US National Security Adviser John Bolton is in the global spotlight this week after it emerged that the Pentagon is drawing up plans to send 120,000 US troops to the Middle East to confront Iran, largely at his behest.
Bolton has served in every Republican administration since 1981. But, says The Atlantic, it is not that long since “most observers of foreign policy would have pronounced Bolton’s career over, and predicted that he would not reenter government unless literally dozens of other Republican operatives were suddenly and tragically unavailable”.
Yet “he is now the most important figure in American national security, and because his position requires no Senate confirmation, he answers to no one but Trump”, the news site notes.
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But who is Donald Trump’s national security adviser and exactly what role does he play in this unorthodox administration?
Bolton the ambassador?
Bolton first came to prominence under George W. Bush, who appointed him US ambassador to the UN in 2005, during the Iraq War.
Making Bolton the face of the US relationship with the community of nations “was contentious, to say the least, as he made little attempt to disguise his deep-seated contempt for the world body”, says The Guardian.
The newspaper points out that this was the man who a decade earlier had remarked: “There is no United Nations. There is an international community that occasionally can be led by the only real power left in the world, and that’s the United States, when it suits our interests.”
As a senior official in the Bush administration, Bolton also played a key role in the collapse of the Agreed Framework, the deal brokered by the Clinton administration to freeze North Korea’s plutonium nuclear programme.
Another of his key achievements was orchestrating the controversial US withdrawal from the international criminal court in 2002. Recollecting this moment, he wrote in his memoirs that he “felt like a kid on Christmas Day”.
Bolton the manipulator?
Since those days under Bush, Bolton “has established himself as the Republican Party’s most militant foreign-policy thinker - an advocate of aggressive force who ridicules anyone who disagrees”, writes Dexter Filkins in a recent profile for The New Yorker.
“Bolton has spent decades in federal bureaucracies, complaining often of hating every minute,” he adds. “He has established himself as a ferocious infighter - often working, either by design or by accident, against the grain of the place to which he’s assigned.”
Indeed, the former ambassador has a blunt approach to diplomacy, “summed up in the title of his book Surrender is Not an Option”, says the Guardian.
At the heart of this approach is Bolton’s fierce unilateralism, which although “long seen by Washington foreign policy elites in both parties as fringy and dangerous”, says Politico, is now “the beating heart of America’s foreign policy under Trump”.
In a Guardian piece headlined “Is John Bolton the most dangerous man in the world?” Ben Armbruster writes that Bolton “has no qualms about manipulating or outright ignoring intelligence to advance his agenda, which is exactly what’s happening right now”.
In a White House statement ten days ago announcing the deployment of an aircraft carrier and bomber to the Persian Gulf, Bolton cited “a number of troubling and escalatory indications and warnings” from Iran to justify the bolstered US military presence.
But “multiple sources who have seen the same intelligence have since said that Bolton and the Trump administration blew it ‘out of proportion, characterizing the threat as more significant than it actually was’”, says Armbruster.
Bolton the enabler?
To his critics, “Bolton is an enabler” of Trump’s worst inclinations, says Politico. His fired predecessor, H.R. McMaster, “was an establishment man who tried in vain to contain the president and his impulse to upend the Western world order”, the website continues. Conversely, “Bolton is often a cheerleader for, and sometimes benefits from, Trump’s wrecking-ball instincts”, it says.
Mark Groombridge, who worked with Bolton for 15 years and was his adviser on Asian affairs in the George W. Bush adminstration, told the New Yorker he questioned how someone like Bolton can stand working for Trump.
“John is thinking, ‘To the extent I can modify or mollify the President’s actions, I will’,” Groombridge said. “He is truly a patriot. But I wonder how he goes into work every day, because deep in his heart he believes the president is a moron.”
The feeling may be mutual since CNN reports “as recently as last week, Trump was calling outside advisors to complain about Bolton”. Having campaigned “on an anti-interventionist platform and determined not to oversee another repeat of the Iraq War, Trump’s frustrations with his advisor began when Bolton began escalating rhetoric toward Venezuela”, says Observer.
But despite their divergent levels of enthusiasm for invading other countries, the president appears to be heeding the advice of the former Fox News executive Roger Ailes.
“He’s a bomb thrower and a strange little f***er,” Ailes said of Bolton last year, according to journalist Michael Wolff’s inside account of the White House, Fire and Fury. “But you need him.”
