistan, Trump wants out and it doesn't matter what the conditions are. And it was clear that the whole negotiation process was undermining the government of Afghanistan. Now, there's no doubt in my mind, notwithstanding that the people who negotiated the deal from our perspective, Mike Pompeo and Zahal Ilza, I'd say, but there were conditions, conditions that the Afghans had to meet, conditions the Taliban had to meet for us to withdraw. That was the way the Pentagon justified their support for the deal. But it was perfectly clear to me that Trump didn't care about the conditions. He wanted out, and he was going to get out if he had gotten a second term. Biden did not have to accept the deal. They completely misunderstood the undermining of

the Afghan government that the negotiation of the deal had caused. And Biden, in many respects, was the same as Trump. He wanted out and he didn't care what it took. Do you think that what happened in Afghanistan or how much did what happened in Afghanistan contribute to what happened later in Ukraine? Did Vladimir Putin look at that? Was that one of the factors that he took into consideration saying, I think the West is weak, I think this government is weak? Yeah, there's no question about it. And there were other factors as well. He met with Biden in Vienna in the summer of 2021. I can only imagine what this cold-blooded KGB operative thought of Joe Biden sitting opposite from him. I had a very clear idea of what he thought about Donald Trump for different reasons. I think he despised both of them. And he felt that from

the experience of the lack of an effective Western response in 2014, after the first incursion into Ukraine, that neither Biden nor the West as a whole would respond. You said something very interesting there. You think that Vladimir Putin despised Donald Trump. Talk to me about that. I think he thought he was a fool. So one of the lines we hear from MAGA World is that Vladimir Putin never would have invaded Ukraine

when Trump was president, but he waited till Trump was out and then invaded when Joe Biden was president. What do you think? No, of course that's not true. Look, from the time of the flap over the Ukraine security assistance, we were really in an election campaign at that point. And I think that Putin would not have contemplated invading during an election campaign because he could not predict what the impact on the election would be. He was waiting for Trump to get re-elected because he believed,

as I believe, that Trump would have withdrawn from NATO. Do you believe that he would have actually gone ahead and withdrawn from NATO? Yes, I do. And by the way, just to defend my book one more time, how long on the evening news interview I would have had would we have talked about the impact of what's wrong from NATO? Yeah. You know, that wouldn't have come up. Anyway, the point for Putin would be if Trump is basically doing his work for him, it makes the ultimate invasion that much easier. When Trump lost, I think that had to cause some reflection on Putin's part. But then almost immediately thereafter, Biden agreed to a five-year extension of the New START treaty and got nothing in return for it, a treaty that in 2010, when it was negotiated, was disproportionately favored to

Russia at the time, then followed the withdrawal from Afghanistan, then followed the meeting in Vienna. So by late 2021, the buildup is already underway on the Ukraine border. So this seems like a huge issue that is going to overshadow 2024. If a President Donald Trump 2.0 would pull us out of NATO, what would it mean for the world, for the Western alliance, for free countries, if the United States basically said, after this incredible success of NATO and Western unity, what would happen? Well, it would be catastrophic around the world. People talk about what minimal order there is in the world, and without really understanding that the reason there's almost any order in the world at all is because of the United States and

its strength projected internationally along with its allies. If we abandon the most successful political-military alliance in history, it would be a diminution of our ability to affect the rest of the world that you can't really calculate. And it wouldn't simply be damaging in the North Atlantic. It would be damaging around the world because we haven't talked about China, but China looked at the withdrawal from Afghanistan, I think, much the same way Russia did. And a withdrawal from the NATO alliance would be a free pass to the Chinese almost everywhere. So how surprised should we be? How surprised were you by NATO stepping up, the Western alliance being so strong? I'm guessing that Vladimir Putin thought that not only was the United States weak,

it would not step up, but that the West would not do this. I mean, I'm guessing that Vladimir Putin did not think that his invasion of Ukraine would result in NATO admitting Sweden and Finland as well, or that Poland would take the position it is. Your thoughts? Well, I think there were a lot of miscalculations. Putin certainly got completely wrong what the abilities of the Russian military were. Although, let's be clear, so did American intelligence. We briefed Congress that Kiev would fall in a matter of days and the country would fall in a matter of weeks. Remember, we were trying to get Zelensky out of the country

and have stay-behind guerrilla warfare planned after the defeat. So Putin was wrong about his own army, but so were we. And while NATO has responded respectably, this is far from over yet. And the weaknesses in NATO that remain and that are evident, I think Putin is going to try to exploit over the next year, because I think this, unfortunately, is going to go on for a long time because of the inability of the Biden administration to have a strategy for victory. What they're doing is providing enough aid so that Ukraine doesn't fall, which is fine. You know, this war can go on for a long time. No Americans are dying. We're getting great battlefield testing of our weapons. We're, as Secretary of

Defense Lloyd Austin said six or seven months ago, the Russians are feeding their army into a wood chipper. This is all fine. Of course, we're also destroying significant parts of Ukraine. And it's not enough simply to stop the Russians. It's the official position of the United States and every NATO ally that Ukraine should be restored to its full territorial integrity and sovereignty. And if we believe that, then what's the strategy to achieve it? Biden doesn't have one, and honestly, neither does NATO. So what should we have done and when should we have done it, do you think? Well, a large part of the problem stemmed from Trump's efforts to unleash Rudy Giuliani into

Ukraine, because from that point on for the rest of Trump's term, there was no effective relationship between him and Zelensky. And there was, while the provision of some assistance continued, it was not in any way connected with any kind of strategic appreciation of what the threat might be. So that was a year and a half lost, just simply lost to Ukraine. When Biden came in, I don't think they paid much attention to it either. But by the time you get to late 2021, when they begin to worry, and obviously as they later disclose getting intelligence that the Russians may be thinking of an invasion, there were multiple things we could have done to deter the Russians, which we didn't do. In fact,

on two occasions, Biden said, I don't think deterrence works here. We can punish them after the fact, but we can't deter them. Well, again, if you're Vladimir Putin, that says they're not going to do anything. What we should have done first, beginning in late 2021, or certainly before February the 24th, we should have imposed massive sanctions on Russia. Now, people said, well, if you sanction them before the invasion, maybe they'll invade earlier. Well, how did that work out? They invaded in February. The sanctions would have been the missed sanctions we didn't impose in 2014 and others to show that this is going to be extremely costly. There were other things we could have done as well. But even there, the NATO alliance performance was not that great on imposing the sanctions. You heard the Europeans, you heard the Brits, you heard us really say,

we're going to cut off purchases of Russian oil. In every case, the effective date was six months after the enactment of the sanctions. Six months. Six months for the Russians to hedge and make other arrangements, because it would be inconvenient for Europe and Germany in particular to put the sanctions down immediately. That's not effective on NATO's part. We've used the phrase self-deterrence several times, you know, described the Biden administration's approach to this. How concerned should the administration and NATO be about some of the saber-rattling involving nukes? Would Vladimir Putin ever use nukes? And what would the response be? What would the consequence

of that be? Well, it's possible, but I think the deterrence was not self-deterrence, even on the conventional side. This long series of arguments that we've had about do we supply Polish MiGs, do we supply more Javelins, HIMARS, tanks, F-16s today, it shows that the Russians have intimidated us because of the fear of a wider conventional war in Europe. Now, one question that the administration should be asking is, why their conventional war with Russian army? Where is this army that he's hiding that's so much better that it's going to escalate against us? And if he's got a better army, why isn't it in Ukraine now? Now, on the nuclear side, I think that the potential threat comes only in circumstances where Russian forces in Ukraine have totally collapsed,

are fleeing back toward the Russian border, and where there's been significant deterioration in Putin's own political position in Russia. I think it gets to be a more serious consideration then. Obviously, we're not at that point. And every time he has rattled the nuclear saber, we've had testimony by heads of our intelligence agencies in public session that they detected no changes in the deployment of any of the Russian nuclear forces, which means that was all totally a bluff. So I want to move on to China and the way that American attitudes towards China are changing right now. But you and I were talking about this in the green room before the show.

You went on Eric Bolling's show on Newsmax some time back, and you said something that I thought was going to make his head explode. You said that right now the country is safer under Joe Biden than Donald Trump. And people ought to look up this YouTube video because Eric Bolling was very, very upset about it. But it was surprising coming from you. Do you believe that today we are safer than we were under Donald Trump, and why? Well, I think we're safer because we've got somebody, at least in administration, that does have an appreciation for strategic thinking.

The trouble with Trump was that he didn't have an attention span long enough to focus on trying to move from A to B to C. He's compared it to a gnat. Yeah, that may have been complementary to the gnat. Trump's total focus was on what was good for Donald Trump. And, for example, withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal, imposing sanctions on Iran, all things that I favored. I wanted to go further, as you mentioned earlier, I wanted regime change in Iran. But Trump, at the Biarritz G7 meeting in August of 2019, came very close to meeting with the Iranian foreign minister, Javad Zarif at the time, that President Macron of France had brought to Biarritz to put him in a room with Trump. And Trump came very close to meeting with Zarif because he thought he could make a deal. And he would have been happy to reverse withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal

if he could have made a deal, like he thought he could make a deal with Kim Jong-un. There's just no thinking about that at all. Biden makes mistakes. And as I said, I think his performance on the Russian invasion of Ukraine is barely satisfactory, but that's better than withdrawing from NATO. So let's talk about China. After you left the administration, you wrote a scathing piece in the Wall Street Journal about the Trump administration's failed China policy. Let's talk about this because it does feel as if we're

in a bipartisan moment where everybody wants to crack down on China. What did the Trump administration, Donald Trump, get wrong about China? Well, Trump's focus, as on many, many other international issues, was trade. And he felt if he could make the biggest trade deal in history with China, that that would solve all of the problems. Now, there were some people in the administration who knew what our objectives were, but they were never going to be accepted by China. And Trump didn't understand them enough to push them, like what to do to stop 30-plus years of China stealing our intellectual property, about discrimination against foreign investors and traders, about manipulating the international trading system, and a range of other things. What Trump wanted in exchange for China making those kinds of

commitments was to buy more agricultural products. That was the biggest trade deal in history. And he didn't think about what other threats China posed. This is not because he had a sense of what China's threat was. He just felt that being tough on China would be politically beneficial to Donald Trump. And I think it was politically beneficial to him. There's a longer story going back to the early 2000s where there was this optimistic belief that if we traded more with China, they would become more open. If we engaged with them, I think we've been disillusioned about this. Where do you come down on the question of,

is it time to decouple from China? Is that even possible? Is that realistic? What should our posture be? I don't believe in industrial policy sort of generally. I think there should be a lot more careful examination of industries and products that have a national security factor in them. But I think right now American business is doing its own decoupling in a very rational way, that every time a company has to look at potential new capital allocation for investment in China, they're thinking of something else. They're trying to hedge their supply chains. I think this is going to happen anyway. In part, this is finally the end of the mythology of globalization, that political risk has disappeared from the world, and having a plant in China is no different

than having a plant in Iowa. It's just not true. Do you think China is going to invade Taiwan? Well, I think the risk is high, although I don't think they actually want to invade because they don't want to take over a heap of smoking rubble. They want Taiwan to fall into their lap like a piece of ripe fruit. And so I think the way it would happen would be not an invasion, but the creation of

some kind of political pretext to throw a blockade around Taiwan and then see if the United States came to Taiwan's side. Because if we didn't, that would absolutely demolish our position in East Asia. Taiwan at that point would fall under Chinese hegemony, and it would only be a matter of time before they took it over. But if we do come to Taiwan's defense, what happens then? What we should do right now is increase Taiwan's defensive capabilities. By that, I mean, among other things, home-porting a couple of American naval vessels in Kaohsiung. I would put a lot more American military forces into Taiwan to train and assist

the Taiwanese. So this would all be deterrence. Yeah, and that would be the same thing as another thing we could have done before the Ukraine invasion, put more Americans in, not to fight, but so the Russian generals figuratively looking across the border through their binoculars would say, I wonder what all those American flags mean. I think China can be deterred here. But I think the long-term answer is that we've got to take the step I first recommended in 2000 and grant full diplomatic recognition to the government of Taiwan. The Chinese won't like it. That would be very provocative, wouldn't it? And begin to integrate Taiwan into the kinds of collective defense structures that we need along the Indo-Pacific periphery. Japan, South Korea, Australia, others. There's a lot of work

we can do, and Taiwan could be a very important part of it. I want to talk about next year now. You have become a never never again Trumper. Fair to say that you are determined that he will never get back into the Oval Office with his finger on the button? Yeah, I think that's very important. I should say, just to see what the reaction in this crowd is, in 2020, I didn't vote for Biden either. I wrote in the name of a real conservative Republican because there weren't any on the ballot. Who'd you write in? I'm not going to say. Okay. It was not me.

Well, it wasn't you then, but are you thinking of running for president in 2024? And what is the rationale? What is the base there? Yeah. Well, I am thinking about it. I hadn't originally intended to. I did look very seriously at it in 2016. I went to the cattle shows in Iowa and New Hampshire. I took my wife and daughter up to New Hampshire to see how

they liked campaigning. I mean, I did a lot of due diligence and ultimately decided not to run. And I had not intended to do so this time up until Trump said that we should terminate the Constitution so that he could be declared the winner of the 2020 election. Now, you know, like a lot of people in this room, I've filled out a lot of security forms over the years. And there's always a question on it that says something like, have you ever advocated the overthrow of the government of the United States? And I've always said no. But that's what Trump was advocating. And that didn't disappoint me or surprise me.

Well, he actually did try to overturn the government earlier, remember? No, look, January the 6th, you give the man far too much credit. He had no idea what was actually going to happen then. Other people may have had ideas. He's not capable of thinking it through. He's not. But what I was really disappointed, I don't know why you think he's such a phenomenal presence.

This is a very limited man. He's done enormous damage. He's done enormous damage, but it's not because of his mental acuity, that's for sure. I'm going to let the whole January 6th thing go because we could go down that rabbit hole. But you raise the interesting question, though. If he is so limited, why have Republicans not figured out how to take him on?

We're sitting here right now, and he's still way ahead in the polls. A lot of the other Republicans, their grand strategy seems to be hummina, hummina, hummina, unicorn, maybe he'll die. How do you run against Donald Trump? Can you go around him, or do you have to go through him, Ambassador? Yeah, look, I think he's a lot weaker than people think. I've done polling through my PAC, and the last one I did was in late August of last year. I consistently found a lot less support for him among self-identified Republicans than a lot of other polls, and I think it's continuing to decline. I think people are intimidated by him because they're afraid of being attacked.

And I think the real answer is that rather than doing what happened in 2016, as the candidates other than Trump tried to take each other out so they could then face Trump alone, is you do have to go at Trump directly. In the course of this consideration, I've been asked by a lot of people, well, what would you do if you got on a debate stage with Trump? And I mean, the answer is I'd have a hell of a good time. Because if you're prepared to take him on, he doesn't know how to respond to it. Okay, how do you take him on? He's going to say, you just want to bomb everybody and you're a warmonger. Yeah.

Right, okay, that's his line about. So it's your turn, Ambassador Bolton. What do you say? I think I would explain how incompetent he was at doing all the things that happened during the administration. You would say this? You have to. Okay. It's true.

Because Mike Pompeo, Secretary of State, seems incapable of naming him, and Nikki Haley can't say a single issue she disagrees with him on. Well, you know, I've had my differences with Pompeo. If you've read his book, you probably have become aware of that. I know who I would support if I didn't run under some circumstances, but that's one reason. Who would you support? Well, I'm not going to say because I don't want to damage their chances. But I think if I could see a path to win,

and I would not do this just to be a pain in the ass. I would do it because I thought I could get the nomination. The person who stands up and tells the truth ultimately should prevail. And if that's not true in American politics, then you need another system. No one's ever accused you of being naive before. Over time, if you don't trust the people, leave. Leave. You can be skeptical of the people all you want, but it's the responsibility of a political leader

to change people's minds, to bring them to the position he thinks they ought to take. And if you spend all your time denigrating the American people, you're going to be in a room this size for the rest of eternity. So I think obviously one of the reasons why other Republicans are reluctant to take it to Donald Trump or to go to him is, number one, they're afraid to unleash the Trump insult machine on them, which will be unleashed anyway. number one, they're afraid to unleash the Trump insult machine on them, which will be unleashed anyway. But secondly, they're afraid that the base will be offended and that they will be excommunicated. So aren't you concerned that there would be just a tremendous

backlash against? I mean, this is the calculation that every Republican on that stage is going to make when they have to debate Donald Trump. So what are your thoughts about that? You have a cult of personality out there. How are they going to react? Well, I think the cult of personality is overrated. I think a lot of the polls that show support for Trump in head-on-head races with Biden are the tribal knee-jerk reaction. But I think, especially after November the 8th, I think more and more people see that the path to winning in 2024, not just the White House, but the House and the Senate, has got to be with somebody other than Trump at the top of the ticket. So what happens if Donald Trump is the nominee in 2024? I think he loses. I think we lose seats in the Senate in a year where we should gain four or five or six.

I think we lose control of the Senate in a year where we should gain four or five or six. I think we lose control of the House of Representatives. And I think the party itself could be in real trouble at that point. What if he wins? What would a Trump restoration look like? What would it mean for the kinds of things that we've been talking about? Well, I think it would have significant damage for the country. The damage that Trump did in the first term was all repairable, all repairable. The damage he would do in a second term is likely not going to be repairable. Give me an example of that. What would be an irreparable bit of damage? Well, I think the undercutting of the judicial system and the prosecutorial system reflected

in his effort to cancel the results of the 2020 election, which were amateurish and came nowhere close to success, this time would have people working on it that would be much more difficult to prevent. So looking back, a lot of people in this room have a lot of regrets about a lot of things. So do you regret the role you played in defending Donald Trump, enabling Donald Trump, giving him the cover, going into his administration? In retrospect, do you think that we wish that your wife had pulled you aside and said, she did. John, what are you thinking? I'm an edith pf guy, you know, you're gonna regret Rianne. Somebody's going to be National Security Advisor. You want it to be Steve Bannon?

Kash Patel? Because that's what's coming in the second term. You think he's joking. Steve Bannon is Secretary of State. See if you're laughing then. No, I don't regret it at all. I knew what I was getting into. As I say, I was wrong in that I thought that even Donald Trump would have to be disciplined by the gravity of the national security issues he had to face. But when I saw he wasn't disciplined, it just reinforced in my mind that somebody who knew what was going on had to try and do the best they could.

Ambassador, thank you so much for joining us. I appreciate it very much. Thank you. And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We'll be back tomorrow, and we'll do this all over again. The Bulwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.