Between Policy and Privilege: A Critical Review of “The Room Where It Happened” by John Bolton
By Hannan R. Hussain
A Review of The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir By John Bolton (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020); 592 pages.
Before Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th President of the United States, the Trump administration’s revolving door of national security advisers stood as a testament to American foreign policy in retreat. From partisan appointments at the Pentagon that risked escalations with the Taliban, to the intensification of transatlantic fissures and Iran-focused military assassinations, Donald Trump’s advisers saw it all. It is against this backdrop that John Bolton’s book “The Room Where It Happened” – an account of his 17 months as former U.S. President Trump’s national security adviser – illustrates the brand of hardcore protectionist thinking that served the former administration’s America First narrative abroad, and later, contributed to its own decline. More importantly, Bolton’s extreme policy fixations – regime change in Iran, preemptive strikes against Pyongyang, and an end to China’s military advancements – lay bare a complex web of present-day foreign policy challenges that Biden, as a champion of multilateralism, must attempt to undo in full.
A series of chapters on foreign policy form the crux of Bolton’s recollection, and nowhere is his frustration more evident than on Iran. He declares the 2015 nuclear deal “the most palpable manifestation of the problems”, arguing the pact was “badly conceived, abominably negotiated and drafted.” He justifies President Trump’s unilateral withdrawal by reminding U.S. allies of not doing enough. On the question of what U.S. sanctions and unilateral withdrawals achieved for Washington, Bolton presents a thinly veiled hypothesis: “to bring Iran to its knees, or to overthrow the regime.”
There is ample evidence to refute Bolton’s underlying assessments as Biden looks to pivot America towards a potential Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) revival. Attacks against Americans grossly reduced between the time the JCPOA was negotiated and the end of President Obama’s term, indicating the deal’s centrality to bipartisan U.S. security concerns. At the time, over half a dozen confirmations from the International Atomic Energy Agency established Tehran’s adherence to the nuclear pact, lacking similar precedent during Bolton’s stint in the White House.
Moreover, the former national-security adviser incorrectly presupposes the intentions of key U.S. allies towards Tehran during the course of U.S. engagement on JCPOA. France, United Kingdom and Germany were never inclined on “pressuring the ayatollahs” (as Bolton puts it) or interested in watching U.S. sanctions wreak havoc on the Iranian economy. In fact, Paris, London and Berlin drew a thick line between their idea of shared security commitments and that of the Trump administration in their May 2018 joint statement. All of this evidence is without due emphasis in Bolton’s account.
On China, Bolton shifts momentum. His central claim is that in the lead-up to the 2019 G20 Summit, Mr. Trump turned to Chinese President Xi Jinping and sought re-election guarantees. In a landmark gesture, Xi appears content with the arrangement as long as it meant “increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat” (for a $14.3 trillion-dollar economy). Note that Bolton never detailed Xi’s response to Trump’s re-election advance. By doing so, he effectively compromises his own assertion.
Meanwhile, several other revelations fall into the mix. President Trump has somehow learned of Beijing’s position ahead of Washington’s nuclear deal withdrawal, and Bolton claims Xi explained Xinjiang’s internal transitions in confidence to Trump. “Xi said he would keep the news [of terminating the nuclear deal] confidential, adding simply that the US knew China’s position”, narrates Bolton. It is difficult to buy this confidentiality at face value when top U.S. allies knew of Trump’s nuclear deal termination beforehand.
Despite an overwhelming reliance on anecdotes, Bolton’s 592-page memoir manages to produce some policy takeaways too. He makes a compelling case against former president Trump’s growing hostility towards NATO, arguing that the president was “relentlessly critical.” According to Bolton, Trump blasted Germany for its ‘terrible’ cooperation, threatened NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg with scant U.S. funding, and measured NATO loyalties based on the degree of support afforded to U.S. military offensives – such as U.S. military imperatives against the Bashar Al-Assad regime. Bolton’s observations are consistent with recent trend-lines, where president Trump unilaterally called for a broader NATO presence in the Middle East, kept top allies uninformed in the lead up to Iranian General Qasem Soleimani’s assassination, and pressed to withdraw U.S. boots from German soil – adding to president Joe Biden’s long list of foreign policy challenges in office.
Bolton’s second tangible assessment comes on Afghanistan. He correctly states that no amount of dialogue with the Taliban appears to have stopped the former president from lashing out at Kabul, demanding all his troops come home. Mr. Trump’s inability to commit to the on-going peace process, and compromise its spirit in the same breath (as seen during the Camp David fallout and subsequent Pentagon tensions), qualifies as a weak link in Washington’s broader military drawdown, as Biden looks to rethink peace guarantees with the Taliban. Moreover, the former president’s failed push to present U.S. troop withdrawal as his signature foreign policy achievement, ahead of the 2020 November elections, left significant trust deficit with the Taliban. Biden is now on the receiving end of this trust deficit as the Taliban issue a stern warning: that Washington should stick to its May 2021 troop withdrawal deadline, irrespective of a power-sharing agreement materializing in Afghanistan.
Further, the former national security adviser markets the ‘workability’ of his effective response options towards key U.S. adversaries. One standout example is that of North Korea. Bolton overtly endorses the use of massive conventional bombs, taking Seoul’s defenses into America’s own hands, and magically reducing civilian casualties – all at the same time. Paradoxically, the signal from North Korea, ahead of Biden’s presidential inauguration, was to declare the United States as its “biggest enemy” in 2021. Such a pledge suggests Washington has lost more leverage as a peace-maker with Pyongyang in the past four years than it believes it can exercise in the Korean Peninsula.
Ultimately, Bolton’s long and digressive critique of the White House offers a peek into an administration’s thinking where instruments of confrontation undercut America’s quest for global leadership. Bolton’s own nod to coercive diplomacy, regime change and hardcore populism ends up complicating the relationship between informed national security council and America’s powerful executive initiative, revealing obstacles to Biden’s multilateral worldview, and the need for him to act on an inclusive U.S. foreign policy with twice the force.
Hannan R. Hussain is International Affairs Columnist for CGTN and an author. He was previously Assistant Researcher at the Islamabad Policy Research Institute (IPRI). Hussain’s writings on world affairs have been published in The Diplomat, South China Morning Post, and The Sydney Morning Herald, among others.
John Bolton is by Gage Skidmore and is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
