The Decibel - INTERSECT/26: John Bolton on Canadian military defence

Episode Date: April 26, 2026

Globe columnist Andrew Coyne interviews former U.S. ambassador and national security adviser John Bolton at The Globe and Mail’s INTERSECT/26 forum of government officials, industry leaders and policymakers.  Coyne and Bolton discuss the spectre of Trump as a threat to Canada’s sovereignty, the tense relationship between the two countries and what Canada needs to do to bolster its defence in a time of potential conflict. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hi, it's Cheryl. Today we're bringing you a special episode from the Globe and Mail's Intersect 2026 conference, which happened this week in Toronto. The Globe brought together government officials like federal minister Dominic LeBlanc and Ontario Premier Doug Ford, as well as CEOs and industry leaders, to talk about Canada's pressing economic and social issues. This year was all about building a stronger Canada. With threats to Canadian sovereignty and its economy,

what will Canada do to build a plan for national growth and renewal? We're spotlighting this conversation between Globe columnist Andrew Coyne and former U.S. ambassador and national security advisor John Bolton. They discuss foreign policy under Trump, who Bolton famously worked for, how Canada and the U.S. can manage their now tense relationship, and what Bolton thinks about Canada's military defense. Have a listen. Our next session, our next guest, is going to talk to us a bit about American foreign policy under Donald Trump

and what the twists and turns that we've seen almost daily or indeed intra-daily mean for Canada and the world. For this purpose, it is going to be my great pleasure to introduce to you Ambassador John Bolton. Mr. Bolton was national security advisor under Trump in his first term in 2018 to 2019. He's also a former ambassador to the United Nations. and a well-known commentator on defense and foreign policy. He's the author of a number of books, most recently, The Room Where It Happened. Ambassador Bolton, please join us. Please welcome Ambassador Jordan.

I think what we may do is just start off with the top of the news, with the war in Iran, and it's hard to see how it could have gone worse in strategic terms, whatever the early tactical successes. The regime is still in place. If anything nastier than ever, it's still in possession of its nuclear material. still has most of its missiles and is now in possession of the strait of Hormuz. Is the takeaway from this

just that Donald Trump has bungled things or is regime change harder than looks? Well, the first question really is what were Donald Trump's objectives? And I don't know the answer to that. I know what my objectives would have been and I've felt this way for 20 years, which is the only way you're ever going to have

peace and stability in the Middle East is to get a new regime in Tehran. And this is really a matter of pretty straightforward logic. When you have somebody whose behavior is unacceptable, which is pursuing weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear weapons, which is the world's oldest, largest state sponsor of terrorism, which holds parades for 47 years with people saying,

death to America and death to Israel, you know, at some point you take them seriously. And you can try and change their behavior, but after 47 years, if you haven't done that, you can either live with a threat or you can do something about it. So if you're into solving problems rather than massaging them, regime change is the obvious answer. I'm not sure that's what Donald Trump came up with, though. So there was a complication of aims rather than the inherent difficulty of achieving regime change? Or not having any aims at all, which we,

which would be more typical. If you were going to go for regime change, the first thing to have done would have been to make what I think is a very compelling case to the American people why regime change is in our national interest. And he didn't do that.

And that's not a matter of one speech. It's a matter of weeks, months of preparation. Didn't do any of that. The corollary to that is you prepare Congress. He didn't do that. Another related point is you prepare your allies. And not just NATO, but the Gulf Arabs, our Pacific allies that depend on Middle Eastern oil for so much of their economy.

He didn't do any of that. And then maybe most important of all, you coordinate with the opposition inside Iran, which is very widely spread but not well organized. And he didn't do that either. So when people say his objective must have been regime change, he was saying that. He said it as the regime was machine gunning its own people in the street in January. And just a little footnote, you know, a regime that machine guns its own people isn't going to treat hostile foreigners very well either. But Trump said on social media, his words, keep protesting, take control of your institutions,

help is on its way. I don't think that's what ultimately happened, but that's what he was saying. You mentioned NATO, and it does appear that NATO is one of the bits of collateral damage from this. It was already in a lot of trouble the relationship after the Greenland fiasco, but it's really looking very rocky now. What is Trump's beef with NATO? I mean, I think earlier in this first term, people would have said it's the traditional U.S. president's concern that NATO partners weren't spending enough on defense, but it really seems like he's quite hostile

to the organization and its members. and I'm just wondering where you think that comes from. Well, he's always been hostile to NATO. I describe in my book how at the NATO summit in Brussels in the spring of 2018, when it was his turn to speak, it was not clear to me when he started whether he would pull out a NATO right there. He believes that basically the United States defends Europe.

They don't pay for it, and we don't get anything out. of it. Now, if I thought that's what NATO did, I wouldn't be in favor of it either. But I think NATO is in America's interest, and I think we benefit from a strong alliance. And that's a concept he doesn't understand. I do want to say one thing, though, about this question of countries bearing their fair share of the burden, which, if I may say so politely, Canada hasn't done in a long time. Canada has not met the 2% target. Now, that traditionally doesn't. doesn't bother the United States much because quite honestly,

we can't defend ourselves without defending you. You know, congratulations. But you should pay your fair share of the burden. But I will just speak as an American who has many, many times, along with hundreds, probably thousands of other Americans, said to our friends in Europe, you need to spend more on defense. Not just the 2% target from 2014, but going back the last days of the Cold War in the early days after the Cold War when people thought we had

reached the end of history, remember that, and we had said firmly, I believe, but politely, I hope, you need to spend more on defense. And they didn't do it. Then, along comes Donald Trump and says, you blankety blanks, you shirkers, you loafers, I'll withdraw if you don't spend more on defense. And our European friends say, oh my goodness, I guess we better spend more on defense. What does that tell you? What do you say to Donald Trump when he says, well, your way didn't work, did it? My way did. Just something to think about. How much of that, though, was Trump's threats and how much of it was Russia invading Ukraine? Well, it was Russia invading Ukraine in 2014 that led to the NATO summit at Cardiff Wales that year

to set the 2% of GDP target. So that didn't have anything to do with Donald Trump. The question then, by 2017-2018, when Trump is inaugurated, is are they on the path to meeting it by 2014, which was their stated goal? And the answer was a lot of people weren't. When you look at what's happening in Ukraine and Trump's... Can I just make one more point on the end?

Sure, yeah. I didn't get any reaction in the room at all. Maybe I'm not reading well. Don't you see what it means when people who believe in NATO try to make the alliance capable of doing what, which is capable of doing many things, fit and equipped to do it. And we don't get a response.

It takes Donald Trump to wake people up. That says there's a problem. I think people are waking up in a lot of ways in this country, and we'll get to that in a second. but I just wanted to ask you about Russia and Ukraine and the Trump response to that, which has been, to say the least, not particularly supportive of either Ukraine

or the causes that it represents. The thing that Trump advocates or apologists will say is, well, we can't get too involved in Europe because we've got to pivot to China. We're much more concerned about the Chinese threat, which is great, except that we're now hearing that in this upcoming summit with Xi, he's going to make some sort of concept.

on Taiwan. So I guess my question to you is which right now looks like the graver threat to you, Russia in Eastern Europe or China and Taiwan? Well, let me say something first about the isolationist in the United States because there are some like J.D. Vance that don't want to pivot anywhere except back to the center of the U.S. There are others who have a more sophisticated argument, also fallacious, but a little bit more sophisticated, which is China is the main threat in the 21st century. And by the way, congratulations on growing closer to China. I hope you enjoy it. China is the main threat in the 21st century. We don't care so much about Europe. We don't care so much about the Middle East. Besides, we don't have the assets and capabilities to deal with

all these places. We have to focus on China, which is an attitude that lasts right up until you have to deal with China. And then they conclude we don't have the capabilities or the assets to deal with them either. It's all the same isolationism, and that is a real problem, especially within the Republican Party. His base thought that Trump was an isolationist, and they found that he is not. That doesn't mean he's a Ronald Reagan conservative. It proves the critical point that cannot be said too often, and that is Trump does not have a coherent philosophy. He doesn't do national security grand strategy. He doesn't even particularly do policy as the way we understand that term.

He does Donald Trump. That's what he's interested in. And that's pretty much all he's interested in. This country has spent the last 150-odd years in the belief that we would always have a stable United Democratic Republic to our south. That the best would defend us, as you mentioned, if we ran into an enemy aggressor, at the very least wouldn't threaten us. We've now had the last year under the shadow of Donald Trump announcing he wants to annex Canada, to make it the 51st state, et cetera.

And while people took it as a joke, at first I don't think people continued to take it a joke the more that he kept repeating it. So my question to you is, what does Donald Trump really want from Canada? Does he seriously want to annex us, or is it about our resources or the Arctic, or controlling our foreign policy? What do you think is his objective, if it has one? I mean, you do still have a stable Democratic Republic to yourself. It's the president that doesn't meet those characteristics.

I think at the beginning, when he talked about annexing Canada and calling Prime Minister Trudeau governor, it's because he didn't like Trudeau. And he didn't like Trudeau in the first term either, and he knows that calling him governor and saying Canada is going to be the 51st, state is demeaning to him, and he enjoys that sort of thing. I don't think it was ever serious, but the more people reacted, the more he loved doing it. In the social media world, which I deal with, but not as much as others, it's called trolling. And he and the people

around him think that government policy, by and large, is determined by how well you troll, and they trolled Trudeau very, very well. And I think a lot of that continues today. I think it's important to separate Trump, who I believe is an aberration from the majority feeling in the country. Because much of what he's done, including threatening invading Canada, played no part in the 2024, 2020, or 2016 presidential campaigns. This was out of his fertile imagination.

And I think that's really where support for it is, find except to sink of fans around him. And yet there are certainly people in the MAGO world, and I read their tracks from time to time, who seem to think that Canada is a big problem for the United States, whether because we're this woke liberal dystopia or because we're under the thumb of a client state of China or these kinds of statements. So short of annexation, maybe that's all just trolling, there certainly seems to be an agenda to circumscribe our options,

whether it's dealing with China, whether it's our trade policy or our resource policy, should we have reason to be worried on that front, that there's a much more aggressive aim to limit our options as a country? Honestly, I don't think he cares. I don't think that's what's interesting to him. Well, the people around him, though.

Well, but they have passing influence on him. It was a problem in the first term. I think it's even more acutely a problem in the second term that a carefully thought out decision-making process is not something he's terribly interested in. And therefore, the last person who talks to him on any given issue has a disproportionate influence. And so I would not make bets about consistency

or long-term strategy in trying to get something out of Canada one way or the other. This is the guy who renegotiated NAFTA, and he calls it USMCA. I guess you call it something else. NAFTA was fine with me. But now he's discontented with the trade deal that he has between the United States and Canada. I mean, who was the idiot in the United States who negotiated the last trade deal? This is Trump in action.

He just sort of forgot that he's the one who negotiated the trade deal. Now he's going to do it better. If you were advising the Prime Minister of Canada and you were looking at this world where we can't necessarily count on the Canada U.S. trade relationship being the same as it was, we can't necessarily count on the same defense arrangement, we're kind of having to rethink a lot of things. What would you place the most priority on? Would it be building up our defense? Would it be Arctic sovereignty? Would it be using our energy as leverage? Would it be trade diversification? What do you think is the really key thing we need to focus? on to build up our resilience and autonomy and independence? Well, I wouldn't rethink so much. I mean, there are transient things and there are permanent things. And you have to think not only what happens for the next three years, but what happens in the

infinity that lies after the next three years. Let's start with a few things that are constant. One is geography. I mean, I'm sorry you live next to the United States. What do you expect me to do about it? The trade ties that have built up over decades, centuries really, between Canada and the United States, are dictated by a logic that Trump may not understand, but in any event, he cannot contradict on a sustained basis. And what applies in economics, I think, applies in politics and other issues as well.

There are a lot of things Trump says and does that people in Canada don't like, and rightly so. There are a lot of people in the United States that don't like them either. And there's a virtue in gritting your teeth and saying, all right, I don't like this. In fact, I'm insulted by it. I'm infuriated by it. But rather than respond in kind,

what are the long-term issues that we have to consider, the long-term things that keep us closely bound together whether everybody likes it or not? So I think it's a big mistake. I speak as a Burkean conservative It's a big mistake to make overly broad conclusions on insufficient data. And Donald Trump is not the basis on which I'd make a lot of conclusion.

So that's a very comforting message to hear, the theme running through a lot of your remarks is this is all going to blow over. The United States will snap back to something resembling what we saw before. Trump will be gone. Why should we believe that, though? I mean, if right now you would say the likely successor to Donald Trump and the Republican Party is J.D. Vance, who's not a huge improvement from our perspective. And even if the Republicans are defeated,

you know, it's not clear that the Republican Party is going to go back to anything resembling what it was, or indeed that America as a society. This is a country that's elected this guy twice, and I think the rest of the world looks at that and goes, something has cracked in America that would do that. Why should we believe it's all going to come back to something resembling normalcy?

Well, let me name his three opponents for you. Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris. You know, two out of three, Trump beat. And not surprisingly. I think any Republican other than Trump would have beaten Biden, too. So it's not that, particularly in 2016, that anybody saw this coming.

And I'm not in a position any better than anybody else to predict what will happen in the 2028 nomination. But there simply isn't anybody else like Donald Trump. It's not a personality question. It's the way he looks at the world, which is through the prism of his own interest. Every politician thinks of his own self-interest. Only Trump, as far as I know, thinks of it exclusively.

And as for Vance, look, in 2016, J.D. Vance compared Trump to Hitler. In 2022, he was running for the Senate and decided he needed Trump's endorsement. And his views changed a little bit, and he got the endorsement. In 2024, he wanted to be vice president. They changed again. I'm really wondering what J.D. Vince Vance thinks now as he gets prepared to fly back to Islam about at some point to negotiate something about this war. I don't know what J.D. Vance will believe in when it gets to be 2028.

And bear in mind, the last two presidents who moved directly from being vice president to president through election were George H.W. Bush and before him, Martin Van Buren. So it's not like this happens frequently. Sure. Well, Vance will say whatever he needs to say to get elected. But if we were looking at the base of the Republican Party, or indeed a lot of the elected officials or the intellectuals around it, they don't really look like the Republican Party of all. How do the Reagan Republicans, how do the Berkian conservatives, how do the normal conservatives, take back their party when it seems to have cast them aside? Well, I just don't think that's accurate.

I think in Congress today, if you talk to overwhelmingly Republican senators and Republican House members in terms of national security policy, they're still basically Reaganite. That's the good news. The bad news is they're intimidated by Trump. But that's one reason that I think Trump's influence is so transient because I don't think there's any successor,

including J.D. Vance, who can have that effect that Trump does. both because they don't behave the way he does and they don't have the political support for it. I don't think J.D. Vance has a real throw at keeping the Trump coalition together. I think the coalition is fragmenting already for a whole host of reasons,

and I think it will continue to fragment. And if the November elections go as badly for Republican House and Senate members as beginning to appear, I think Trump's ability to intimidate those who remain standing is going to be pretty limited. Might it be the best thing for the Republican Party to suffer a blowout defeat in this midterm? Well, I don't think so because that means the Democrats win a blowout victory, and that thought doesn't cheer me up much.

what do you think are the prospects for democracy in the United States? People look at the things that Trump has done, whether it's to do with intimidating opponents, whether it's to do with controlling the media, whether it's to do with running roughshod over the separation of powers, and there's a lot of worry in this country and in the United States and around the world that democracy is in a fragile state with the United States. They're people very concerned about the midterms,

whether they're in fact going to be free and fair. And it's not a fantasy to worry about this after the January 6th episode. So I'm going to guess you're relatively sanguine about that. Put our minds at ease about the state of democracy in the United States. Well, I think Trump's doing damage. There's no doubt about it. But the idea that somehow it's an existential threat to the Constitution,

I don't believe it's he does a lot of outrageous things. let's just take tearing down the east wing of the White House and putting up this ballroom. Now, the earth won't turn on that, but it's an outrage. And it may be that it'll be stopped in the courts. It may be that people are outraged that he's worried about a ballroom when they're worried about the cost of living.

And so a lot of the damage that he does is, I think, repairable. I think some of the damage that he did in the first term was repaired. and I think a lot of the damage that he's doing in the second term can be repaired. It remains to be seen, and I think people should be vigilant. But, again, I don't think you want to overstate the nature of the threat. This is not Catalan or Sulla or Pompey at the end of the Roman Republic,

and for God's sakes, it's not Julius Caesar. Not in competence, no, in ambitions, perhaps. Well, thank God he's incompetent. Just going back to the big picture in a post-Trump world, even before Trump, people were saying we're moving into a different world, that we're not going to be the unipolar, Pax Americana in future. Democrats were saying this as much as Republicans. Can you sketch out what's going to replace that if we survive Trump?

Will there still be a NATO? Will there still be an America that takes a leadership role in the world? Or is America on a bipartisan track towards a much less expansive view of its role in the world? Well, I think in the Democratic Party there's a greater threat of what is functionally isolationism than there is in the Republican Party. It just inherently doesn't believe in a strong national defense. and I think it's a weak America that leads to more problems internationally, not as strong America.

As Donald Rumsfeld used to say, American strength is not provocative. American weakness is provocative, and that is the DNA of the modern Democratic Party, at least certainly the left-wing flank of it, which has the momentum and energy now. I think the Republican view, the Reagan-Bush view, will come back into,

predominance within the Republican Party, a lot depends on crises around the world, which could happen in the remainder of Trump's term. I think people now understand in a significant way that we need defense spending not just at two or three percent, but somewhere in the range of the end of the Cold War and the Reagan administration when it was five to six percent. Trump himself has proposed a $500 billion defense increase in the next fiscal year up from just over one trillion, which is a good start, but it needs to go much higher than that. And I think others in the West as a whole need to spend more. The Japanese, the former Prime Minister,

right before Takeichi, said that Japan would double its defense spending over a five-year period from 1% to 2% of GDP, and she has said, Prime Minister Takhiichi said she would speed that up. that will make Japan the second largest military power in the, not the geographic West, but the free powers of the world, which is something pretty remarkable when you think about it. But that's how threatening they see the rest of the world. And I think ultimately reality takes hold, and the people in the United States will see that. You're not worried, though, about the resources available to buttress American strength. When you're running deficits in peacetime of whatever it is,

five or six percent of GDP, and your debt has gone to stratospheric, at some point your wish to spend more in defense is going to run into the reality of the pinched resources. Well, then you spend less on domestic welfare programs. And I know that's hard politically to do, but welfare programs don't protect you from Chinese aggression. And so if you want to spend more on welfare,

where it's a, as they say, that's a choice that people can make that will have disastrous consequences. They're not going to make that choice in Japan and South Korea and Taiwan. They're not making it in Australia, where through the August program they're going to have, in due course, when the submarines are constructed, 10 to 12 nuclear power to tax submarines that can project power from Australia into the Indian Ocean,

which is where the Chinese are trying to take over as they have done in the South China Sea already. If people don't want to think in strategic terms, they're making a very, very poor decision. And I think that's one of the problems the United States has had is that after the defeat of the Soviet Union in the Cold War, people were saying it's the end of history, globalization will take care of everything,

we can have a peace dividend, we can cut defense budgets. Well, good luck with that. And we haven't had politicians by and large in the United States since the end of the Cold War who were trained to address the people in strategic terms, who could sit behind the Oval Office, the resolute desk in the Oval Office at 9 o'clock Washington time at night and say, my fellow Americans, we have a serious problem we need to deal with. We need more people who can do that because the threats are growing. And we can either plus up defense budgets now, cut domestic spending, and deal with.

with the deficit or we will have more problems later. Let me ask you a couple of personal questions in the time we have left. What lessons do you draw from your time as Trump's national security advisor? Was it worth doing? Do you regret it at all? No, knowing everything I know now, which is quite a bit, I would still do it. People say, why did you take the job? I don't think I've been criticized for a lot of things, not usually for being naive. naive. I thought I knew what I was getting into, but I thought that like every other American

president before him, the weight of the responsibility, the gravity of the decisions Trump would have to make in the national security space would discipline his thinking. And it just turned out to be wrong. Do you feel he made a difference, though? I'll let others decide that. I know I made my share of mistakes. I think, for example, that our efforts to overturn the Maduro regime in Venezuela, which I would do over again, only I would do a lot more of them, were the right thing to do. I'm sorry we left the people of Venezuela to suffer for basically eight more years under Maduro. I wish we had done more to beef up defenses in the Ukraine. I wish we had done more to help Taiwan get ready for the crisis that they're facing now.

I wish we'd been able to increase defense spending more. It was an effort in many recent, in my job just to keep the train moving down the track, not necessarily speeding it up or moving it into different direction. You're a man of firm convictions, as I like. What, if anything, have you changed your mind about that is a big thing in the last 10 years? The Republican Party could withstand Donald Trump. Meaning you didn't think it could before, and now you do? Well, I mean, I've spent a lot of time in politics. I have to say when, I think it was even late 2015,

when Donald Trump referring to now-deceased Senator John McCain said, I didn't think McCain was such a hero. I like my heroes who don't become POWs. My immediate reaction is this guy is toast, and I was obviously wrong. Final question. What unpleasant truth about the world does a polite audience like this need to hear that it might not like to hear? There are evil people out there who think your civilization is rotten and prime for the picking.

And if they can do it, they will. All right. Well, I think that's all the time we have. I like to say I spread sweetness and light wherever I go. I like to send people out singing after the session. Please join me in thanking Ambassador Bolden for his remarks. Thank you very much, sir. That was terrific.

Thank you very, very much.