Today, Explained - Bolton's Back

Episode Date: March 27, 2018

President Trump announced John Bolton will be his new National Security Advisor just as the White House prepares for historic talks with North Korea. Just last month, Bolton called for pre-emptive strikes on North Korea. In 2015, he endorsed war with Iran. Vox's Zack Beauchamp tells Sean Rameswaram about Bolton's controversial background and what it means to have a hawkish advisor seated next to the president. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There are all kinds of podcasts out there. News podcasts, music podcasts, sports podcasts. There's even a podcast about the cloud. It's called the Google Cloud Platform Podcast. It's weekly. Learn more about it at g.co slash gcp podcast. Zach Beecham, senior reporter at Vox. Welcome back. Hello. Happy to be back. I feel like we only talk to you when the president is making changes to his cabinet. I'm sorry about that. No, no, that's okay, because it means we'll talk like every week or so. Perfect. Breaking news.

President Trump has just tweeted. Shaking up his administration's top ranks. President Trump is announcing that he is going to name a new national security advisor. Replacing White House national security advisor H.R. McMaster with John Bolton. So before we get into the new guy, I should just ask, you know, what exactly does the National Security Advisor do? National Security Advisor is basically the curator of what the president sees and hears on foreign policy. Their job is to sort through all the information and policy recommendations that they're getting from everybody else, give the president an assessment of what the advisor thinks, and also an honest summary of what all the different things are, and then ultimately present a set of recommendations to the president. This person is the principal filter in the way that the president understands

the world. And this is a position that does not require a Senate confirmation of any kind? That's right. Because it's not a technical cabinet position like a secretary, you don't have to go through the Senate confirmation process. No one's going to ask questions of, say, the nominee, John Bolton? No, there's no nominee whatsoever. They've already announced the timetable for Bolton taking over McMaster's position. And when is it? April 9th. April 9th, very soon. So what does it mean that our new national security advisor will be John Bolton? Oh, boy. Oh, boy. John Bolton. He is maybe the

most hawkish man in America. Wow. He loves war. He doesn't put it like that. But whenever there's a problem, you can count on John Bolton proposing war as a solution for it. He said the solution to Iran's nuclear program is that we should bomb Iran. Just as Israel twice before has struck nuclear weapons programs in the hands of hostile states, I'm afraid, given the circumstances, that's the only real option open to us now. He was a big supporter of the Iraq War. He still thinks the Iraq War was a good idea. He has said the solution to North Korea's nuclear program is, you guessed it, bomb North Korea. Anybody who thinks that more diplomacy with North Korea or sanctions is just giving North Korea more time to increase its nuclear arsenal, increase its ballistic missile capability, increase the accuracy of its guidance systems, and put us, South Korea and Japan, in more jeopardy. The basic setup is John Bolton sees a rogue state and he thinks the solution to it is found in a bomber bay.

What is his story? Where does he come from? Is he related to Michael? If only. I'd like a more musical national security advisor. Yeah, me too. So John Bolton has been like a fixture in DC for a really long time in Republican politics. He's been an attorney and a consultant that he really first came to prominence in the George W. Bush administration. Okay. Bush hired him to be the undersecretary of state for arms control, basically managing U.S. diplomacy surrounding weapons of mass destruction and other general weapons proliferation issues. And this is before 9-11 or after 9-11?

This is before 9-11. Okay. After 9-11, that became a really important job. I imagine. Bolton played a major role in the run-up to the Iraq War. Okay. Bolton played a role in helping politicize intelligence on issues of weapons of mass destruction. So, for example, he once decided he wanted to give a speech alleging that Cuba had a biological weapons program.

This was not true. Okay. A State Department intelligence analyst objected and was like, you can't have this language in your speech. It's not true. And so Bolton calls this guy into his office. He screams at the guy, calls for the guy's boss, talks to the boss for a while, refers to the analyst derisively as a munchkin for some reason. Maybe he was short. And then says that the guy should be transferred to another department.

Now, the boss stood up for his subordinate. And so Bolton didn't get what he wanted here. But what he did do is help create a climate of fear among intelligence analysts, not just in the State Department, but across the different bureaucracies about dissenting from the administration's line on WMD. And if you look at some of the documents there and internal conversations with Bush administration people, they'll say this helped prevent dissent from being surfaced on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program, which was, of course, the reason why the invasion happened in the first place. Bolton is unrepentant about all of this.

It's especially funny because Trump once tweeted that all Bush administration officials involved in the Iraq war should be discredited. And here he is promoting someone who had a really important role in messing with intelligence before the war, who bears a lot of blame for the fuck up that happened. This doesn't make him very popular within his department, but how does the administration feel about John Bolton? Oh, they promote him.

President Bush intends to nominate John Bolton to be our next ambassador to the United Nations. One of the most important diplomatic posts in the entire government. Which is to say George W. Bush very much liked this John Bolton character. Correct. Okay. And Bolton's not a dumb guy. I want to be clear. He really believes in war and he is a huge asshole to a lot of the people around him. But he's smart. The issue is not intelligence or even competence at managing the bureaucracy, which has been the case with other Trump administration employees. It's that he's sinister. So Bush elevated him for whatever Bush's reasons were.

But the Senate was not interested in John Bolton as ambassador to the U.N. Yes, which is a Senate confirmable position. OK. And the reasons why were twofold. First, there was the Iraq intelligence issue, because that obviously was in the middle of the war turning into a disaster. And everyone was really upset at the politicized intelligence. The second issue was something I alluded to earlier, which is the way that he treats his subordinates. So this incident with this intelligence analyst that he yelled at is not a one-off. There's another incident from the 90s where a federal contractor named Melody Townsall tried to raise questions about something Bolton was working on at the time, a USAID project. Bolton, instead of thanking her for blowing the whistle

on problems with the contract, followed her around a hotel in Moscow, screaming at her. By her account, he throws stuff at her. She gets so scared that she hides in her hotel room. And then he slips angry notes under her hotel door after she stays there for days. And have these stories been corroborated? At the time, during the 2005 Senate hearing, Joe Biden was the ranking Democrat. And he said there were five different people alleging multiple allegations of Bolton politicizing intelligence or mistreating subordinates. Carl Ford, who was in the State Department with him, very conservative Republican, said that Bolton's MO was kissing up and punching down.

So he doesn't get confirmed to the UN? No. And Republicans controlled the Senate at the time. OK. So this wasn't a partisan thing. It was that he seemed like a guy who was unfit for high office. Wow. So Bush appointed him to the U.N. job as a recess appointment, basically going around Congress. He could never make it through the Senate and only lasted about a year in the job. Because his recess appointment ran out?

Yeah, and he couldn't be confirmed. And he famously shows up to the U.N. after saying something like, you could chop off the top 10 floors of the building and it wouldn't make a difference? I believe that might be the exact quote. Not the best opening salvo for a UN ambassador. Love to have a UN ambassador who thinks the UN is bad. He railed against a lot of people in the UN, but actually didn't get a lot done because he was pretty isolated in the Bush administration at that point.

But early on, he was winning a lot of bureaucratic battles. So what's he been up to since basically losing in the George W. Bush administration? Oh, he's been on Fox News pretty much the entire time. Perfect, because it's a 24 7 channel. Yeah, he's always there. Fox News contributor John Bolton, Ambassador. Fox News contributor. How are you doing, sir? And welcome back here in America. Good morning. Newsroom. Turn on Fox News. There's John Bolton. You go to a conservative conference. There's John Bolton. Some of these events, by the way, are quite troubling. So he has really close ties to a group of radical anti-Muslim extremists. Oh, no. Sort of call themselves counter-jihadists.

This again. who are two of the most prominent anti-Islam activists in the United States. They're part of a broad ideological movement called the counter-jihad that believes that the U.S. is being quietly infiltrated by Islamic extremists and that mainstream Muslim American organizations like the Council on American Islamic Relations are secret fronts for terrorist groups, engaging in something they call civilizational jihad. And these people have proposed to shut down something like 80% of all mosques in the United States. Bolton doesn't

outright espouse their views. He sort of cozies up with them. He sees them as kind of supporters and worthwhile thinkers. You can't imagine someone who wrote a foreword to an avowedly anti-Semitic book being the national security advisor. But this is like that. Except this time we've got a president who proposed a Muslim ban and watches a lot of Fox News. And if you connect a couple of dots here, John Bolton all of a sudden makes a little bit of sense. He sure does.

So how do we think he and Donald Trump got connected? Fox News. Oh. It's pretty clear. Yeah. But is that just what we think because he watches a lot of Fox News and he's on Fox News. Oh. It's pretty clear, yeah. But is that just what we think because he watches a lot of Fox News and he's on Fox News a lot? Look, Trump loves watching TV. We know that Trump staffs his administration with people who he sees on TV defending him, like Larry Kudlow,

the CNBC pundit, who just got appointed to a top economics post. And there's like a few other ones. Okay. The like overall situation, right, is one in which Trump sees people on TV. He likes that. And that's who he wants working for him in the government. More with Zach Beecham just ahead. We're going to find out how this Bolton appointment might change the United States foreign policy. Before that, here's this, a fresh take on a Bolton classic. Adolf McMaster for more hawkish views He don't need the United Nations Said he could lose ten floors

Who needs the UN when you only want war? When a Trump loves a Bolton ignores the Iraq defeat forgets George W and WMDs He won't need

confirmation and it don't matter He won't need confirmation And it don't matter that he's brash Now we're running North Korea Gotta deal with that mustache When a Trump loves a Bolton He gives him everything Moving to the cloud can be scary, but Google wants to help. They've even created a podcast to explain

cloud stuff. It's called the Google Cloud Platform Podcast. Google developers Melanie Warwick and Mark Mandel answer questions, get in the weeds, and talk to Google Cloud Platform teams, customers, and partners about best practices from security to machine learning and more. You can subscribe to the podcast at g.co slash gcppodcast. This is Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos from Talking About John Bolton with Zach Beecham. He hosts the Worldly Podcast at Vox. This is a really, really big deal.

Bolton is now in charge of the White House's foreign policy. He is in charge of managing it. He's in charge of dealing with the cabinet secretaries. He is Trump's principal lifeline to the world. And he believes fundamentally that we need to go to war, multiple different wars at once, wars that could have thousands, tens of thousands, millions of casualties, potentially in the case of North Korea. And he wants to put U.S. troops in harm's way because he believes the threat to the United States is so dire that there's no other solution. Almost every expert disagrees with him in these two cases. Bolton doesn't care. He believes that he's right, and it's very possible that he'll get his way.

Are there any forces in the Trump administration who might provide a counter-argument in scenarios where, let's say, something terrible happens, there's an attack? The last bastion of hope here is Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis. Not only is Mattis widely understood to be a force for restraint inside the White House, but Trump likes him. I don't know if it's because he stays out of the media. I don't know what the reasons are, but he is the person who has been anchoring American foreign policy in the Trump era.

And his job seems for the time being to be relatively safe. It's interesting that you're saying that the introduction of John Bolton into this administration speaks to this increasingly hawkish cabinet, and the one person maybe holding it back is a general. A general whose nickname is Mad Dog. Got it. So we've got General Mad Dog Mattis on one end. Who's in the other camp over there with Bolton? Secretary of State, well, soon to be, if he's confirmed, Mike Pompeo, is quite hawkish, is also called for bombing Iran. It's not clear if he thinks war with North Korea is a good idea,

but he's sort of hinted at it. Mike Pence, also relatively hawkish. Yeah, those are sort of the top influences on foreign policy. So what does it mean then for our foreign policy that the people with the president's ear are John Bolton, Mike Pompeo? It means that every crisis has a higher risk of escalating than it did before. Foreign policy is all about unpredictable crises coming up and having to manage them. You know, Trump hasn't had a big, genuinely world-changing event like the Arab Spring that Obama had to deal with. And in those situations, he will have to react based on a sort of impulse and best consensus

advice. We know Trump can be pushed. There's a real chance that these people could persuade him towards a more militaristic reaction. What about the president himself, his reluctance to go to war, his constant reminder during his campaign that he thought the Iraq war was a huge mistake? Well, first of all, that was a lie. Are you for invading Iraq? Yeah, I guess so.

You know, I wish it was, I wish the first time it was done correctly. He endorsed the Iraq war before it happened and only afterwards was like bad idea. So don't let him get away with that. I think also in general, this idea that Donald Trump is some kind of instinctive dove is really ridiculous. He has called for all kinds of crazy uses of military force. Like in Iraq, he wanted to annex Iraqi oil fields. I've always said, shouldn't be there. But if we're going to get out, take the oil. If we would have taken the oil, you wouldn't have ISIS.

Like, that's colonialism. But it is really telling because it shows that his impulse is that he wants to maximize gains for the United States and doesn't care about the consequences. Does that scare you, Zach? I don't know. I've gone back and forth in this administration between normal levels of fear about the world and like real panic about this particular situation. Now I'm back on the real panic train. The last time was when we were in like really tight tensions with North Korea. And then we had good news on that front.

We did and thought, you know, maybe there'd be sit down negotiations and those could be at least temporarily, you know, calm things down. But now Bolton is out there being like, look, he should meet with Kim because it'll prove to be a disaster and then we can go to war. Well, fuck. That was the worst case scenario as a result of these talks that like they piss off Trump and he hates talking to Kim. And the result is that he gets mad and wants to do something to retaliate against North Korea. But like now we have someone in the White House who's actively rooting for the worst case scenario. War with North Korea would kill so many people.

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