Now along comes John Bolton and his account of time served in the Trump administration as national security adviser. Bolton’s latest book has been attacked as fiction by President Donald Trump, members of his administration and even members of the administrations of other countries (like ). Bolton is a thoroughly unpleasant hatchet man who has opposed arms control treaties, diplomacy in most forms and international institutions of all varieties. He is reliably paleoconservative. But does that make him a reliable narrator of his own story as well?

John Bolton’s Lesson in the American Value of Self-Interest

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The picture Bolton paints of the Trump administration is a familiar one. We’ve been treated to a succession of tell-all accounts of the horror that has been Trump’s tenure as president: Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury,” Philip Rucker and Carol Leonig’s “A Very Stable Genius,” even “A Warning” by Anonymous. Each one has added a little more paint to the Hieronymus Bosch picture of the presidency: monsters, unspeakable acts, darkness and chaos.

Other than a morbid, rubbernecking fascination with atrocity, why is yet another account necessary, and from such a potentially unreliable narrator as Bolton to boot? The critics of Bolton’s trustworthiness have a point. But Bolton’s unreliability resides not so much in his ideology as his opportunism.

As a “kiss-up, kick-down kind of guy,” he’ll do it takes to attain power. He has a terminal case of Washingtonitis — he thinks he’s the smartest man in the room and he reeks of entitlement. He entered the Trump administration not as a true believer in Trump, but only a true believer in himself. The book not surprisingly portrays John Bolton as the only person in the Trump administration with any sense at all.

It’s easy enough to dismiss Bolton’s so-called revelations. Here’s why you shouldn’t.

Taking China Off the Table

Foreign policy will not likely be the tipping point for the 2020 presidential election. Trump’s base generally doesn’t care what happens beyond America’s borders (except to keep it beyond America’s borders). And the anti-Trump camp just wants to get rid of the president, regardless of what he has done in the international arena.

Still, Trump is running on his foreign policy record. For instance, he has been busy trying to portray his opponent, Joe Biden, as somehow pro-China. “China wants Sleepy Joe sooo badly,” Trump  back in April. “They want all of those billions of dollars that they have been paying to the U.S. back, and much more. Joe is an easy mark, their DREAM CANDIDATE!”

Then came the����that portrayed “Beijing Biden” as “China’s puppet” who favors engagement with Beijing without caveats and Biden’s son as the beneficiary of sweetheart deals with the Chinese. The Trump ads slam China for its handling of the coronavirus outbreak and suggest that Biden would have fumbled the US response out of deference to Beijing (uh, sound familiar?).

The inconvenient truth, however, is that Trump, to  Nicholas Kristof, “has been China’s stooge, a sycophantic flatterer and enabler of President Xi Jinping.” In fact, Beijing would prefer four more years of Trump, not so much because of this sycophancy, but because he has been busy  US alliances that have constrained Chinese geopolitical influence. The trade disputes are an irritant, but China can’t expect Biden to be any easier to deal with on that score. Four more years of Trump, on the other hand, would mean four more years of the ebbing of US engagement in world affairs.

As Trump and Biden escalate their China-bashing, along comes Bolton. No friend of Beijing, the former national security adviser is appalled at Trump’s exchanges with President Xi Jinping. In one such conversation, Trump effectively signs up the Chinese leader as an in-kind contributor to his reelection campaign.

Bolton had to excise Trump’s actual words from his book, but Vanity Fair has  in the blanks: “According to an unredacted passage shown to Vanity Fair by a source, Trump’s ask is even more crudely shocking when you read Trump’s specific language. ‘Make sure I win,’ Trump allegedly told Xi during a dinner at the G20 conference in Osaka, Japan last summer. ‘I will probably win anyway, so don’t hurt my farms … Buy a lot of soybeans and wheat and make sure we win.’” Trump was, of course, impeached for attempting the same strategy with Ukraine.

The other shocking revelation from Bolton’s book is Trump’s response to China’s construction of “re-education” camps for the Uyghur minority in Xinjiang province. It’s not simply that Trump ignored China’s action, as he contends, to ensure that trade negotiations moved forward. to Bolton, “Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do.” An American president encouraged another country to engage in a massive human rights violation?

True, American presidents have given the green light to such things in the past: Sukarno’s  of suspected communists in Indonesia in 1965, Augusto Pinochet’s coup and subsequent  on Salvador Allende supporters in Chile in 1973, the Salvadoran government’s  human rights violations in the 1980s. Horrifying as these atrocities were, American conservatives could rationalize US support for these dictatorships because they were US allies.

But China? That’s going to be a difficult sell for an electorate that’s already been primed, by the Trump administration itself, to demonize Beijing.

So, in effect, the Bolton book has removed China from the 2020 election campaign. Trump will think twice about accusing Biden of cozy ties with Beijing when the Democrats can literally throw the book (Bolton’s, that is) at the president.

Impeachment: Not Dead Yet

Trump loves to play the role of a cornered badger that emerges triumphant in the end. Impeachment would have given an ordinary politician pause. Trump simply held up the Senate’s failure to convict as exoneration, despite all the damning evidence produced by the whistleblower and the subsequent Mueller investigation.

The Democrats wanted Bolton to testify during the hearings. He refused to do so voluntarily. Later, he said that he would testify before the Senate if it issued a subpoena. The Republicans, with the exception of Mitt Romney and Susan Collins, voted against calling additional witnesses.

Bolton argues in his book that the Democrats made a mess of the impeachment inquiry. Yet, he could have corroborated the charge of collusion with Ukraine and provided evidence of impeachable offenses in other realms of foreign policy. He didn’t do so.

Now, of course, some Republicans are saying that it would have been better for Bolton to have testified before Congress rather than save his revelations for now. “One of the things about making allegations in a book for $29.95 — certainly it’s going to be a best-seller I’m sure — the problem is that when you’re selling it in a book, you’re not putting yourself in a position to be cross-examined,” Senator Tim Scott .

If Scott and one other Republican had simply voted for additional witnesses, they could have made that happen. And they could have saved themselves the cost of buying Bolton’s book.

In the end, it probably wouldn’t have made much of a difference in the final votes on impeachment. Except for Romney, the Republicans were unwilling to break with the president.

Bolton’s book, however, is disinterring all the issues surrounding impeachment and in a light unfavorable to the president. Bolton confirms the infamous quid pro quo — military assistance in exchange for an investigation into the Ukraine dealings of Biden’s son — that Trump discussed in a phone call with the Ukrainian president and that was flagged by a whistleblower. “Nor, at the time, did I think Trump’s comments in the call reflected any major change in direction; the linkage of the military assistance with the [Rudy] Giuliani fantasies was already baked in. The call was not the keystone for me, but simply another brick in the wall,” Bolton .

Before you shell out $29.95 for the book (actually $32.50 list price), you might wait to see if Congress drags Bolton back to tell his story. This week, Democratic Representative Adam Schiff  that he might depose the former national security adviser before the House Intelligence Committee.

Who knows? Trump might have to reckon with a second impeachment hearing as he heads into November.

The Benefits of Being Bolton

Bolton predictably criticizes Trump for not being sufficiently hawkish. The president wanted to withdraw troops from the Middle East. He wanted to make nice with North Korea. He had the gall to prioritize trade with China.

From a progressive point of view, that makes Bolton an unreliable narrator. Maybe he was tweaking the facts to make himself look stalwart and wise at the expense of a slow-witted, insufficiently martial president.

But here’s the thing: Bolton hasn’t written anything in his book that contradicts other accounts of the presidency. There was plenty of evidence of the quid pro quo with Ukraine. Trump did not hide his admiration for Xi. The president is obsessed with getting reelected in November, not because he particularly likes his job but because he must prove that he is a winner.

What makes Bolton’s observations most valuable is not their novelty or their acuity but his credentials as a hawk’s hawk. His book isn’t going to make any Democrats or independents or moderate Republicans change their minds about Trump. But it will introduce some doubts into hardcore conservative supporters. They might not publicly renounce the president. Like Bolton , they might not even pull the lever for the Democratic candidate.

But they might decide, because of Bolton, to stay home on November 3, just like so many Republicans decided not to attend Trump’s rally in Tulsa this last weekend. And that, ultimately, is what really puts the fear of Bolton into the Trump reelection campaign.

*[This article was originally published by .]

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Gans sets the scene by describing a personal anecdote of his near encounter with Bolton in the US State Department cafeteria back in 2005, at a time when Bolton was President George W. Bush’s candidate for ambassador to the United Nations. The anecdote carries no information of substance. Gans uses it as a device to establish his credibility as a witness to history. This lends a few grams of weight to his pretention of digging below the opaque surface to reveal Bolton’s true motives as the author of the latest insider book on President Donald Trump’s dysfunctional White House.

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Gans seeks to avoid what some on the Democratic side have tended to do, who have promoted Bolton to the status of a whistleblower speaking truth to power. Instead, he suggests that Bolton, a Republican, symbolizes everything that’s wrong with a regime that The New York Times has been seeking to bring down for the past three and a half years. Gans aims his arrows at a target greater than Bolton himself: “Mr. Bolton’s lonely, self-interested crusade against Mr. Trump says volumes about where Washington finds itself.” 

To bring the point home about Bolton’s lack of any larger civic motive, Gans writes: “It is hard to see any more in Mr. Bolton’s crusade beyond self-interest: for vengeance, attention and sales of the book.” He then turns his gaze away from Bolton, the loner whom he described at the beginning of the article, to bring home his main point: “Mr. Bolton and many others have struggled amid the anarchy and been reduced to the mere pursuit of self-interest.”

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Self-interest:

The core virtue in US culture inspiring the admiration of others, which, to be fully realized and justify the success it aims at achieving, must deny that it’s about one’s own self by creating the impression that one’s acts are designed to promote the good of the many

Contextual Note

Wishing to prove that self-interest is the virus that has infected the regime, Gans cites the term three times, always with a negative connotation, as a synonym for egoism and selfishness and the failure to consider the needs of others. But in US culture, self-interest is commonly seen as a virtue. Gans does implicitly acknowledge the positive value associated with self-interest in one of the citations, when he claims that everyone in the Trump administration has “been reduced to the mere pursuit of self-interest.” Clearly, self-interest itself is not to blame. It’s the fact that the motivation of such people is reduced to “mere self-interest.”

In US culture, self-interest represents the launching pad for everything that becomes socially productive and beneficial to the community. It’s the infant crying for its needs to be met by others, with no awareness of those others’ needs. Social maturity develops from that base. The future adult builds a relationship between its own self-interest and everyone else’s. Socialization is all about balancing the force of multiple self-interests. Americans know that their lives will be defined by the need to affirm themselves and establish their territory in a competitive society. Politicians, referred to as “public servants,” are expected to go beyond “mere” self-interest to represent the “public interest.”

Although foundationally individualistic, Americans do acknowledge the existence of communities that take shape along political, ethnic, linguistic or cultural lines. But such communities are still defined more by shared interests than by identity. They generally fail to rise to a status equal to the more sacred self-interest of individuals. Such collectivities are typically seen as ephemeral collections of self-interested individuals.

Even the nation is ultimately perceived as an interest group. This explains why US society often appears to be on the brink of civil war. No one is ever quite sure which interest group is in control. US foreign policy is famously defined as the implementation of actions intended to defend not the nation but American interests. Those interests include access to markets, competitive advantage for Americans, control of resources in other regions or simply business opportunities for US firms. The actions that compose foreign policy can include military invasion, regime change, war, sanctions and covert activities aimed at undermining local authority or destabilizing local cultures.

Other cultures across the globe, to varying degrees, acknowledge selfish instincts as part of human psychology, but, unlike US culture, they refuse to see it as the foundation of all human motivation. Asian cultures, for example, see collective needs as fundamental and individual desires as secondary. Americans thus have difficulty understanding the force and solidity of Chinese nationalism because, in their view, the policies of the nation stifle individuals’ self-interest. They believe that coercion alone explains the Chinese population’s acceptance of a regime that fails to recognize what they see as a spirit of independence.

Historical Note

John Gans is correct when he observes that “Mr. Bolton and many others have struggled amid the anarchy and been reduced to the mere pursuit of self-interest.” But this point requires some historical nuance. Gans wants his readers to believe that what he calls “anarchy” is an anomaly, a particular state that applies to Trump’s administration. In reality — to the extent that self-interest is the reigning principle in the culture — anarchy is the baseline of American political organization. Government in the US can be defined as the minimal capacity to manage competing points of view within a permanent magma of self-interested anarchy and maintain a semblance of order.

Politics in nation-states always tends toward hyperreality. Queen Elizabeth I’s pageants and masques, her court’s elaborate displays and rituals — just like Louis XIV’s royally-imposed baroque fashions and hairstyles a century later — constituted the cleverly designed trappings of a form of hyperreality aimed at consolidating royal power. In modern democracies, to achieve its effects, hyperreality depends on rituals and relationships that have less to do with fashion and more to do with military technology, popular entertainment and the rhetorical power of audio-visual media. In all cases, the success of government-imposed hyperreality revolves around key personalities acting predefined roles.

Gans sees “anarchy” in the current US administration only because Donald Trump’s brand of hyperreality uses the innate tendency toward self-interested anarchy built into the American psyche to establish his personal form of authority. To a large extent, it has worked because it resonates with a background ideology that is grounded in self-interest. Trump’s weakness lies in the perception by many that “mere” self-interest is vulgar. 

The game of managing one’s own and other people’s self-interest in the lobby-friendly culture of Washington has traditionally relied on cultivating a veneer of European-style diplomacy. It uses an appeal to rational, though often passably hypocritical, explanations rather than emotional outbursts and irate tweets. It is designed to raise the appearance of moral standing above “mere self-interest.” Barack Obama was the president who mastered that art to near perfection.

Traditional Republicans right up to George W. Bush have used a different tactic, while at the same time paying lip service to a form of decorum they call the “rule of law.” Republican presidents before Trump have consistently appealed to an abstract ideal of Providence that manifests itself through economic and military might. It casts each self-interested American into the role of an agent of divine will. God is not just on the American side; God is American. No royal splendor at the human level is required since Americans are the subjects of the king who reigns over the universe, the being who continually blesses America (and its troops) at the end of every political speech.

Trump’s “anarchy” is different only to the extent that he has eschewed the goal of promoting the fiction that there is something beyond self-interest informing the government’s decisions. His hyperreality is powerful but incomplete. In times of crisis, it risks losing its force.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Click here to read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post John Bolton’s Lesson in the American Value of Self-Interest appeared first on 51�Թ�.

President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign seized on the opportunity related to the fact that the pandemic originated in the Chinese town of Wuhan. Just as the Democrats turned their Russian obsession into the legal proceedings of the Mueller investigation and then impeachment, the Republicans have moved on from merely complaining to looking at making a legal case for their indignation.

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As the has already highlighted, the thought processes of power-wielding American politicians inevitably turn to the ultimate solution to any problem: take it to court. As Republican Representative Dan Crenshaw said, “We’re going to find somebody to sue.” He himself explained that the “somebody to sue” was none other than the People’s Republic of China.

Now, the superhawk, arch-conservative, hyper-nationalist John Bolton has stepped into the debate to take a surprising position in adamant opposition to his Republican colleagues. While he agreed that this approach is “very politically appealing,” he thinks that “it’s a very bad idea.” Bolton, the former national security adviser to President Trump, deems it dangerous to play games with the idea sacred to all hyper-nationalists: sovereign immunity.

Reporting on Bolton’s objections, Jenna McLaughlin, the security and investigations reporter at , sees some merit in the idea promoted by the Israeli civil rights organization Shurat HaDin. “While officials have typically opposed lawsuits against foreign governments, a number of lawyers and organizations, including Shurat HaDin, have found creative and sometimes controversial ways to challenge sovereign immunity, such as by launching multiple lawsuits aimed at banks and businesses associated with governments they hold responsible for harming their clients,” McLaughlin writes.

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Creative:

Free to imagine clever ways of skirting around not only the law but especially the spirit of the law for the sake of either getting some undeserved financial compensation or scoring points in the game of power

Contextual Note

In a 2016 on Slate, journalist John Kelly explored the rising fortunes of a new verb in the English language that had come to dominate political and journalistic discourse. The verb was to weaponize. “The history of this word weaponize reveals the shifting anxieties of the past half-century,” Kelly wrote. In some sense, the law has always been used as a weapon, not so much for justice as for “settling differences,” a traditional euphemism for vengeance. More recently, the idea of weaponizing the law has even taken the form of “,” another useful neologism. In some sense, the key to modern “creativity” is finding a way to weaponize any traditional tool. The courtroom is a great place to begin.

For once, Bolton is right — and on two counts. The purely electoral strategy is indeed “politically appealing” for Trump and Republicans because it mobilizes those two great forces of political motivation that have the power to turn an election: fear and xenophobia. And because of its appeal and Trump’s past success with xenophobia, there is little doubt that Trump will continue to exploit this strategy right up to the November election.

Bolton is also correct when he explains that it’s a bad idea. He explains that “it would put the judicial system of the United States right in the middle of international controversy” and “would just lead to lengthy, drawn-out proceedings that are not likely in a timely manner to bring justice to victims.” It would, however, keep a large number of high-profile international lawyers busy, which may explain Shurat HaDin’s motivation.

Bolton provided a number of other reasons to prove the futility of the endeavor, its waste of valuable time and resources in the midst of a pandemic and the possibly permanently damaging effect on international relations. He pragmatically sums up his case with this reflection: “This is a state-to-state matter.”

Historical Note

Kishore Mahbubani, the former Singaporean diplomat and celebrated author, in on this controversy, adding another important consideration by citing recent history. He pointed to the fact that the 2008 financial crash that began in New York. “The crisis began with investment bank Lehman Brothers’ collapse in New York, and caused tremendous damage to economies around the world, but nobody suggested that other countries should get compensation from the United States.”

Mahbubani suggests a more constructive approach: “What we should learn from this is that, instead of being punitive to the countries that suffered it first, we should immediately help the countries that get affected first. Because if we don’t help them, we will get affected.”

Asian journalist Leslie Fong looks deeper into history to make the that people “in the West who blame China for the Covid-19 pandemic and demand reparations for the damage to their economies have probably done Beijing a favor.” Like many Chinese, Fong hasn’t forgotten the history of Western, and particularly the shameless, destructive manipulation of the Chinese people and their economy in the 19th century with the Opium Wars by the British and French, all in the name of commerce. Britain’s National Army Museum the first Opium War in these terms: “Between 1839 and 1842, British forces fought a war on behalf of drug traffickers … with the full blessing of the British government.” At the end of the war, Britain assumed control of Hong Kong and the Chinese were forced to pay reparations for the cost of a war the British waged on their territory.

Fong points out what Westerners never learn in their history classes at school: “They have unwittingly — or perhaps unthinkingly — reopened a scar that is deep in the Chinese psyche and given the party more of the ammunition it needs to rally the people against what it has portrayed as hostile moves to put China down.” He goes on to say that “asking for reparations is certain to bring back painful memories of when the country was forced at gunpoint to pay 450 million taels of silver to eight imperialist powers in 1900 as an indemnity after losing a short war.”

Historians have given the title “The period of ‘unequal treaties’ with China” to an entire portion of modern Chinese history. Encyclopaedia Britannica devotes a to the topic of “Unequal treaty” in Western relations with China. France’s Digital Encyclopedia of European History (EHNE) the period up as one of “aggressive commercial diplomacy” in which “‘Gunboat diplomacy’ opened European trade and imposed its sometimes unilateral clauses on China, which subsequently lost its sovereignty over numerous portions of its territory in favour of France and Great Britain, as well as Germany, Russia, the United States, and Japan.”

Shurat HaDin’s “creative and sometimes controversial ways to challenge sovereign immunity” belong to the tradition of bullying, gunboat diplomacy, reparations and “unequal treaties” that dominated the West’s relationship with China in the 19th century and effectively led to the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911. The British, after all, thought they were being very creative when, in the name of commerce, they promoted massive addiction among the Chinese population to opium grown in British India to pay for the tea and other products they had become dependent on.

Americans may not yet have realized it — and as Fong points out they may continue to draft policies “unwittingly” and “unthinkingly” — but China today has achieved a status today that in no way resembles the decrepitude of the 19th-century Qing dynasty.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book,, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post The Limits of Western “Creativity” Facing China appeared first on 51�Թ�.

But ultimately, like the scorpion that stings the frog halfway across the river, Bolton couldn’t betray his own nature. In his eagerness to start wars with Venezuela, North Korea and Iran, Bolton spoke out of turn, publicly clashed with his boss and probably  to the press. By August his position had become untenable, and he suffered the fate of so many Trump collaborators: expulsion by tweet. 

Looked at another way, however, Bolton accomplished what he set out to do. He scuttled the negotiations with North Korea by  to the Libyan example of denuclearization (Pyongyang knew full well what happened to Muammar Qaddafi’s regime). He made sure that US troops remain  and  as well. He put the fear of a coup in the heart of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. And he ratcheted up the pressure on Iran to the point of near-conflict. 

Now, with Trump declaring that the United States is “locked and loaded” in the wake of the attacks on Saudi Arabia’s oil supplies, Bolton is no doubt pleased at the prospect of his wildest dream fulfilled: a war with Iran. He nearly pushed the president into military action against Tehran back in June when Trump  the strike 10 minutes before it was scheduled to take place. 

This time, thanks in part to the work of the not-so-dearly-departed Bolton, the president might go over the edge. Or perhaps Trump will stick to his pattern of making outlandish threats and then turning around to negotiate. The administration has more recently been dialing back its rhetoric. Maybe Bolton the scorpion has managed only to sting himself.

The Latest Incident

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has accused Iran of attacking the Aramco oil facilities in Khurais and Abqaiq in the heart of Saudi Arabia. Saudi and US investigators have  that the September 14 attacks came from an Iranian base near the border with Iraq. But the force that has claimed responsibility for the attacks is the Houthis, who have been battling a Saudi-led coalition in Yemen for more than four years. 

On the face of it, the obvious culprit would be the Houthis. Over the last month, they have  aerial attacks on Saudi facilities: a drone attack on the Shaybah oil field on August 16, a missile attack against Jizan airport on August 26, a drone attack against Riyadh on August 27, and a failed drone attack on September 3. 

Also, as Kate Kizer of Win Without War , the Saudis and the Houthis have been engaged in a tit-for-tat game of aerial bombardment. The latest attacks on Saudi oil facilities could very well be a response to the Saudi air strike on Dhamar prison, which killed 100 people two weeks ago. Tit-for-tat doesn’t, however, mean that it’s been an equal contest. The Saudi campaign has killed thousands and thousands of Yemenis. Houthi attacks have resulted mostly in material damage and . 

Those who point the finger at Iran argue that this latest attack was far from the border with Yemen. But the Khurais oil field (the most recent target) and the Shaybah oil field (hit in mid-August) are both about the same distance from the Yemen border. The latest attacks were also remarkably successful. The pinpoint strikes forced the suspension of more than half of Saudi oil production. But the Houthis have steadily increased their offensive capabilities, attacking Saudi airports at Jizan and Abha in May and June . They’ve received some weaponry from Iran but also have , as well as some from North Korea. They are now operating air defense systems as well.

Meanwhile, it’s rather difficult to imagine the Iranian government launching such an attack just after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had talked of Trump possibly meeting President Hassan Rouhani at the UN General Assembly in New York this week. Even if the Iranian authorities are reluctant to sit down with Trump, for understandable reasons, attacking Saudi Arabia on the eve of the UN meeting doesn’t make much strategic sense. 

On the other hand, Iran  that if it couldn’t export its own oil, it would disrupt the global market. The Trump administration has certainly hobbled Iran’s energy industry through direct sanctions and pressure on other countries to stop their imports. Meanwhile, the Saudis  coming, which suggests that it didn’t originate from the south, where Saudi air defenses are focused. But the missiles and drones were flying low, so they might have evaded air defenses. They might also have come from multiple locations.

Of course, it might not be an either-or situation. Iran provides some support to the Houthis. So, even if the Houthis are responsible for this attack, they likely got the green light from Tehran for such a significant attack. Or perhaps Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, which has never much liked rapprochement with the United States, wanted to make sure that any high-level meeting on the sidelines of the UN assembly would not take place.

In any case, the Trump administration was already  by Monday. The absence of Bolton might have something to do with that. More likely, however, it reflects the situation on the ground in the Gulf.

The Larger Context

When Saudi Arabia launched its war in Yemen in 2015, the architect of the campaign, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, seemed to think it would be . Instead, the Houthis have put up stubborn resistance. 

The rebel group, which adheres to a variant of Shia Islam in contrast to the predominantly Sunni Saudis and their Sunni proxies in Yemen,  the capital of Sanaa as well as the northern highlands and a stretch of the Red Sea coast. It has felt confident enough in the past weeks to start setting up a diplomatic corps, with its first envoy dispatched to Iran.

But the most influential development in recent weeks has been a split in the anti-Houthi coalition between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The UAE is focused more on containing Iranian influence rather than rolling it back — and it certainly doesn’t want a war with Tehran.Back in July, the UAE announced that it would  from Yemen. It  a group of southern separatists who, in mid-August, took over the port of Aden from the Saudi-backed faction.

As if Yemen hasn’t suffered enough — famine, drought, cholera — its civil war now threatens to spiral into a multi-party dispute even more resistant to mediation. In this situation, the Houthis may feel more confident that they can force the Saudis into following the example of the UAE. It’s not like Mohammed bin Salman to cut his losses, but the war is threatening his larger plans to transform the Saudi economy. 

It’s one thing for Riyadh to pour money into the quagmire next door (with the help of ). It’s quite another to put its cash cow — oil and gas  50% of Saudi GDP and 70% of export earnings — within range of enemy fire. Also, having failed so miserably to subdue one of the poorest countries in the world, Saudi Arabia may be having second thoughts about confronting a country with considerable economic and military power. 

Meanwhile, Donald Trump is finding it ever more difficult to end US involvement in wars in the region. Negotiations with the Taliban have stalled, so now US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan is no longer in the offing. Not only are US troops remaining in Syria, but  will soon be heading that way. And even though Congress wants the United States out of Yemen, the president keeps vetoing the legislation.

Even thick-headed Trump should be able to get the message: War with Iran would make these conflicts look like a walk in the woods. His advisers are also warning him that such a war would tank the US economy and doom his reelection chances. That’s probably the only warning that Trump can understand.

After Bolton

Mike Pompeo is no less a warmonger than John Bolton. He also had far more doubts than Bolton ever did about Trump’s suitability as president, which the future secretary of state revealed as he was campaigning for Marco Rubio in the 2016 presidential primaries. But those doubts are now gone. As Susan Glasser discusses in her recent , “The Secretary of Trump,” Pompeo is the quintessential company man, striving to align his views with that of his president. If Trump decides not to attack Iran, in other words, Pompeo will go along without a protest.

Meanwhile, the president has chosen his new national security adviser. It would be hard to come up with someone as relentlessly militaristic as Bolton, yet Trump dug deep into his barrel of hawks to come up with someone with that special combination of ruthless craziness and devoted servility. His short list included Fred Fleitz, Bolton’s previous chief of staff, who  the Center for Security Policy, a fiercely Islamophobic think tank devoted to spreading conspiracy theories. Then there was General Keith Kellogg, the vice president’s national security adviser, who’s been  to provoke regime change in Venezuela and also had the dubious distinction of having served as Paul Bremer’s chief of staff in the US occupation authority in Iraq.

But the nod went to hostage envoy Robert O’Brien. This would seem to be a safe, diplomatic choice. O’Brien is a lawyer who once worked at the UN Security Council. On the other hand, O’Brien is also a fierce opponent of the Iran nuclear deal, which he has called “rank appeasement.” On the appointment of his former colleague John Bolton to the position of national security adviser, he :

“The person, if you’re the president of the United States, that you want sitting on your team to negotiate, the best lawyer in the house, the best foreign policy professional in the house, is John Bolton. He’s going to bring a level of seriousness, experience, depth of knowledge, but also hard-nosed, tough negotiation skills. 

I mean, you know, the Iranians are very good negotiators. They took us to the cleaners with the Iran deal. The North Koreans have been doing this for many years, and have taken a number of presidents to the cleaners. No one is going to take John Bolton to the cleaners in a negotiation.”

With O’Brien on board, the Trump administration can be counted on to continue its overwhelmingly hostile policy toward a select group of outcasts like Iran, toward allies that don’t toe the US line, and toward multilateralism more generally. Bolton will no longer be holding the reins of national security, trying to nudge the president one way or another. But Bolton’s bellicose worldview, which both O’Brien and Pompeo share, is the basic operating system of the Trump administration. Remember: This president is always 10 minutes away from war with someone.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Bolton Is Gone, But Not the Threat of War appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Here is the very first sentence of the Gray Lady’s report on Bolton’s ouster: “On one foreign policy issue after another, John R. Bolton was the in-house skeptic who checked President Trump’s most unorthodox instincts.”

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Unorthodox:

Deviating from the overarching strategy of US military and economic dominance of the world order, ensured thanks to the rational management policies of the military-industrial complex, identified as the true government of the United States by outgoing President Dwight D. Eisenhower in January 1960, but since banished from political vocabulary and, at best, given the status of a conspiracy theory

Contextual Note

The Times clarifies its perception of the importance of Bolton’s role in the White House: “Mr. Bolton’s exit from the West Wing on Tuesday removes one of the last constraints on Mr. Trump’s sense of the possible in world affairs.” This provides much-needed insight into the guiding principles of what the vast majority of members of the political club usually referred to as the “federal government” would call “sane policy,” a term that is virtually synonymous with the “status quo.” It’s all about having “a sense of the possible.” The lesson is clear: What is, is possible. What a citizen dreams — even a presidential candidate promising “hope” and “change” — is almost certainly impossible, at best an illusion, but more likely simply a PR slogan to get elected.

After 70 years of the military-industrial complex’s tranquil rule over Washington politics, administered by a succession of Democrat and Republican presidents, any lucid observer should by now have realized that what is “possible” is what is dictated, not by some authoritative voice with an identifiable position, but by the interests of the behemoth that President Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex. For convenience sake, let us refer to the state of affairs of the last seven decades that was created and managed by the behemoth as MICWO, an abbreviation of military-industrial complex world order.

As many , the military-industrial complex now prominently includes a component that Eisenhower quite logically failed to mention: the financial sector, whose full integration as a key operational component of the complex required a long series of deregulations in favor of banks and financial institutions. The deregulations were somewhat timidly by John F. Kennedy and powerfully accelerated by Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. The decades-long historical trend fatally led to the financial crisis of 2007-08.

Thanks to Donald Trump’s “unorthodox” presidency that clearly grates on the sensibility of all “responsible” exponents of MICWO, the outside world has managed for the first time to peek inside the system’s works and may begin to understand some of its serious contradictions. The Times informs us that “Trump has cycled through more senior foreign policy and national security advisers than any other president, leaving him without the men who once were considered the adults in the room: Jim Mattis, Rex W. Tillerson, H. R. McMaster, John F. Kelly and more.” The “adults” are all either high-ranking military officers, the CEO of an oil company (Tillerson) and, now, a fanatical neocon (Bolton).

In its article on Bolton’s dismissal, The Times cites approvingly the comments of “Eliot A. Cohen, who worked for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during the administration of President George W. Bush.” The Bush administration apparently represents for The NY Times the voice of sanity and political wisdom. This is the same administration that initiated, for the sake of MICWO, the disastrous forever wars in the Middle East. These conflicts helped precipitate the financial crisis from which the global economy and geopolitical order still haven’t recovered (growing inequality, the rise of populist nationalism, constitutional crises and negative interest rates, as sure a sign as any that normalcy is not yet on the horizon).

Reminding its readers that it is still a “liberal” newspaper, The Times takes the trouble to signal, with some slight regret, that “Bolton followed the Cold War model of foreign policy, but to an extent that Democrats and some moderate Republicans found to be extreme.” But true to its identity as the voice of MICWO, The Times immediately readjusts its appreciation to identify Bolton as one of the good guys, one of “our team,” the establishment: “Still, he was firmly tied to the Republican foreign policy establishment,” meaning not Trump’s lunatic anti-deep state fringe.

This is the precious point to take away from the article. The Times clearly admits it identifies with the “establishment.” Equally comfortable with Republicans and Democrats — it mentions “50 years of bipartisan American foreign policy” — The NYT makes it clear, in no uncertain terms, that it owes its faith and undying loyalty to the establishment. 

Historical Note

For decades, the American extreme right has complained about the tyranny of the “liberal media,” claiming that the great majority of news outlets are controlled by the Democratic Party. Fox News took upon itself the responsibility for redressing the balance and providing a refreshing contrarian voice to the news industry as the journalistic mouthpiece of the Republican Party, the party of “real Americans.” It has continually promoted the myth — originally launched by the extreme right John Birch Society in the 1950s — of a monolithic liberal mainstream media, dominated by socialistic Democrats intent on defending “big government” to oppress the people and restrict their freedom.

Fox News continues to use Sarah Palin’s favorite term “the lamestream media” to perpetuate the idea that outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, MSNBC and CNN are organs of the radical left, systematically undermining what true believers understand are the only established American values. This includes freedom from both taxes and laws (deregulation of everything) and, of course, their sacred “gun rights” that allow every individual to be the defender of their castle, Bible and Christmas tree, all of which the Democrats and their media want to remove from the communal landscape. The fact that these “radical left-wing” organs of the press are in fact solidly establishment institutions, not very different from Fox News itself, is a truth that Fox couldn’t allow its audience to appreciate.

Bolton’s ouster illustrates just how little distance there is between The NY Times and Fox News. The Times article quotes, with unqualified approval, one of the Fox News’s favorite Republican politicians, Senator Lindsey Graham: “Mr. Bolton ‘understands the world for what it is and the dangers that threaten America’s national security interests.’” The Times, like Fox News, is clearly committed to an establishment that not only senses those same dangers and threats, but it also needs to exaggerate their importance to maintain the climate of fear that draws the public to their news stories and justifies the huge ever-expanding defense and surveillance budgets that underpin MICWO.

That Fox News fails to see The New York Times as a clearly anti-liberal and fellow right-wing establishment paper is hardly surprising. Just as US military policy needs a designated enemy — if it’s no longer communism, then let’s run with Islamic terrorism and maybe China as well — Fox News needs to designate an enemy in its own field. The deliberately reasoned and “intellectual” tone of The Times conveniently brands it as part of the elite. Everyone should know that all intellectuals are fanatical left-wing radicals seeking to destroy “real” American values. 

More surprising is the fact that many people who consider themselves to be more or less on the left, espousing any number of progressive values, continue to see The New York Times as the voice of enlightened liberalism rather than as what it really is: the megaphone of MICWO.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book,, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Bye, Bye, John Bolton. The NY Times Already Misses You. appeared first on 51�Թ�.

On May 21, Trump administration officials treated key members of Congress to closed-door briefings to persuade them to back what appears to be a build-up for a new war in the Middle East, this time against Iran. Among the personalities to pitch for a new round of aggressive moves against the enemy of Saudi Arabia and Israel (and consequently of the United States) were what an observer would be justified in calling some “big guns”: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan, Chairman of Joint Chiefs General Joseph Dunford and an official from the US Defense Intelligence Agency.

Al Jazeera that: “Trump officials cast the discussion as the United States responding to provocations from Iran, but failed to mention President Donald Trump’s decision a year ago to withdraw from a nuclear agreement with Iran and Trump’s imposition of economic sanctions.”

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Provocation:

An act, real or imaginary, always committed by an empire’s enemy for no other reason than to provide a fitting pretext for the bellicose empire’s military to engage an armed conflict considered by the empire’s leaders to be necessary to maintain imperial control over all future events that take place in the enemy’s region of the world

Contextual note

Democratic Representative Adam Smith, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, described the briefing: “Secretary Pompeo made a very lengthy political argument and he argued, ‘Here are all the terrible things that Iran has done’, and he spent about 10 minutes until I cut him off.” Somewhat cryptically, one representative, Anna Eshoo, commented: “There was an echo of years past.”

The Democrats appear unwilling, at least for the moment, to follow President Trump into what increasingly resembles the Bush administration’s push to start a regime-change war in Iraq. worries that “rising tensions with Tehran bear disturbing similarities to the run-up to war in 2003. Chief among them: the presence of John Bolton.” The authors of the article remind us that Bolton, who is currently the US national security adviser, was “a fierce advocate of war who was accused of manipulating intelligence to justify an invasion — and said as recently as 2015 that he didn’t regret his part in what has since become widely viewed as a strategic disaster.”��In contrast, one candidate in the 2016 presidential race viewed George W. Bush’s war as a “a big, fat mistake”: a certain Donald Trump.

Though even the United Arab Emirates has not announced the conclusions of its investigation to identify the perpetrators of the damage done to four tankers in the port of Fujairah on May 12, the Pentagon blames Iran. It that the US “has a high degree of confidence that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard was responsible for the explosions.” Vice Admiral Michael Gilday “did not provide direct evidence to back up claims tying Iran to the attacks. He told reporters the conclusions were based on intelligence and evidence gathered in the region.”

Could the admiral’s “confidence” possibly be an effect of Bolton’s talent for “manipulating intelligence”? Everyone remembers Colin Powell’s “high degree of confidence” in the evidence of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction that he presented to the United Nations.

The Trump administration, nevertheless, appears to have understood that it won’t be quite as easy as it was for Bush in 2003. This time around, Congress is not likely to act as a rubber stamp. And so in parallel with the campaign to seduce the House Armed Service Committee, Trump has resorted again to the notion of emergency powers to put everything in place for his potential war. CNN : “The Trump administration has declared an emergency to bypass Congress and expedite billions of dollars in arms sales to various countries — including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — citing the need to deter what it called ‘the malign influence’ of Iran throughout the Middle East.”

This initiative goes further than just preparing to counter a “provocation” by promising to respond by “the official end of Iran.” Trump is clearly using the idea of an emergency to equip two regimes — Saudi Arabia and the UAE — with the arms whose sale Congress has not only refused to authorize, but has to “prohibit U.S. military involvement in the war in Yemen.” The Saudis are currently using US weaponry to wage their war in Yemen, which has turned into a humanitarian disaster.

Historical note

The Trump administration’s attempt to seduce the lower house of Congress, controlled by a Democratic majority, would appear to demonstrate its deep respect for the Constitution, which attributes exclusively to Congress the power to declare war and ensure its funding. The role of the president in wartime is to manage the war declared by Congress. But, of course, as soon as the provisions of the Constitution get in his way, President Trump finds a way to avoid its constraints. Trump will thus use the idea of an emergency response to achieve his goal.

In some sense, Trump is simply following an established historical tradition. Having Congress declare war has become a historical relic, something only a wimp would even consider. That’s why the US has managed to launch multiple wars and diverse military operations across the globe without ever declaring war since the last declared one: World War II in 1941.

To get there was a long, slow process. For those who care enough to take the time to understand the meaning of the Second Amendment (spoiler: it isn’t about individual rights to own and use guns), it wouldn’t have seen the light of day had there been a federal military force.

But the sole principle of military organization in the early years consisted of state militias, which in order to be well organized required calling on the citizens themselves to provide both the manpower and eventually the arms required, not for the federal government itself but to maintain order in the states. This was, nevertheless, a “1st American Regiment” of 700 men at the service of the federal government. It “was a hybrid, neither a strictly state-based militia unit nor a completely national regular force; instead, its formation depended on the goodwill of four states to provide militiamen.”

In its beginnings, the military was the responsibility of states and their citizens. That situation slowly evolved during the first decades of the 19th century and radically changed with the Civil War, when the United States (plural) became the United States (singular). The 20th century saw much greater changes, as the dominant ideology of self-sufficiency, which encouraged an isolationist foreign policy, suddenly vanished for good following World War II.

Ever since, presidents have learned not only to flex their muscles as commanders-in-chief, but also to learn the tricks of provocation that allow them to start any armed conflict they feel will be convenient for the strength and safety of the empire that was placed in their hands after the collapse of Europe in 1945.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, , in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post The Art of Provocation: Preparing War with Iran appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Only 70 days into his presidency, Ronald Reagan faced an assassination attempt. While he was in surgery and the vice president was mid-flight over Texas, Secretary of State Alexander Haig famously declared in front of the press, “As of now, I am in control here, in the White House.” Haig’s statement was a surprise to everyone else in the Reagan administration — as well as to anyone with a passing familiarity with the line of succession outlined in the Constitution.

Haig’s presumption of power was the logical culmination of weeks of jockeying for influence within the young administration, with the secretary of state convinced that he should wield control over all aspects of foreign policy. Chief of Staff Jim Baker had����to Haig’s early memo on the foreign policy process: “Why, what you propose here would give you control over all foreign policy matters; that does not work. The president has that authority.”

Haig’s impromptu press conference would make him the butt of many jokes (including this brilliant����by Dan Aykroyd on��Saturday Night Live). Reagan ultimately recovered, but Haig’s reputation never did. He ultimately����from his position a little over a year later.

John Bolton has a Haig-sized ego. He aspires to control the ebb and flow of foreign policy in the Trump administration. He is often at odds with his colleagues from the State Department and the Pentagon. And he is dealing with a president who, if not asleep much of the time, is only intermittently focused on national security issues.

Recently, Bolton too seemed to have his “I’m in control here” moment. With the conflict intensifying in Venezuela, the national security adviser leaked the opposition plan for the army to defect en masse from the government of Nicolás Maduro in favor of the challenger, Juan Guiadó. Bolton’s tweets President Donal Trump, who felt “boxed into a corner,” particularly after the defections didn’t materialize and Maduro did not flee the country.

The Trump administration is currently facing the consequences of its erratic foreign policy. Put a pin in the map of the world and you’ll either hit an example of US foreign policy failure or, at best, another part of the globe that the administration is studiously ignoring. Conflicts are escalating with Iran and Venezuela. US support of Saudi Arabia and Israel is producing enormous backlash in the region. The trade war with China is back on after the failure of the latest round of negotiations. Talks with North Korea have stalled, and Pyongyang is losing patience.

Maximum Pressure

John Bolton has a rather consistent answer to all of these foreign policy challenges: maximum pressure. He’d like to see regime change in Venezuela, Iran and North Korea. He’d risk war to achieve these ends. But the riskiest war that Bolton is courting is the one with his boss. Will Bolton’s ambition overreach itself and produce the same kind of ignominious result that Alexander Haig experienced nearly 40 years ago?

John Bolton is that most dangerous of political operators. He is bombastic on the outside and ruthless on the inside. He has the passion of an ideologue and the patience of a realist. “Bolton has spent decades in federal bureaucracies, complaining often of hating every minute,” Dexter Filkins����in a recent��New Yorker��profile. “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.” Bolton is not above making threats or throwing his weight around. He loves to make liberals, diplomats, and anyone who stands in his way squirm.

As national security adviser, Bolton has arrived after a number of so-called adults have fled the administration (or been tweeted out of office): H.R. McMaster, Rex Tillerson, Jim Mattis, John Kelly. With these obstacles out of the way, Bolton has virtually unrestricted access to the president. The former national security officials that Filkins interviews are uniformly aghast at what Bolton has done in his position: reduce coordination, eliminate briefings, encourage chaos. Remember — he hates bureaucracy. But there is method in his madness: He wants to reduce the background chatter so that his own voice is loud and clear in Trump’s ear.

In this looking-glass world, Trump is the Queen of Hearts, who reacts with fury at the world around her. “The embodiment of ungovernable passion,” Lewis Carroll����the queen who rules over��Alice in Wonderland. She threatens people left and right with decapitation. Bolton, meanwhile, is the Mad Hatter, presiding over an intimate foreign policy tea party where he is as crazy as a march hare. Once, when the Mad Hatter sang to his sovereign, he received a death sentence as well and only survived through the intercession of time. Bolton has been singing to Trump for more than a year, and he hasn’t yet been excommunicated. But push might just be coming to shove.

Deal, No Deal

Of all the places where John Bolton would like to go to war, Iran is currently in the lead position. The national security adviser was in office for less than two months before Trump announced that he was pulling the United States out of the nuclear deal with Iran, a key Bolton objective. Since then, Bolton has been part of the team that has put the squeeze not only on Iran (with additional economic sanctions), but any country with the temerity to continue any kind of economic engagement with Tehran (with the threat of secondary sanctions). Last year, Bolton also ��the Pentagon to prepare a menu of military options for striking Iran, scaring even some seasoned administration officials.

But it was earlier this month that Bolton upped the ante considerably. On May 5, he assumed the prerogative of the commander-in-chief by�� a direct threat to Iran:

“In response to a number of troubling and escalatory indications and warnings, the United States is deploying the USS Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group and a bomber task force to the U.S. Central Command region to send a clear and unmistakable message to the Iranian regime that any attack on United States interests or on those of our allies will be met with unrelenting force. The United States is not seeking war with the Iranian regime, but we are fully prepared to respond to any attack, whether by proxy, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or regular Iranian forces.”

Bolton was�� by a tip from Israel that Iran was preparing an attack on US interests in the region. But the national security adviser was not speaking only for himself. The May 5 statement came from the White House, so it had the full backing of the administration. Pentagon head Patrick Shanahan, CENTCOM Commander Kenneth McKenzie, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Joseph Dunford have all endorsed the deployments.

At the same time, Trump is presenting an entirely different face to Iran. Just as he turned on a dime in his policy toward North Korea — from “fire and fury” to lovey-dovey with Kim Jong-un — the president last week : “What they should be doing is calling me up, sitting down; we can make a deal, a fair deal. … We’re not looking to hurt Iran. I want them to be strong and great and have a great economy. But they should call, and if they do, we’re open to talk to them.”

The administration even reached out to the Swiss to provide Iran with the president’s phone number (as if Iran didn’t already know how to reach Trump). This might seem like so much political theater designed to confuse, terrify and ultimately cow the Iranians into signing a humiliating agreement with Washington — if not for what happened in the Strait of Hormuz over the weekend.

A Useful Pretext

John Bolton warned on May 5 that Iran should think twice about attacking US interests or face retaliation. One week later, Saudi Arabia reported that an act of sabotage damaged two of its oil tankers, and the United Arab Emirates claimed that the attackers targeted four ships in total. Gulf officials ��on who might have been behind the attacks.

The US government has not been so reluctant to point fingers. A preliminary US intelligence assessment has identified��. Trump, in his characteristic children’s book language,��, “It’s going to be a bad problem for Iran if something happens.” And now Saudi Arabia is�� that the Houthis have conducted two drone strikes on its oil facilities; the Houthis are aligned with Iran.

Bolton has what he wants: a pretext for launching a retaliatory strike against Iran. The Strait of Hormuz incident is the equivalent of the����that helped cement the case for war in Iraq (which turned out to be false) or the chemical weapons allegations that Bolton����to drum up support for a war against Cuba (which also turned out to be false).

Iranians, and many others besides,�� that Trump is being led toward war by Bolton, that the president ultimately wants to make a deal with Iran. Given Trump’s resemblance to the Queen of Hearts, however, it would not be a good idea to bet on his reasonableness. On the other hand, Bolton might have stuck his neck out a little too far this time. This just might be his Haig moment. He is encroaching on the executive’s power. He is setting up the United States to intervene on the side of a country, Saudi Arabia, that is increasingly reviled around the world for its human rights record. Like so many of his predecessors who dared to disagree with their boss, Bolton this time might lose his head.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post John Bolton Is the Most Dangerous of Political Operators appeared first on 51�Թ�.

John Bolton, the US national security adviser, has moved his sights from last week’s Venezuela to this week’s Iran. Following the failed attempt to stage-manage a cleverly scripted revolution to overthrow Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Washington has had to put that coup d’état on hold as it awaits the next opportunity to organize and execute a putsch, promising some supplementary suffering for the Venezuelan people.

According to Bolton, consists of sending “a clear and unmistakable message to the Iranian regime that any attack on United States interests or on those of our allies will be met with unrelenting force.” He might have more simply promised “fire and fury,” but the intellectual property for that phrase belongs to his boss, President Donald Trump.

The situation sounds dire. But, as The Guardian (in an earlier edition), it “was unclear on Sunday night what Iranian actions Bolton was referring to.”

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Unclear:

1. Not easy to understand and therefore perfectly exploitable to justify acts of war

2. An anagram of nuclear

Contextual note

The Guardian points to two reasons for deeming the announcement unclear: “There have been no recent incidents in the Persian Gulf where US and Iranian navies are routinely in close proximity and the Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group was already bound for the Gulf a month before Bolton made his announcement.” In other words, “no news” for the first reason and “old news” for the second. A media critic might see this simply as “fake news.” A psychoanalyst might get more technical and see this as compensatory macho behavior from warmonger John Bolton, who appears to be looking for ways to flex his muscles after the humiliation of Venezuela.

Applying the same reasoning to the man Bolton answers to, President Trump, some might suspect a “” scenario. In this case, the still beleaguered Trump, facing possible impeachment, might be tempted to “take arms against a sea of troubles” by going to war with Iran. It would make sense from several points of view.

First, it would neutralize the ongoing assault from the Democrats who now control the House of Representatives. In their grand majority, Democrats in Congress are eager supporters of any war and applaud military action, even when foolishly engaged by Republicans in the White House, as “presidential.”

Second, it would thrill his great friend, Israeli Prime Minister , whose own position at home, even surviving the recent election, has weakened at the same time as , once defined, will now probably include two extreme right, ultra-orthodox parties.

Third, it would postpone sine die the release of White House adviser Jared Kushner’s “,” aka the peace plan for the Middle East, which all observers have noted has no hope of getting any traction because of its apparent pro-Israel bias and heartless dismissal of all Palestinian demands.

Fourth, it would immensely please Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has a developed taste for military action and needs a wagging dog to help people forget not only his ordering the assassination of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul — which he continues to deny, with zero credibility — but also his consistently of domestic critics. By joining the US and Israel, a decidedly , in attacking Iran, it would also weaken the Houthi forces that have resisted Saudi Arabia’s “relentless,” costly and criminal military campaign that is still raging in Yemen.

Historical note

For over a century, US presidents have profited from decidedly unclear events to enter epic wars. These are conflicts that achieve no positive political outcomes in the short term while costing blood and treasure for both the US and its adversaries. Yet they have the marvelously positive effect of shaping and sustaining a powerfully militarized economy and feeding a national culture of what the population and media consistently frame as aggressive humanitarian justice. The wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, to name just those, have all failed to achieve any other result than the pretext for the limitless growth of the US military machine and its expansion across the globe.

Bolton the nation and the world: “The United States is not seeking war with the Iranian regime, but we are fully prepared to respond to any attack, whether by proxy, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or regular Iranian forces.” Some, such as former State Department and Pentagon official Ilan Goldenberg, quoted in The Guardian’s , assume it’s simple bluff: “The inflammatory language from Bolton is unusually provocative but my guess is just an opportunity to try to intimidate the Iranians. Nothing more.”

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif tends to agree, but he detects a potential wag-the-dog situation: “I think the US administration is putting things in place for accidents to happen. And there has to be extreme vigilance, so that people who are planning this type of accident would not have their way.”

Zarif’s fear of “accidents” clearly refers to some of the conveniently “unclear” events of history. These include the incidents that provided the pretext for US commitment to the war in Vietnam or the “proof” of weapons of mass destruction that convinced most of the political class in Washington to support the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Understanding that the pretext was phony has never stopped an already engaged war from proceeding. It’s always useful to “.”

The US is not alone in the art of fabricating accidental starts to wars. Business Insider that one of British Prime Minister Theresa May’s possible motives for dismissing her defense secretary, Gavin Williamson, was that he “wanted to invade … at least five African countries, including Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Kenya and Egypt.” As there were no obvious reasons for doing so, the article explains that defense “officials told the paper [The Sunday Times] that Williamson wanted to ‘find excuses to send troops.’”

That might have happened had Williamson not had the indiscretion to disclose to the outside world May’s confidential decision authorizing Huawei to participate in building the UK’s new 5G network. The Huawei affair was officially the “accident” that led to his dismissal and saved five African countries from a British invasion. Prime Minister May’s willingness to invade Africa remains, nevertheless, “unclear.” She may have been tempted. After all, it worked for Margaret Thatcher, who became the “” by going to war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, , in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post With No War in Venezuela, John Bolton Focuses on Iran appeared first on 51�Թ�.

My first trip to Washington, DC, to do something other than protest on the streets was to interview for a Herbert Scoville Jr. Peace Fellowship, which brings young people to the nation’s capital to work on arms control and disarmament. It was 1987, around the time that Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. The INF Treaty committed the United States and the Soviet Union to eliminate nuclear weapons for the first time on a large scale — by 1991. It was a high point for the arms control movement.

To get to the interview stage, however, I wrote an application essay about the flaws of arms control agreements: that they provided a false sense of accomplishment, that they capped the number of nuclear weapons but rarely reduced them, that they accepted the “logic” of mutually assured destruction, that they reinforced the privileges of the nuclear club, and so on. Arms control was conventionally thought of as the path toward disarmament. I made the case instead that arms control was a detour around disarmament.

When I walked into the room for my interview, I found myself facing a dozen of the leading arms control advocates in the country. I’d anticipated a one-on-one discussion, not a full court of inquisition. They understandably grilled me about my arguments and looked universally dissatisfied with my answers. Yet, in the end, they gave me a fellowship, perhaps for the same reason that Antonin Scalia liked to employ one liberal Supreme Court clerk — to have a dissenter close at hand to sharpen arguments. I did my fellowship at��Nuclear Times��magazine, a periodical devoted to scrapping nuclear weapons rather than merely controlling their production.

Nuclear Times folded long ago. Now the INF agreement, after both the United States and Russia suspended their compliance this February, is effectively dead too. Led by National Security Adviser John Bolton, an inveterate opponent of arms control, the Trump administration has taken aim at a wide range of efforts to control the production and proliferation of weapons, from the Iran nuclear deal to the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) that the president just savaged in front of a group of cheering National Rifle Association members. And yet Trump has also said, just this week, that he wants to get rid of all nuclear weapons. So, is it time to write an epitaph for arms control and herald a new age of disarmament?

The Swerve

Since my time at��Nuclear Times, two major events contributed to pushing some otherwise conservative policy makers away from arms control and toward actual disarmament. The first development was the collapse of the Soviet Union. The number of nuclear weapons in the world peaked the year before my Washington interview at just over 70,000. The end of the Cold War����to under 14,000 today.

Also, in 1991, Democrat Sam Nunn and Republican Richard Lugar teamed up to create a groundbreaking piece of legislation, the Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) Program, later dubbed the Nunn-Lugar Act. It provided US funds to decommission weapons of mass destruction in the former Soviet states. Among other results of the program, the new states of Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus became the first countries in history to abandon their nuclear weapons.

But attempts to negotiate a new set of arms control treaties with Russia have run up against a number of obstacles, from the intransigence of congressional hawks to Russia’s seizure of Crimea and involvement in the civil war in Ukraine. Over the years, Congress has chipped away at the funding for CTR. And Richard Lugar died on April 28 — the passing of one of the last moderate Republicans committed to a cooperative US relationship with the world.

The other half of Nunn-Lugar, meanwhile, has been part of the second major development: the response to global terrorism. In 2007, Sam Nunn joined Henry Kissinger, George Shultz and William Perry to author ��������The Wall Street Journal urging the foreign policy establishment to embrace not just arms control, but disarmament. They expressed concern about states like North Korea and Iran acquiring nuclear weapons and disrupting the tenuous balance of nuclear power. But they reserved most of their anxiety for scenarios in which non-state actors acquired nukes: “In today’s war waged on world order by terrorists, nuclear weapons are the ultimate means of mass devastation. And non-state terrorist groups with nuclear weapons are conceptually outside the bounds of a deterrent strategy and present difficult new security challenges.”

The United States built an arsenal of nuclear weapons to preserve and extend its global dominance. But now, in a perverse development, nukes threatened that dominance. So, the lions of US foreign policy had decided that they must go. No longer convinced that nukes kept the peace, they pushed for a world free of these weapons of mass destruction.

Two years later, clearly influenced by these arguments, President Barack Obama�� in Prague announcing for the first time that the United States was committed to nuclear disarmament. He outlined a number of steps toward that goal: a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with Moscow, US ratification of the , a fissile material cut-off treaty, a strengthened Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and so on. It was an impressive to-do list, but alas this agenda remains unrealized.

The Trump Paradox

The nuclear stand-off of the Cold War was predicated on predictability. The United States and Soviet Union wouldn’t launch a first strike because of the near certainty that the other side would then engage in massive retaliation. But the end of the Cold War and the possibility that nuclear material would fall into the hands of unpredictable actors changed the nuclear calculus. Then, to complicate matters further, along came the most unpredictable element of all: Donald Trump.

As the self-professed king of negotiators, Donald Trump used to boast of his ability to solve the nuclear impasse if only the US government would appoint him as special emissary to the Soviet Union. Within an hour of meeting Gorbachev, Trump Nobel Peace Prize winner, Bernard Lown, he could end the Cold War. In an article for in 1984, journalist William Geist wrote: “The idea that he would ever be allowed to get into a room alone and negotiate for the United States, let alone be successful in disarming the world, seems the naive musing of an optimistic, deluded young man who has never lost at anything he has tried. But he believes that through years of making his views known and through supporting candidates who share his views, it could someday happen.”

Young no more and now in a powerful political position, Trump still holds on to this illusion. But to achieve his ambition of personally disarming the world, Trump believes that first he has to get rid of all the poorly negotiated efforts of his predecessors. In this endeavor he is aided by Bolton, who has made it his personal mission to torpedo every arms control treaty that he can bring within his sights. That’s why the Trump administration seems to be all over the map on arms control. On the one hand, the president has withdrawn from the nuclear deal with Iran and pulled out of one of the last remaining arms control agreements with Russia, the aforementioned INF treaty.

Then, last week, he announced that he would unsign the Arms Trade Treaty, which the Obama administration supported and which imposes a number of important restrictions on the sale and transfer of armaments across borders. The Senate has yet to ratify the treaty. Over 100 nations have both signed and ratified the ATT, and it went into effect in 2014. Trump, by denigrating the ATT, has thrown the United States into the same camp of opposition as North Korea, Iran, China and Russia.

On the other hand, Trump also�� last week: “Between Russia and China and us, we’re all making hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of weapons, including nuclear, which is ridiculous. And I would say that China will come along, and I would say Russia will come along. It doesn’t really make sense that we’re doing this.” The president has thus instructed officials to prepare for big agreements on nuclear weapons with both Russia and China.

To get from here (dangerous) to there (disarmament), Trump has to follow some pretty obvious steps,��, of the Union of Concerned Scientists. These include a new treaty on strategic nuclear weapons with Russia, reentry into the INF Treaty, scaling back on missile defense and kicking Bolton out of his administration. So far, Trump has expressed zero interest in making any of these moves.

When it comes to any kind of large-scale arms control treaty with Russia and/or China, as ��������Arms Control Today, the administration has “no plan, strategy, or capacity to negotiate such a far-reaching deal. Even if it did, negotiations would likely take years.” Kimball suspects that the administration has an entirely different goal in mind: to load the arms-control agenda with so many big asks that it makes future deals, like a new strategic treaty with Russia, untenable. Kimball continues: “If in the coming weeks, however, Team Trump suggests China must join New START or that Russia must agree to limits on tactical nuclear weapons as a condition for its extension, that should be recognized as a disingenuous poison pill designed to create a pretext for killing New START.”

Trump will soon come to the same realization on arms control that he did��: “Nobody knew [it] could be so complicated.”

Of course, everyone knew that health care — and arms control — could be so complicated. Only Trump believes that he alone, though force of will, can substitute for the patient and informed diplomacy of hundreds of experts. As with his efforts to negotiate with North Korea, once he bumps up against the complexity of the situation, Trump will hand over responsibility for the details to his aides — and that means that Bolton will have a free hand to block any progress in talks with Russia and China.

Temporary Paradox

Since 1987, the logic of arms control has changed. Because of the end of the Cold War, arms control agreements have led to dramatic reductions in nuclear forces and the prevention of states like Iran from becoming nuclear powers. The threat of nuclear material falling into the hands of non-state actors, meanwhile, has shifted the consensus away from deterrence and toward disarmament. Arms control is now clearly part of the solution, not part of the problem. So, I’ve changed my mind about arms control being a detour around disarmament. Arms control has become more important than ever before, given that a new nuclear arms race beckons.

�ճ����,�� and ��are all modernizing their arsenals. Key arms control treaties, like the INF, no longer serve as checks on weapon development and deployment. Important initiatives like the��Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty can’t go forward without US support. The nuclear club the new treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons. And John Bolton is on the loose, like a fox bent on killing off every inhabitant of the henhouse.

So, it isn’t just Donald Trump who has a paradoxical attitude toward nuclear weapons. The world as a whole has never been closer to consensus on the need for disarmament. And yet it’s also never been further away, in a practical sense, from following the necessary steps to achieving global zero. Perhaps, however, this is only a temporary paradox. Let’s hope that the Trump administration proves to be the detour on the path to finally bidding farewell to nuclear arms.

*[This article was originally published by .]��

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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A troika, for those who haven’t read any 19th-century Russian novels recently, is a carriage drawn by three horses. So the ultimate troika of tyranny, from the point of view of the planet as a whole, would feature the three horsemen of the ongoing apocalypse: climate change, nuclear proliferation and global pandemic.

But no, that’s not what National Security Adviser John Bolton had in mind when he talked last week of a “troika of tyranny.” In a rehash of a he gave��in November in Miami, ��last week that the “troika of tyranny — Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua — is beginning to crumble.” Further laying on the insults, Bolton called Cuba’s Miguel Díaz-Canel, Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega “the three stooges of socialism.”

Ever since George W. Bush included Iraq, Iran, and North Korea in an “axis of evil,” speechmakers have been in search of the holy grail of geopolitical matchmaking — Condoleezza Rice’s “outposts of tyranny,” for instance. Bush’s phrase, which proved so enduring, was an extraordinarily flawed piece of work. The three countries he grouped together had little to no relationship at the time. Iraq and Iran had fought a nearly decade-long war that left them bitter regional rivals. North Korea, which has no ideological affinity to either country, was probably included in the list so that it didn’t appear anti-Islamic. This particular axis didn’t have a leg to stand on.

Bolton’s more alliterative phrase suffers from the same conceptual problems. Worse, it revives an anti-communist crusade that could easily expand to include North Korea, China and any left-leaning country (New Zealand?) that makes the mistake of looking at Bolton funny.

A New Monroe Doctrine?

Trump understands the world in terms of three types of leaders. There are the autocrats he likes. There are the autocrats he doesn’t like. And then there are all the rest: the democrats he doesn’t respect. Cuban leader Miguel Díaz-Canel is one of those autocrats that Trump doesn’t like. It’s not Díaz-Canel’s ideology that rubs the American president the wrong way. After all, Trump has no problem praising China’s Xi Jinping or falling in love with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. Rather, Cuba made the unpardonable error of negotiating a détente with Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama. So, by the logic of the Trump administration, Cuba is guilty by association.

Over the last two-plus years, Trump has rolled back the elements of the agreements that the Obama administration negotiated with Cuba that culminated in diplomatic recognition in July 2015. The Trump administration has restricted travel to the country, the amount of money that Cubans in America can remit to their families back home, and the deals that US businesses can negotiate with Cuban counterparts. Also, the administration will now allow US entities to file lawsuits against foreign companies operating on property appropriated by the state after the 1959 revolution.

The Obama policy was all about nudging Cuba in a particular direction. More people-to-people contact would increase the free flow of information. More business deals would encourage the growth of market activities. Meanwhile, unrestricted remittances would help Cubans deal with the myriad difficulties of everyday life.

The Trump administration isn’t interested in nudging Cuba in a particular direction. Its punitive measures are designed to encourage regime change, pure and simple. The decision to allow lawsuits to go forward is aimed at scaring off European investors in particular who’ve been operating in Cuba despite decades of US sanctions and embargo. In response, Spain����the EU to challenge the new US policy at the World Trade Organization.

Bolton never liked Cuba. When he was undersecretary of state for arms control in the George W. Bush administration, Bolton����of making biological weapons. This accusation came only two months after Bush had inaugurated the “axis of evil,” and Bolton was eager to shoehorn Cuba into the new group. But his efforts to designate the Caribbean island a “terrorist threat” — and prepare the ground for yet another US invasion — foundered when a congressional investigation����of a biological weapons program in the country.

Now Bolton is excited to have a second chance to group Cuba with two other countries that have fallen afoul of the United States: Venezuela and Nicaragua. Like the original members of the “axis of evil,” they don’t have much in common with one another. Cuba is avowedly Marxist in orientation, with a “Third World” agrarian spin. Venezuela, on the other hand, is a corrupt petrostate led by a leader who calls himself socialist but is really just a klutzy kleptocrat. Then there’s Daniel Ortega, who was once a socialist revolutionary but has transformed himself into a Catholic dictator along the lines of Francisco Franco.

None of these countries poses even the remotest threat to the United States. They have dismal human rights records, but that hasn’t been a concern for the Trump administration anywhere else in the world. So, why is Bolton bothering to waste his rhetorical flourishes on the trio? The national security adviser claims that Cuba is propping up Maduro. He hints that Ortega’s days are numbered. Is Bolton campaigning to revive what had once been the traditional US approach to Latin America: invasion, occupation, regime change?

After all, his most recent “troika of tyranny” speech was timed to coincide with the anniversary of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba on April 17, 1961. And the audience for his speech was similarly chosen with care: the Bay of Pigs Veterans Association.

When it comes to Bolton, war is always a possibility pretty much anywhere in the world. But with the Trump administration focusing most of its wrath��, the “troika of tyranny” speech is probably not the opening salvo of a new, hyper-militarist Monroe Doctrine. Bolton likely has a longer game plan in mind.

Expanding the Troika

You can almost see the lips beneath the walrus moustache purse in displeasure when Donald Trump shakes hands with Xi Jinping, murmurs sweet nothings to Kim Jong-un, and has quiet confabs with Vladimir Putin.

John Bolton has never concealed����to the current government in North Korea. He wants to����and is willing to use military force against Beijing as part of that effort. As for Russia, Bolton����that Putin is a liar and Moscow represents a serious long-term strategic threat to the United States.

This, then, is the shadow “troika of tyranny” that John Bolton would roll out in a speech if only Donald Trump’s personal predilections didn’t get in the way. But that isn’t stopping the national security adviser from carefully preparing the ground to do just that as soon as Trump gets frustrated with Kim, Xi, and/or Putin.

Toward that end, Bolton carefully chose “troika” for his phrase: a Russian word that can later be repurposed to suggest that Moscow is in fact at the root of these problems. And Bolton is hammering away at the “socialist-communist” nature of the three Latin American countries, which will prove enormously useful later on when expanding the troika to include North Korea and China. In the end, Bolton is after nothing short of a new Cold War.

Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua are small countries with no desire or means to attack the United States. North Korea with its nuclear weapons, China with the world’s second largest military, and Russia with its geopolitical ambitions, on the other hand, are much worthier adversaries. Prolonged conflict with these three will keep militarists like Bolton in business for decades. As importantly, Bolton can use these larger confrontations to unravel all international institutions, all forms of international cooperation, in fact anything that smacks of an international community.

With all eyes focused these days on Trump and his myriad crimes, John Bolton’s speeches are a reminder that even worse options are waiting in the wings.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Hired in March as national security adviser to give new impetus to Donald Trump’s foreign policy, John Bolton has finally come out of the wings to show the world what it means to make policy that truly accords with the gospel according to Fox News. He made his major public debut at a Federalist Society lunch on September 10, where he not only warned about an imminent threat from a sinister global network of malign forces seeking to undermine the US Constitution and fragment the integrity of the nation. Not content to simply issue warnings and demonstrating he was ready for the fight, he formulated very specific threats of his own against the new evil empire, of which few Americans are aware. It is known as the ICC.

Had we been back in the “great” old days of the 1950s, everyone would have immediately understood that ICC meant the International Communist Conspiracy. Perhaps it still does in Bolton’s subconscious. But today’s ICC — the International Criminal Court in the Hague, Netherlands — was only created in 2002, as an initiative of the United Nations to respond to the needs of global justice in the face of genocide and war crimes.��The creation of the tribunal was adopted by a vote of 120 to 7. In democratic terms, that was a resounding consensus. In diplomatic terms, less so, as the seven nations voting against it were��China,��Iraq,��Israel,��Libya,��Qatar, the��United States and��Yemen.

Yemen may one day have good reason to regret not signing on to the Rome Statute that founded the court. That poor country at the bottom of the Arabian Peninsula is currently the victim of ongoing war crimes, conducted on an unprecedented scale, perpetrated principally by Saudi Arabia (who did not sign the Rome Statute), with substantial technical and logistical support provided by the United States.

Two other nations that refused to sign on, Iraq and Libya, had, at the time, Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi as their leaders, both of whom have since disappeared from the international scene in circumstances most people are familiar with. Qatar, once the rising star of the Arabian Peninsula, has since been branded a traitor to the Saudi-led Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and may soon be turned into an island by Saudi engineers.

Inadvertent Truth Bearer

There are currently 123 nations that are party to the Rome Statute. The ICC has actively investigated and prosecuted alleged war criminals , and though it has convicted only a handful of the accused, it has provided an important platform for exposing the existence and nature of such crimes. More significantly, it offers an internationally recognized and apolitical tribunal for examining cases that could degrade even further, such as President Rodrigo Duterte’s murderous war on drugs in the Philippines. Two years ago, Duterte launched a campaign that authorizes and perpetrates extrajudicial assassination of suspected drug dealers and drug users. As Philip Gourevitch , “Maybe the best that one can hope for the court, in its current form, is that it can yet inspire some people who seek the rule of law to find a way to achieve it.”

The Duterte case illustrates both the utility and weakness of the ICC. Two Filipino senators brought the case against Duterte before the international tribunal in 2017, leading to the decision to conduct a preliminary investigation. Earlier this year, Duterte reacted. As head of state, he announced��the and then threatened to arrest the ICC prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda — appointed to head the investigation — if she were to conduct any activities in the Philippines. Duterte may thus have provided a model of resistance, or rather refusal, that has inspired Bolton. But Bolton’s threats, as we shall see, are far more elaborate.

Despite Donald Trump’s apparent addiction to “alternative facts” and his propensity for outright misrepresentation of reality (sometimes called “lies” but, in his case, more of a psychological compulsion), to some observers, the Trump administration has become a model of transparency. At least in the sense that thanks to his actions and speech, we can see more of what goes on in the US government than under previous administrations. The observable chaos within the White House, thanks to which so much of what was designed to be concealed has been revealed, accounts for only one small part of this unexpected transparency.

The successive waves of leaks, shocking insider revelations, salacious anecdotes, “gutless” op-eds in The New York Times and blockbuster books by Pulitzer Prize winners about the surreal goings-on of a group of dysfunctional actors in search of a non-existent script entitled “America First” tell only the anecdotal part of the story. That isn’t transparency: It’s just the gossip that provides late-night talk show comedians with their scripts.

Trump and now Bolton have done much more than open up the White House to the media’s scrutiny and television satirists’ derision. Through their actions and pronouncements, they have progressively and convincingly revealed what was previously hidden by the carefully scripted “good intentions” of the entire political and diplomatic class: the workings of the global American empire as it has developed and expanded over the past seven decades. In a betrayal of Teddy Roosevelt’s oft-quoted wisdom, faithfully followed by previous presidents, Trump has consistently spoken loudly (and repetitively) and wielded two shaky sticks: sanctions and tariffs.

A summary of his time in office so far would reveal a clown skipping across the globe, cursing and insulting his allies, and using his dreaded “sanctions” to punish not only his enemies but also those among his allies who refuse to assist him in punishing his enemies. The case of India comes to mind, compelled to respect US sanctions against Iran, compromising its own economy, following Trump’s unilateral betrayal of the five other signatories of the Iran deal.

Imposing sanctions and tariffs in all directions might appear to be a step forward from the costly, disastrous wars George W. Bush initiated and Barack Obama prolonged and perpetuated. But Trump has kept those fires burning as well, though with less fanfare. And though sanctions and tariffs do real damage, especially to civilian populations, Trump’s innovation has been largely rhetorical and symbolic as he seeks to realize his otherwise nonsensical dream of “America First.”

Being first may not be as enviable a position as Trump thinks. Those in the administration who have actually read the Bible — rather than just paying lip service to it in a ploy to secure the evangelical vote — may be in a position to understand one of the stated paradoxes of divine justice that “The last shall be first, and the first last” (Matthew 20:16). Getting one’s wish — or rather trying to impose it through force — may lead straight to the hell of international humiliation.

The deepest irony lies in the fact that using sanctions and tariffs to demonstrate Trump’s goal of putting America first has revealed to the world a feature of the long-standing Pax Americana that has remained true but was hidden from view: that every other nation, including historical allies, is a competitor with the US and potentially, when push comes to shove, an enemy. Trump is right to think that leaders across the globe understand that they live in a competitive world, but his actions and words — now underlined and even exaggerated by Bolton — have helped ordinary people to understand that as well.

Attitudes May Vary

Leaders of any nation or institution are, by definition, power brokers. They know how interests are evaluated, how the balance of power is managed in backroom diplomacy, how trade-offs and compromises are quietly negotiated and how — in all cases except war — face must be saved in the media, if only to keep the critics at bay.

Philip Gourevitch��reminds us that, speaking to the Federalist Society, John Bolton “failed to mention … how dramatically Washington’s hostility to the court inspired greater support for it in international opinion, and complicated relations on many fronts with our allies, particularly as the extent of the Bush Administration’s policy of torturing detainees in the so-called global war on terror became widely known.” Bolton’s speech has already provoked a new round of hostility��from around the world. that “The world will see this new policy for what it is: an outrageous attack on the institutions of global cooperation, and a worrisome sign that a United States led by President Trump cannot be counted on to lead the fight for global justice, but instead poses a terrible threat to it.”

Newsweek’s take reflects the current “mainstream” position in US politics that seeks to put all the blame on Trump and promote the illusory belief that if the president were replaced, all would be well again. Gourevitch reminds those who may not have noticed of the more flexible but equally cynical approach of the Obama administration, when it attempted to use the ICC for its own purposes while remaining uncommitted to it: “Just as the antagonism from the Bush Administration’s first term had won the I.C.C. favor in much of the rest of the world, the Obama Administration’s practice of publicly embracing the court, which it furtively tried to exempt itself from, engendered resentment that the court was being co-opted as an instrument of U.S. hegemony.”

In other words, from president to president, the attitude may vary, but the message received by the rest of the world is the same: All administrations are committed to using whichever tools they possess to promote US hegemony. Where previous administrations — including the Bush Jr. White House — took the trouble to invoke higher principles while following the same underlying logic, Trump and Bolton’s transparency about hegemony constitutes an innovation. And though many in the establishment hope for a return to the status quo ante Trump, the Trump team has exposed, with admirable transparency, the underlying logic of the US commitment to what Newsweek euphemistically and patriotically calls “the fight for global justice.”

In his speech, Bolton returned to his own themes from the past about evil conspiracies seeking to undermine US sovereignty, but added to them a new ingredient: the Trumpian obsession with economic punishment and humiliation, especially in the form of sanctions. Before Trump, back in the days of George W. Bush, Bolton’s position was just to deny the authority of any international organization, starting with the United Nations, to which Bush, in one of his numerous hyperreal moments, appointed Bolton ambassador to the UN. Bolton has learned the lessons taught to him by his new master in the White House: “It’s the sanctions, stupid!”

Former presidents — notably Bill Clinton in Iraq — routinely sought to define sanctions in an international context, appealing to multilateral authority. When leveling sanctions against non-compliant nations, they justified it as a moral act, underpinned by the somewhat fanciful idea that the more a population suffers, the more likely it will be to accept regime change favorable to US interests, Trump has taken it one step further — thanks to his belief in exceptionalism and��the notion of “America First” — by discarding the need for a consensus and acting unilaterally.

Bolder than Trump and resolved to show his teeth under his drooping moustache, Bolton applies the logic of sanctions not just to nations and institutions alone, as he has now promised to do with regard to the ICC, but also to the individual members of the court. As mentioned above, Duterte may have inspired this innovation. Bolton’s original suggestions, saying that “the Trump administration will consider banning judges and prosecutors from entering the country, put sanctions on any funds they have in the US financial system, and prosecute them in US courts.”

Thanks to Bolton, we seem to have entered a new universe of primordial punishment, for the first time directed at anyone, in any form — nation, population, government, individual — who is not willing to conform to US dictates or bow down before its global authority. In a certain sense this is a mere extension of what already existed. Bush’s war on terror opened the doors to secretly punishing, torturing and assassinating people without due process (for example,��the ), a practice chillingly extended by Obama with his . The major difference is that, until now, the practices were not proclaimed as policy.

Obama banished torture and then, when confronted with the historical facts, regretfully admitted that “” and “did some things that were contrary to our values.” The acts contradicted the policy, which purportedly reflected our moral values. Perhaps under Trump “our values” have now changed. But in both cases, there appears to be an overriding principle: that Americans involved in military operations should never be prosecuted or punished even for recognized crimes. The first step is to deny the crimes themselves. If discovered, as Obama demonstrated, we let them go because that was then, and this is now. They belong to chapter of a history that no one can rewrite.

Moral Context

Bolton’s words make clear the moral context as he sees it. He fumed that “the I.C.C. may announce the start of a formal investigation against these American patriots, who voluntarily signed on to go into harm’s way to protect our nation, our homes, and our families in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.” The rhetoric is admirable: The war criminals cannot be criminals because they are “American patriots” who must be goodhearted and generous because they volunteered to “go into harm’s way.”

Harm’s way, we assume, is a geographical term for a place that is typically another faraway country populated by people we know, and want to know, little about. And the noble aim of these patriots, transported to the other side of the globe, is “to protect our nation, our homes and our families.” Any crimes they happen to commit along that stretch of road called harm’s way must be understood to have been for a noble cause, which automatically exempts them from both investigation and eventual punishment.

Some commentators suspect that Bolton was less concerned about the ICC’s threat to accuse Americans of war crimes than he was about Israel, a nation occasionally suspected of mistreating other people (especially those living as captives within its borders). As he states, echoing previous presidents and practically every politician in the US, that “the United States will always stand with our friend and ally, Israel.”�� Once again, this means “no investigation, no trial, no punishment.”�� reports: “He said the U.S. would use ‘any means necessary’ to protect Americans and citizens of allied countries, like Israel, from unjust prosecution by this illegitimate court.”

Although he invokes “allied countries” in the plural, Israel is the only one he mentions. Does anyone seriously imagine that the US would consider using “any means necessary” to protect citizens of France, Canada or Mexico from prosecution by the ICC? (Note that prosecution, when conducted by the ICC, is necessarily “unjust,” and the court itself is, by definition, “illegitimate.”)

Therein, with particular thanks to Bolton for his clarity,��we see how the Trump administration has made things considerably more transparent. Israel is not just an ally. It is the ally, perhaps the only real one. Israel’s interests and US interests are identical and can never be separated. This has been obvious for some time, but Bolton wants to make sure that we all understand that.

Bolton’s real purpose in the speech had less to do with the illegitimate meddling of the ICC than to announce the punishment of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) with the closing of its office in Washington and banishing it from American shores. The PLO stands accused of the capital crime of soliciting the ICC to investigate what multiple observers have qualified as likely war crimes by Israel against the Palestinian people. And it’s all in the interest of future peace. Just as Trump claimed that moving the US embassy to Jerusalem was intended, almost comically, to remove an obstacle to the advancement of peace talks, Bolton claims that the punishment of the PLO — its exclusion from the US, ending its role of representation even of Palestinians living in the US — will serve to convince the Palestinians to engage in peace talks with Israel, presumably on terms defined, but not yet announced, by .

A Learning Experience

Palestinian negotiator of this move is that “this is an affirmation of the US administration’s determination to continue its policies of blackmail and extortion.” Blackmail and extortion have been part of the diplomatic toolkit of the US empire for decades, long before Trump, alongside invasion, war, regime change, “fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder,” to quote John Perkins in .

Nobody builds an empire only out of good wishes and generous acts. There is always dirty work to be done. Imperial governments and media concert to build a public image around the positive effects of empires, many of which are real. But enough of the bad effects are equally real, inciting serious people to wonder whether it is all worth it, and whether it doesn’t reach a point at which abuse becomes its dominant trait. The public image of the good American empire remained largely intact for some 50 years, but began to fray, as historian has remarked, with George W. Bush’s neocon inspired invasions of the Middle East.

In many ways, the Trump administration is the messenger who has now shed bright light on the underpinnings of an increasingly out-of-control empire. Not many Americans — and especially not Trump’s own base — are ready to admit that the message is worth paying attention to. Trump’s opponents, both Democrat and Republican, and a good part of the citizenry, are equally committed to denying the tenor of the message. They desperately want to believe that Trump is the cause and not the (unwitting, and probably witless) messenger who has come forward to reveal the complex of related causes.

Bolton and Trump have provided, and are continuing to provide, a service we should all be grateful for, which would have some meaning if we could take the time to understand what it signifies and how to act on it.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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�ճ����recent ��������The New York Times��about the resistance to Trump within his own administration was supposed to reassure the American people. Don’t worry, the writer was saying: We the “steady state” are making sure that an unhinged president doesn’t blow up the world. Behind the scenes, the “adults in the room” are hoodwinking the president so that Americans can sleep soundly at night.

I’m still having trouble sleeping.

The anonymous author, after all, also proudly proclaims that his cohort of semi-dissidents “want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous.”

Anonymous is thrilled that the administration has successfully pushed through “effective deregulation” (like gutting the Environmental Protection Agency), “historic tax reform” (shifting billions of dollars from the poor and middle class to the top 1%) and “a more robust military” (wasting precious resources that could be used to rebuild US infrastructure and help Americans in trouble). Like most of the Republicans in Congress, in other words, Anonymous ignored all the warning signs (actually, the screaming headlines) that Donald Trump was unfit for office and supported his efforts anyway in order to push through all the programs dear to the hearts of the conservative movement.

Yes, I’m delighted that there are people in the administration who are aghast at Trump’s attacks on the media, his embrace of dictators and his overall erratic behavior. It’s embarrassing that the bar has dropped so low that such obvious objections should qualify as worthy of comment, much less controversy.

The Schismatic

Meanwhile, I don’t think Anonymous should resign. I don’t think Anonymous should go public. Anonymous belongs to a time-honored tradition of civil disobedience and whistle-blowing. It will take all kinds to defeat Donald Trump, including those who voted for him, those who served under him and even those who continue to embrace much of his agenda. I’ll support Anonymous just like I support the Colin Kaepernick ads despite ��to its workers. Sometimes you have to praise the action and ignore the actor.

But the question remains: Why did Anonymous do it? It’s a big step to declare yourself a mole inside one of the most vindictive administrations of all time. The cloak of anonymity is surely not sufficient. Most people wouldn’t cross Trump this way without enormous legal pressure or the promise of a witness protection program. I’m not convinced that Anonymous published the article as a preemptive plea bargain for some future Nuremburg-like trial that passes judgment on those who worked in the Trump administration. Such a person could document his or her efforts quietly without publishing an op-ed in��The New York Times.

No, I think it’s part of an effort within the Republican Party that will gain strength over the next two years — to build a movement of Trumpism without Trump.

Anonymous wants a president who acts more like a conventional leader and, on such issues as free trade, more like a conventional conservative. The internal resistance knows that Trump’s days in office are limited — by his own incompetence and criminal venality, by the prospect of impeachment hearings or by the actions of voters. These semi-critics want to safeguard their supposed achievements and detach them somehow from the stigma of Trump himself.

The anonymous op-ed is a call not for a coup within the administration — for instance, through the invocation of the 25th��amendment — but rather for a schism within the Republican Party.

As Republican strategist ��back in April: “We don’t have to wait for November’s cataclysm. We can begin now with a strategy to harness Trump’s base and add swing voters, even as we remain faithful to our principles.” In other words: Strip away the numerous dead leaves on the Republican Party and hope that what remains can survive the Trump infestation.

Despite Trump’s obvious failings, such a schism is no easy task. What Anonymous finds appalling — the qualities that make the president a populist and not just a right-wing conservative looking out for number one (percent) — is precisely what endears Trump to his hardcore supporters. They don’t want him to act presidential. They don’t want him to rein in his worst tendencies. They like his unpredictability, they applaud his attacks on the press, and they believe his bombast. They want Trump to be Trump.

“As a sheer political matter, there can be no such thing as Trumpism without Trump, or Anti-Trumpism without Trump, or Anything Else without Trump,” ��last year in��Politico. Ed Gillespie, the right-wing Republican candidate for governor of Virginia, lost decisively in the December election after he tried to distance himself from Trump. It’s not clear whether Gillespie would have done any better if Trump had supported him more vigorously. Still, Lowry and other conservatives insisted on their takeaway: Trump owns the Republican Party, so get with the program.

The other objection, from conservative columnist Ross Douthat, is that any attempt within the Republican Party to drain off populism will only backfire. The internal resistance might save the country from any number of dunderhead moves, “but it will not save the country or its party from populism,” . “It will only make the next surge that much stronger, and ease the next Donald Trump’s ascent.”

Trump 2.0

But the next Republican politician who comes along will probably borrow just enough of Trump’s populism to get elected. Someone like Tom Cotton, the Republican senator from Arkansas, is just the kind of political figure that Anonymous might choose to lead the party to the Promised Land, someone for whom populism is a condiment rather than the main dish.

Consider this excerpt from a��:

“Go home tonight and turn on one of the nighttime comedy shows. Tomorrow morning, turn on one of the cable morning-news shows. This Saturday, watch ‘Saturday Night Live.’ All the high wardens of popular culture in this country, they love to make fun of Donald Trump, to mock him, to ridicule him. They make fun of his hair, they make fun of the color of his skin, they make fun of the way he talks — he’s from Queens, not from Manhattan. They make fun of that long tie he wears, they make fun of his taste for McDonald’s.

What I don’t think they realize is that out here in Arkansas and the heartland and the places that made a difference in that election, like Michigan and Wisconsin, when we hear that kind of ridicule, we hear them making fun of the way��we��look, and the way��we��talk, and the way��we��think.”

Cotton went to Harvard as an undergraduate. He went to Harvard Law School. He clerked for an Appeals Court judge. He worked at a prestigious law firm. After serving in the military, he did consulting work for McKinsey. And now he is a member of the Senate. In other words, Tom Cotton is without doubt a member of America’s elite. And yet, he is able to traffic in all the idioms of populism by emphasizing his Arkansas origins.

Indeed, despite Trump’s predilection for fast food and limited vocabulary, he has few of the credentials of a populist. Cotton can talk the talk. Meanwhile, his foreign policy is just like John Bolton’s, and his domestic agenda is basically slash-and-burn economics and anti-government politics. When he was a member of the House, the Arkansas Times said that����was “extreme even for a Republican.” In the Senate, he’s����a 92% ranking from the American Conservative Union.

President Cotton is the even more perilous future in store for America. There won’t be an internal resistance inside a Cotton administration because he would behave just like all the other “adults in the room” he appoints. He’d run up the flag and both Rich Lowry and Ross Douthat — not to mention the neocons, the nativists and the know-nothings — would stand and salute. It would be all the worst aspects of the Trump agenda without the worst aspects of Trump himself.

So, I’ll certainly join hands with Anonymous to rid America of its present danger. But let’s not kid ourselves about the future danger that Anonymous wants instead.

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Donald Trump’s foreign policy approach to the Middle East, such as it is, is a wild zigzag of a ride that is now being driven largely by his national security adviser, John Bolton. Bolton’s grand��idée fixe��is to effect regime change in Iran. In order to do that, he needs to capture the attention of a president who complains often and bitterly that America’s friends and allies never, ever do enough.

When Donald Trump peevishly asks why American soldiers remain in Syria while its Arab neighbors do next to nothing to assist in finishing off ISIS, John Bolton pops up with a ready answer by calling for the formation of an��. The force would consist of troops from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman and Qatar — as well as Egypt and Jordan.

When Bolton floated the idea, he was either blissfully ignorant or wilfully malicious in suggesting Qatar be part of the force. The Qataris are engaged in a bitter feud with the Saudis, the Emiratis, Bahrain and Egypt — the so-called quartet — who have waged a land, air and sea blockade for more than a year. The feud, largely driven by the Emiratis and the Saudis, has plunged to new depths of absurdity with Saudi Arabia, among other things, pirating ��and threatening to dig a canal to turn the country, which juts like a thumb off the Arabian Peninsula,��into an .

Meanwhile, Egypt has more than enough of its own brutal insurgency to cope with in the North Sinai with ISIS affiliate Ansar Beit al-Maqdis. Even were the Americans to use the big stick of threatening to cut off aid to force Egypt on board, it is highly unlikely the Sisi government would comply. Though it may be more than five decades ago, Egyptians well remember an����that destroyed a large part of the army in what came to be called their country’s Vietnam.

Speaking of Yemen, Bolton’s army, for it to have any hope of success, would be largely reliant on the Emiratis and the Saudis. But they are embroiled in a three-year war that has brought huge misery to the people of the Middle East’s poorest country. The war remains largely stalemated, with Saudi Arabia in particular having precious little to show for its efforts, which include the destruction of essential infrastructure and the killing and maiming of thousands of civilians with an aerial bombing campaign that in its savagery has brought international condemnation down on the Saudis’ head.

The Emiratis, fondly referred to as��“”��by US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, may well be up for a further military adventure that would buttress their foreign policy ambitions, but Saudi Arabia, with an ongoing war on its southern border, would be well-advised to steer clear.

Jordan, for its part, finds itself deep in an����that has been exacerbated by the more than 1 million Syrian refugees that have flooded into the country. The last thing on King Abdullah’s mind, surely, is to join a campaign that would see a Sunni Arab army enter a country that is increasingly falling into the hands of the Alawite dictator Bashar al-Assad, backed as he is by Shia Iran and by Russia.

So Bolton’s Arab army is a fantasy woven out of ignorance and wishful thinking, one unlikely ever to see the light of day. Or will it? Given that he wants to overthrow the current regime in Tehran, a Sunni fighting force that found itself in Syria and in conflict with Hezbollah and soldiers from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps could be just the spark that triggers the war that Bolton is eager to pursue.

His dilemma is that it must be a war that the US contributes to but does not lead. Trump’s base is well fed up with American military interventions in places they do not care about and indeed may have only vaguely heard of. No American boots on the ground, then. Logistical support, leading from the rear and being in coalition with an aerial bombing campaign — that’s about as far as Trump can afford to go.

That is, however, well beyond where his defense secretary and the Pentagon are prepared to go. Mattis has been careful, noting, for example, that military options toward Iran remain viable and on the table, but steering well clear of the sort of inflammatory language that Bolton is prone to use.

The difficulty is that the defense secretary is an increasingly��. More than one year into his presidency, Trump no longer feels the need to surround himself with people who refuse to pander to him and to give him assurances of personal loyalty. Buoyed by what he sees as his success with the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, Trump believes that, like trade wars, foreign policy is an easy win. He is surrounding himself with people who flatter his gargantuan and demanding ego and reassure him that yes, Kim Jong-un will dance to the tune you play, when all the����leads to the supposition that it is America that is likely to be doing the dancing.

It has been said of John Bolton that he��“.”��He knows how to play the game, how to play up to Trump and how to bully those around him to get to where he wants to go. Make no mistake about it, Bolton wants regime change. To get that, he wants America’s allies in the Middle East, one way or another, to go to war with Iran, and as of now he couldn’t be better placed to push for that goal to become a reality.

*[This article was originally published by .]

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Has Donald Trump suddenly begun to learn and adapt rather than posture and repeat? Concerning the imminent talks with North Korea, we , perhaps for the first time, that he is willing to change, though he of course denies it is a change. “I never said that it will happen in one meeting. I think it’s going to be a process. But the relationship is building and it is a very positive thing.”

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Relationship:

In the US, an arrangement to do business and grant reciprocal favors so long as the terms of the contract are respected. In Asia, the act of belonging to a pluralistic network of trust, unlimited by legal terms or time factors. In the rest of the world, something similar to the Asian network but also admitting of individual arrangements.

Contextual note

Significantly, ��that “Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, and Mike Pence, the vice-president — both hawks on North Korea — did not take part in the meeting and were nowhere to be seen before and after.”

Trump and his closest advisers share a worldview in which they see every arrangement as adversarial. That Trump is now talking about relationships suggests that someone who actually knows something about Asian culture may have captured his attention for five minutes, eventually dictating the message to put forward before he tries to bully his way through the negotiations.��

Historical note

A year ago, General James Mattis — a moderate compared with Bolton and Pence — evoked the��: “It would be a war that fundamentally we don’t want… but we would win at great cost.” Today the tone has changed. Diplomacy has replaced the threat of war and the promise of domination by the powerful US military, a threat Trump was still making less than two weeks ago. Now Mattis tells us, “We must maintain a strong collaborative defensive stance so we enable our diplomats to negotiate from a strong position of strength in this critical time.” This from the man who foresaw a “war more serious in terms of human suffering than anything we’ve seen since 1953,” featuring a massive attack on Seoul, with its population of 25 million.

The US has now backed off its ultimatum requiring North Korea to immediately dismantle its nuclear capacity. Instead, Trump now anticipates a “” in what he describes as a process rather than a simple signature on a hastily established zero sum contract. “We’re over that, totally over that, and now we’re going to deal and we’re going to really start a process… I think it’s probably going to be a very successful — ultimately, a successful process,” the president said.

Trump’s language is always interesting. “We’re over that” usually suggests “we have reformed” or “we’ve been cured of something shameful.” Adding “totally” makes it sound like a radical cure. But his meaning becomes a little clearer when he follows up with, “now we’re going to deal.”

“Deal” is always a key word for Trump. In this context, “we’re over that” may mean that, in his mind, it was a planned or predictable stage in a standard negotiation ritual. Trump the master negotiator will always start with a gambit in which he pushes an extreme position to frighten the other party into reducing their hopes and ceding ground. That’s how the “art of the deal” works in Trump’s mind. Relationship building is not part of it, especially when you know you have the clout that the other party cannot theoretically oppose.

In the end, Trump predicts “it’s probably going to be a very successful” before switching to “ultimately, a successful process.” He’s caught between promising success now — one of his recurring (“we’re going to win so much you may even get tired of winning”) — and geopolitical reality, which he still doesn’t understand. But now he realizes he has no choice but to acknowledge it as something that may reduce his capacity to “win” and may also take time.

The media have documented Trump’s curious belief that by making peremptory decisions and simply proclaiming “may my will be done” that all will fall into line. He has already applied this method to the 2015 Paris agreement, the Iran nuclear deal and now tariffs on steel and aluminum. When dealing with the eternally confused and endemically ineffective members of the American political establishment — Republican and Democrat — he has managed to play his game, keeping political friends and enemies off balance.

With his declared external enemies — North Korea and Iran — so long as it was only about bluster, he has also managed to keep his act going. But when it comes to sitting down to talk with enemies his method fails. And when he makes enemies of all his allies — as he has done with his trade war — he can’t even count on “process.” He’s left with a choice between humiliation and disaster.

The real question no one can answer is this: Can Trump manage humiliation? Can he even envision it?

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book,, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Conmen always keep up a patter. While they’re extracting the wallet from your pocket, they maintain a nonstop monologue so that you focus on their mouth and not what they’re doing with their hands. Beware the voluble stranger.

Donald Trump has always been a talker. Even before he discovered Twitter, Trump was constantly bending people’s ears — about himself, his deals, his girlfriends. He even pretended to be other people on the phone in order to more credibly boast of his achievements: a ventriloquist who performed as his own dummy.

A few months before the 2016 elections, his former ghost writer to a card sharp: “His verbal gymnastics are intended to burnish his image, excite his followers, or tear down his competitors and critics. And like the three card monte dealer, Trump is prepared to bolt should he get caught in the game.” Unfortunately Trump learned that the most successful conmen don’t bolt. When caught, they stand their ground and raise their (con) game. The short con is for losers.

In November 2016, enough Americans were distracted by Trump’s patter to put him into the White House. The Russian trolls who helped out through social media were just an expanded version of what Trump used to do by himself — create fake people to advance his cause. And when critics have tried to pin all this fakery on Trump himself, he has merely turned the tables by accusing his accusers of “fake news.” In a long con of this nature, the dupes are never quite sure what is real and what is sham.

Trump has brought this art of the con into foreign relations. He’s tried to pretend that he has an “America First” trade policy even as he grants concessions to China’s telecommunications giant ZTE (and just after Beijing����Ivanka a few more trademarks as well). He lambasted the 2003 decision to invade Iraq, but is following the same pattern with Iran. He has promised a grand peace deal in the Middle East even as he jettisons��the last pretense of ��and tightens his embrace of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

But the most mystifying policy so far has been toward North Korea. In the last week, Trump has gone from eagerly anticipating a June 12 summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to abruptly cancelling the meeting to starting up the preparations again for the very same summit. It looks and sounds like a classic shell game. Where’s the summit? Under this walnut shell? Wanna bet? Sorry, buddy, the summit disappeared. Ah, but wait — here it is, under this shell! Now, watch carefully as I move the shells one more time…

The least charitable interpretation of this behavior is that Trump is all sound and fury signifying nothing, which certainly characterizes his knowledge of all things Korean. The most charitable interpretation is that it’s all part of a sophisticated negotiating strategy of bluff and bluster. Trump’s volatility, however, has an altogether different origin. It’s not just Trump’s patter that serves as a distraction. Trump himself is the distraction. While all eyes are focused on him, other forces are at work to make sure that the audience is fooled.

Why Did Trump Cancel?

Donald Trump wants a summit with Kim Jong-un. He wants the spectacle. He wants to demonstrate that he’s better than all the presidents who came before and failed to solve the nuclear crisis. He wants to prove that he, alone, can do diplomacy the right way (and so why not ��by a third?).

But ham actors are acutely aware of the prospect of being upstaged. Trump wants a Korean drama, but only one that he controls. As��The Washington Post��describes the scene in the White House on the eve of the cancellation:

“Inside the White House residence, the first alarm sounded about 10 p.m. Wednesday when national security adviser John Bolton told Trump about��North Korea’s public statement��threatening a ‘nuclear-to-nuclear showdown’ and mocking Vice President Pence as a ‘political dummy.’

Trump was dismayed by Pyongyang’s bellicose rhetoric, the same theatrics Trump often deploys against his adversaries. Bolton advised that the threatening language was a very bad sign, and the president told advisers he was concerned Kim was maneuvering to back out of the summit and make Americans look like desperate suitors, according to a person familiar with the conversations.

So Trump called it off first.”

Pay attention to the key person in this account. It’s not Trump, who remains as always blithely unaware of what lies beneath the froth of current events. It’s��. Ostensibly he’s just the bearer of bad news in this story. But the national security advisor knew exactly how to play the president. He provided just the intelligence necessary to further : undermining the summit.

Searching for a scapegoat to blame for the summit going south, the administration seized on China. Trump asserted that Kim Jong-un had shifted his attitude toward the United States and the summit after a second discussion with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. That’s the conman’s equivalent of snapping his fingers to divert your attention once again. China has consistently supported the summit and would love to see North Korea fully denuclearized. Moreover, North Korea didn’t fundamentally adjust its stance since on May 8. Indeed, the meeting came just before Secretary of State Mike Pompeo went for his second trip to Pyongyang and negotiated the release of three American detainees.

And, of course, North Korea went ahead as promised two weeks later with the����at Punggye-ri. In fact, it was demolishing this site at the����that Trump was preparing to send out his letter cancelling the summit. Talk about awkward!

For the world at large, Trump was clearly the unreliable flip-flopper, not Kim. And the key difference between the time Trump accepted the summit invitation and the moment he cancelled it was not Xi Jinping, but John Bolton. That’s part of the con. The Trump administration must somehow convince Americans and Koreans alike that this dangerous hawk can play a dove if called upon to do so.

On Again

The leaders of the two Koreas scrambled to meet again quickly in the wake of Trump’s cancellation letter. They met for a fourth inter-Korean summit to����to working-level talks, to denuclearization and to a US-DPRK summit. In an even more promising development, North Korea��is sending��to the United States one of its top officials — , a former head of military intelligence and reportedly Kim Jong-un’s right-hand man — to signal the importance of the meeting with Trump.

Eighteen years ago, North Korean General Jo Myong-rok made a similar trip to the United States to discuss the planned visit to Pyongyang by then-President Bill Clinton. The 2000 elections intervened, along with the surprise victory of George W. Bush. While the Supreme Court adjudicated the Florida vote, Clinton called off what might have been a historic turning point in US-North Korean relations. Kim Yong-chol will����to pick up on where Jo left off.

All of these moves do much to allay the American president’s chief concern — that the North Koreans will embarrass him personally by not showing up in Singapore. Trump, in turn, has indicated that the summit may well be on again, even for June 12, though it’s only a couple weeks away. In a tweet on May 27, Trump��: “Our United States team has arrived in North Korea to make arrangements for the Summit between Kim Jong Un and myself. I truly believe North Korea has brilliant potential and will be a great economic and financial Nation one day. Kim Jong Un agrees with me on this. It will happen!”

But what will happen? The summit? North Korea becoming a great economic nation one day? Or simply another move of the walnut shells? What game is Trump playing exactly? Let’s first put to rest two misconceptions surrounding this summit. The first is that Trump’s belligerent approach to North Korea is something new and has already yielded results. The second is that the diplomatic approach to North Korea obviously failed over the years, since the country now possesses nuclear weapons.

The Long Con

Trump’s threats and see-sawing attitude toward North Korea is nothing new. Bill Clinton nearly started bombing Pyongyang in 1994. George W. Bush included North Korea in his axis of evil in 2002. Successive administrations have reminded North Korea, both rhetorically and through repeated military exercises near its border, that the United States has sufficient firepower to obliterate the country. The only thing different about Trump’s strategy has been his personal invective. Everything else — more sanctions, pressure on China to rein in its putative ally — has been borrowed from administrations past.

As I’ve argued��, neither Trump’s insults nor his borrowed tactics have much to do with the change in North Korea’s behavior. That has more to do with South Korean leader Moon Jae-in’s sophisticated engagement policy along with economic, political and security calculations inside North Korea itself. Diplomacy, meanwhile, hasn’t prevented North Korea from going nuclear. But it nevertheless produced partial success in the past — the freezing of North Korea’s plutonium program in the 1990s, the partial destruction of elements of that program in the 2000s, a multi-year moratorium on missile launches. The reasons for the failure of that diplomacy are myriad. Suffice it to say that it takes two to mess up a tango.

So, diplomacy can still work to bring peace to the Korean peninsula. And Trump’s belligerence is not likely to make the difference in such a scenario. It’s impossible, of course, to know what’s going on inside Trump’s brain. The president himself seems to have only intermittent access to that dimly lit space. However, it’s likely that Trump believes that he can dazzle Kim Jong-un — with charm, with bravado, with threats, with promises.

This, too, is a shell game. The president has to persuade Kim to give up his nuclear weapons in exchange for what? A promise not to attack? A promise to lift sanctions like the United States did for Iran? A promise of economic investment that neither the US government nor the private sector is likely to provide?

Meanwhile, Kim Jong-un is playing his own shell game. He knows that nuclear weapons are his only real bargaining chip. If he gives them up completely, the game is over, just like it was for Muammar Gaddafi. So, he too must keep the walnut shells in motion. In other words, both leaders are playing a long con designed to maintain their own short-term political survival. It’s the perfect scenario for a movie like��The Sting.

But here’s the twist. There’s a good chance that the two cons will cancel each other out at the summit because neither side will have to give up anything, at least not completely or immediately. At the summit, the leaders will simply sign a pre-planned document that will be simultaneously grand and bland. As : “U.S. officials said the most likely document would provide a framework for future negotiations, without going into great detail about what North Korea might be willing to give up or what steps the United States would take in exchange. Instead, those details would be hammered out at the working level in the months and years to come.”

Pay attention to the key word here: years. In a new report, nuclear expert ��a process at least a decade in the making: “The initial phase, taking up to a year, is the halt of military, industrial, and personnel operations. The second, taking up to five years, is the winding down of sites, facilities, and weapons. The final and hardest phase, taking up to 10 years, is the elimination or limiting of factories and programs.”

Hollywood Ending

And now you understand the real long con at work here. If all goes well, the two Koreas will proceed with the hard work of reunification — slow, patient, full of difficult compromises — while US and North Korean negotiators are absorbed in the equally time-consuming task of dismantling the North’s nuclear program. John Bolton’s regime-change fantasies will be mothballed. Donald Trump can claim victory for a process, not an outcome.

Diplomacy will ultimately give way to regime change — not in Pyongyang, but in Washington. By the time that voters have ousted Trump and crew from the White House, the Koreans will have created a dynamic on the ground that a subsequent US administration will have great difficulty reversing.

That’s not the only way this story could end. The summit might not happen. John Bolton might succeed in turning the president away from diplomacy. North Korea might get disgusted with the Trump administration’s intransigence. Disagreement over denuclearization might doom the discussions. Relations between Pyongyang and Seoul could sour.

But for the moment, let’s go with the Hollywood ending. Let’s imagine a big close-up of Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un shaking hands. Let’s imagine a peace treaty ending the Korean War. Let’s close with the image of Koreans from north and south working together in a joint IT complex.

Cue��The Entertainer. Roll the credits. Smile and applaud.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif has wrapped up the first leg of his diplomatic tour to work with the signatories of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA, or the Iran nuclear deal), in a final stand for its preservation. Following Trump’s decision to pull the US out of the agreement on May 8, Zarif met with his counterparts in Beijing and Moscow, soliciting their renewed commitment toward the international pact, as well as , who stand to lose billions if the agreement collapses.

Trump’s decision has without a doubt dealt a blow to Iran. Nonetheless, Tehran is optimistic that the deal has not been completely derailed.��“From this moment, the JCPOA is between Iran and five countries,” Iranian said in a press statement just moments after Trump’s announcement. “From this moment, the P5+1 has lost the 1.’”��

Iran has abandoned hopes it once had under the Obama administration of gradually rekindling relations by pivoting away from the US toward other world powers, particularly Europe. Rouhani announced that Iran would continue to adhere to the deal as long as European powers took substantive measures to preserve it and continue business with the Islamic Republic despite US sanctions. The UK, Germany and France have all announced that they will remain committed to the nuclear deal with or without the US. On May 15, European leaders held an emergency crisis meeting with Zarif and steps to get the nuclear deal, in the words of EU foreign policy chief , “out of intensive care as soon as possible.”

A Blow to Reformists��

President Trump had lambasted the deal for being “one-sided” and simply “horrible” and sought to penalize Iran from the benefits promised under it. While Iran adhered to the agreement by destroying its core reactor at Arak, ended uranium enrichment and ultimately abandoned its ambitions of becoming a nuclear power altogether, Trump sought to undermine the deal the moment he stepped into office. In addition to imposing new sanctions, the US president called for a Muslim ban that blocked Iranians from entering the United States; created an atmosphere of uncertainty for American companies that discouraged them from doing business with Iran; and appointed��a war cabinet��that includes Trump’s hardline national security adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who have both actively called for ��against��the Islamic Republic. ��

When JCPOA was signed in January 2016, Iranians were hopeful that the nuclear deal would open both the country’s economy and society to the international community. The deal was thought to not only bring economic growth, but also strengthen reformist leaders like Rouhani who negotiated the agreement and have called for expanding political freedoms inside Iran. Hardliners in Iran, who are isolationists critical of the West and devoted to Islamic law, are capitalizing on Trump’s withdrawal and have criticized Rouhani for trusting Washington. Instead of buckling under pressure by admitting defeat, Rouhani is determined to resuscitate the deal by bolstering relations with the P5.��

The nuclear deal has become a lifeline for the reform movement. For as long as it enables Iran to widen relations with other world powers and bring in foreign investment, reformists will continue to have leverage over the hardliners. Rouhani’s election in 2013 and the 2017 reelection, the latter of which was considered a successful referendum on the nuclear deal, emboldened ordinary Iranians to call for greater social reform. Rouhani has echoed Iranians’ calls publicly and even carried out measures to loosen restrictions on personal freedom, such as divesting of the moral police.

The deal provides President Rouhani with an opportunity to push for more reform and convince hardliners to work with the international community rather than against it. Rouhani is now depending on Europe, which��understands how the reform movement’s fate is tied to that of the nuclear deal, to save the agreement.��

European leaders are on the frontline fighting to save the JCPOA. In the weeks preceding the US withdrawal, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel vigorously lobbied Trump against it. Europe not only risks losing a , but also understands the ramifications it would have on political stability in the Middle East. Without the deal, Iran would restart its nuclear program, validating Saudi Arabia and Israel’s calls for military containment. These three countries’ proxy wars have already caused insurmountable damage to the region; a direct war could destroy it.��

Can Europe Save the Deal?��

The nuclear deal is best positioned to contain Iran’s ambitions. As long as there is an international pact with Iran, there is a channel for diplomacy. European powers understand that as long as this channel is open, they’re more likely to be able to engage Iran on other topics, from its ballistic missile program to its involvement in Syria.��������

Europe’s best shot at preserving the nuclear deal is through a carrot and stick approach toward the US. On the one hand, it can ignore America’s extraterritorial sanctions by employing the 1996 that threatens to freeze US assets in Europe and in the process protects European companies from US legal rulings (such as sanctions). On the other hand, European powers can address Trump’s concerns over the nuclear deal through a separate, parallel agreement negotiated alongside the JCPOA that compels Iran to diminish its ballistic missile capabilities in exchange for sanctions relief.��

If Europe hopes to save the nuclear deal, it will need to learn to stand up to Trump, who has repeatedly sacrificed global security in favor of an “America First” approach. The US cannot continue to dictate international relations and politics. Iran sees Trump’s exit from the nuclear deal as an opportunity to work and bolster relations with other world powers and prove that international agreements can survive without the United States. When Trump announced US withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, the international community came together to carry on with business as usual. Iran hopes that it will do the same when it comes to the nuclear deal.��

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For a man with a reputation for venting spleen and flying off the handle, John Bolton bided his time before finally rising to the position of power he now occupies. The former US ambassador to the UN spent much of the last decade consolidating his political base through stints at right-wing institutes like the��, media appearances on Fox and the occasional reckless op-ed. He considered running for president in 2012 and 2016, but chose not to take the risk. Instead, he raised large amounts of money for extreme right-wing Republican candidates like ��(R-AR).

When Donald Trump appeared on the political scene, Bolton����the candidate in the presidential race and offered himself up as a potential secretary of state. Trump won, but Bolton didn’t get the call. A similarity in temperament and a difference in ideology seemed to doom his appointment. The White House, after all, couldn’t possibly accommodate two filterless hotheads.

Moreover, Bolton’s continued support for the Iraq War and a more interventionist US foreign policy seemed to put him forever at odds with the new president. “Bolton’s lambasting of global aristocrats aside, there isn’t much in the man’s worldview that rings consonant with President Trump’s ‘America First’ foreign policy,”�� in��The American Conservative.

That was then. Now John Bolton is Trump’s national security advisor. After a steady diet of levelheaded corporate execs and restrained military men, Trump clearly wanted a little more hot sauce in the Oval Office. As for the differences in ideology, those were largely fictitious. Trump has no ideology, and Bolton is smart enough to tailor his message to his audience. Trump is a very powerful boat with no rudder. Unfortunately, Bolton is now his rudder. Which effectively means, when it comes to foreign policy, that it’s Bolton’s administration now.

Bolton’s Impact

National security advisor is the perfect position for Bolton. He didn’t have to go through any messy confirmation hearings. He doesn’t have to perform any of the ceremonial tasks of a secretary of state. He can instead focus on what he does best: steering government policy far to the right. Only a few weeks into his job, he can already put one notch in his gun for helping to steer the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal.

This should have been an easy task, since Trump had already made clear his distaste for the agreement. But there was still significant disagreement within the administration. Bolton, it appears, tilted the balance away from those, like Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who preferred to remain within the agreement.��Writes�� in��The New York Times:��“Even if Mr. Mattis had wanted to fight for the deal, it is not clear how much he would have been heard. Mr. Bolton, officials said, never convened a high-level meeting of the National Security Council to air the debate. He advised Mr. Trump in smaller sessions, otherwise keeping the door to his West Wing office closed. Mr. Bolton has forged a comfortable relationship with the president, several people said, channeling his ‘America First’ vocabulary.”

Now that he has this comfortable relationship, Bolton will move on to more challenging assignments. “By working��in the West Wing, the national security adviser spends more time with the president than the secretaries of State or Defense, and so can always get the last word,”��writes����on Axios. “But Bolton is signaling restraint until Trump makes a decision.”

So, for instance, with the Iran deal decision made, Bolton����about whether he’s still pushing a regime-change strategy toward Iran. In public, of course, he must defer to the president. In private, Bolton would never keep his ideas to himself. As one of the����of the militant, cult-like����(or MEK), Bolton is no doubt whispering into Trump’s ear at every possible opportunity that Iran is on the verge of regime collapse and a cadre of����are ready to take over. All it needs is a tightening economic noose and a military nudge from Israel.

Meanwhile, as the president’s enforcer, it’s Bolton’s job to play the bad cop. He’s already done so with Europe,��raising the possibility��of European businesses that continue to work with Iran. Bolton must love the opportunity to kill two multilateral birds with one unilateral stone. However, the test of Bolton’s impact shouldn’t be Iran, where his views intersect with Trump’s. The real challenge will be on issues where Bolton’s stated preferences are diametrically opposed to current policy.

From Regime Change to Rapprochement?

John Bolton has never concealed his desire to see the collapse of the current government in North Korea. In February, even after the two Koreas had cooperated in the Winter Olympics, Bolton����in the��Wall Street Journal��that the United States should launch a preemptive military attack on Pyongyang and its nuclear facilities.

�ճ����Journal��piece featured a bizarre, legalistic argument based on his interpretation of a British attack on a Canadian steamboat in US territory in 1837. (No, I’m not making this up). Bolton didn’t bother to devote any space to the likely consequences of a preemptive attack on North Korea that, unlike the British example, could escalate to an exchange of nuclear weapons and involve the deaths of more than a million people.

It was pure Bolton: a legal intellect plus an instinct for bombast — and minus any acknowledgement of real-world consequences. Now, as national security advisor, Bolton must wrap his mind around the reality of the potential summit between his boss and Kim Jong-un, scheduled for June 12 in Singapore. This might seem to put Bolton in a bind, forcing him to make arguments that run counter to his long-held preferences.

But remember: Bolton knows how to bide his time. He knows that the track record of US-North Korean negotiations isn’t very good. He knows that a failed summit could easily push Donald Trump to the other side of the spectrum — or perhaps, given����to the recent US-South Korean military exercises, the summit might not happen at all. A Trump scorned will likely find regime-change arguments more compelling.

In the meantime, Bolton is doing what he can to subtly undermine the upcoming summit. He’s ratcheted down expectations����that the Trump administration isn’t “starry-eyed” about the meeting. He’s��loaded the ��by adding “their ballistic missile programs, their biological and chemical weapons programs, their keeping of American hostages, the abduction of innocent Japanese and South Korean citizens over the years.” It would be hard enough to negotiate a nuclear agreement even without adding these other elements (though North Korea has already released the “American hostages”).

But perhaps the most sinister tactic Bolton has deployed involves his references to Libya. In interviews, he��has said��that in the 2000s can serve as a model for the North Korea talks. Libya? The country that gave up its nuclear weapons program and then, within a few years, experienced civil war, foreign intervention and regime collapse? Is that really the kind of model you want to highlight with a country like North Korea, which is worried about precisely such a scenario?

An anonymous source in the Trump administration����of��Vanity Fair��that Bolton is sending his own message to the North Koreans: “I mean, there is only one reason you would ever bring up Libya to the North Koreans, and that is to tell them, ‘Warning: don’t go any further because we are going to screw you’… So yeah, I completely agree that that is a dog whistle to the North Koreans, telling them, ‘don’t trust us.’”

Of course, Bolton’s mere presence in the administration, even if he just stands quietly in the corner and scowls, sends the message that this government is not to be trusted. Perhaps that’s the real reason for North Korea’s sudden summit skepticism.

War at the Top?

John Bolton isn’t stupid enough to contradict his boss, at least not directly. He’s a�� to his superiors��and a sunvabitch to his subordinates. The interesting part comes with his relations to his equals. The most interesting part will be his relationship with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Thomas Wright, in��Politico,����that Bolton and Pompeo are cruising for a mutual bruising. He argues that it’s not hawks versus doves in the Trump administration, but “litigators versus planners”: “The litigators, led by Trump and deputized to Bolton, see national security policy as a way of settling scores with enemies, foreign and domestic, and closing the file. They will torpedo multilateral deals, pull out of international commitments and demonstrate American power before moving on to the next target.”

Planners, on the other hand, are worried about the day after — for instance, how the United States addresses Chinese economic power in the wake of a pullout from the Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal. It’s not yet clear whether Pompeo is a litigator or a planner, and thus whether he’ll team up with Bolton or side with the quintessential planner, Jim Mattis, to challenge the national security advisor’s blow-‘em-all-up philosophy. Wright expects a showdown.

I’m not sure. I expect tactical alliances between Bolton and Pompeo (on Iran) and tactical disagreements (on China). Where they disagree, Bolton probably will gain the upper hand, if not immediately then eventually, because he knows better how to manipulate the levers of power. But on the general direction of Trump’s foreign policy, Bolton and Pompeo are in agreement. The faux-isolationism of Trump during his presidential campaign fooled a number of neoconservatives into voicing their opposition. But it didn’t fool either Bolton or Pompeo.

Let’s be clear: There is no American “retreat” from the world. Under the rubric of “America First,” the Trump administration has created a new kind of multilateral engagement — aligned with the hard right in Israel and Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, allied with authoritarian and far-right leaders like Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Vladimir Putin in Russia and Viktor Orban in Hungary, and in support of a range of plutocratic interests over and above the wellbeing of the majority and the planet as a whole. (I long for Angela Merkel to just come out and say it: “Gott im Himmel, we must oppose this new Axis of Autocracy!)

So, not a retreat from the world but a retort to the world: Move this way, not that. As the��Washington Examiner��recently��, “Trump’s foreign policy record is one of America continuing its role as global leader — even if we’re leading in a direction that displeases John Kerry.”

But please, let’s not talk about Trump’s “foreign policy record.” This is not the world of Donald Trump. The world of Trump is Mar-a-Lago, Fox News and his Twitter account. His worldview is limited by his over-inflated ego and bank account. No, this is the world of John Bolton. And, for a limited time before he blows it up, we’re just living in it.

*[This article was originally published by .]

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The recent allied attack against Syria was a deliberately crafted gesture which amounted to no more than a statement that the use of banned chemical weapons will have consequences. If he heard this, Assad will conclude that he may continue the bloody suppression of his people by the usual conventional means. No one will oppose that.

The April 14 strike by the United States, Great Britain and France was bigger and hit more targets than the similar airstrikes in retaliation for chemical weapon use last year. But it was a limited operation calculated to avoid any direct attack on Russian or Iranian positions — many of which are co-located with major Syrian targets. More that that, the allies told the Russian military in advance and in detail what they proposed to do in order to de-conflict and avoid any direct contact. The Russians certainly passed this information on to the Assad forces. For all of President Trump’s bombastic threats, the actual attack made no effort to damage Assad’s grip on power or to tilt the balance in the war.

The Syrian Civil War, with its roots in the Arab Spring and a disastrous drought that drove millions into the cities, has confounded the strategists in both Europe and the US. The chaos and brutality that has followed created a vacuum that ISIS and its jihadist allies exploited. The collapse of central government in turn contributed to the migration crisis which continues to rock European politics. The false starts, confused policies and reversals of tactics by the West in response to this challenge have been a disaster — not least to the people of Syria but to the whole Middle East – and a gift to the nativists of Europe.

The truth is that the West has been outwitted by the strategists in Moscow and Tehran who clearly identified their interests and have pursued them consistently. For Moscow, the objective has been to demonstrate the support to an ally who provides Russia with land and sea bases, but has been and will again be a good market for Russian military and civilian output. But much more than that, Russia has demonstrated to all the other Middle Eastern states that it is an ally on whom they can depend — unlike the vacillating, inconsistent and critical West. Egypt and Saudi Arabia are already paying close attention and engaging Russia with negotiations for arms sales and warmer political relations.

Iran has been the other winner. Its consistent support for both the Iraqi and Syrian governments in their fights against insurgents has given them not only enormous political influence, but also a string of military bases extending through Iraq and Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon. We are witnessing the growth of an Iranian empire. None of these developments were initiated by Iran — the sparks that ignited the flames were the 2003 US invasion of Iraq and the Arab Spring. But the Iranians are taking full advantage of the opportunities that have come their way.

The strategists in Washington, now led by the new and aggressive National Security Advisor John Bolton, are preparing a fight back. Strongly encouraged by the Israelis, the Saudis and the Emiratis, the US is preparing a counterattack to try to roll back Iranian influence. This will start with the US withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal and the re-imposition of US sanctions. But we should also expect a sharp escalation of covert operations and low intensity warfare conducted by drones and special or proxy forces. This will be designed to make it too costly for Iranian forces to remain in Syria and Iraq and to force the Iranians to make further concessions, such as discontinuing its long-range missile program.

However, if the lessons of the West’s incompetence in Syria is any guide the Iranians will likely profit from this new confrontation. Tehran and Moscow too have assets they can deploy, and the most powerful of these is that they are reliable as allies but dangerous as opponents. A political accommodation and a new balance of power is what they will seek. The only country in the region that will not be seduced by this argument is Israel. The others will all be making their own calculations.

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President Donald J. Trump has consistently engineered chaos inside the government and within the American society in order to establish norms and rules that befit his personality and limited appreciation of international and domestic politics. Many in the American political realm betted on the “grown-ups” in his cabinet to tame him and console the public; however, he has quelled all efforts. Through it all, Trump has sought to be true to the character he campaigned on and surrounded himself with individuals who are beholden to him. Most recently, he has appointed hawkish individuals who are to the extreme right of the American political spectrum.

John R. Bolton will become the new national security advisor to President Trump. Bolton defended the 2003 American invasion of Iraq and continues to defend it, although the president himself is one of the harshest critics of this military adventure.��Bolton has pushed for a preemptive strike against North Korea and has long been in favor of bombing Iran with the intention of changing the regime in Tehran. He is vehemently against the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), informally known as the Iran nuclear deal, signed between Iran and the United States, Germany, France, England, China and Russia in 2015. The Security Council at the United Nations supported and sanctioned the agreement by a vote of 15-0. Iran has complied fully with the agreement since its inception in 2016.

The United States’ chief negotiator of the agreement, , wrote: “Since going into force in 2016, that deal has blocked Tehran’s path to a nuclear weapon and prevented a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. By every account, Iran is complying with the agreement, has committed to never obtaining nuclear weapons and has subjected itself to rigorous monitoring and verification.”

Bolton is also an ideological partner and supporter of��Mujahedin-e Khalq��(MeK), an Iranian opposition group and a terrorist organization that traitorously fought alongside Saddam Hussein against Iran in the Iran–Iraq war. For decades, the group had a compound in Iraq’s Diayal province, which was supported and protected by Hussein. For many years, the group was on the US State Department’s ��list because it had killed many American citizens. In 2012, Bolton and others successfully lobbied for the removal of MeK’s terrorist designation.

In the past, Bolton has offered extreme arguments against and has expressed excessive skepticism about various international institutions, including the . He is for a unipolar world in which the United States is militarily superior and leads the international community, and believes that the United States alone can manage international order. , a well-known conservative thinker and writer, argues that Bolton perceives the United States as having the power and ability to determine which countries in the world can or cannot have nuclear weapons. The United States, according to Bolton, must rely on military might to lead and establish order.

New Order

John Bolton, as the new national security advisor, and Mike Pompeo, as the new secretary of state, are the two most hawkish figures in Trump’s cabinet, as they both share similar views on Iran and the nuclear agreement. Trump’s selection of Bolton and Pompeo will surely affect the fragile relations between Iran and the United States and threaten peace and security in the Middle East. Of late, the president and his increasingly hawkish cabinet have decided to terminate JCPOA without careful consideration of its ramifications internationally or the detrimental influence on the domestic politics of Iran.

On March 26, 2018, more than 50 American retired military officers and diplomats enumerated for which they believe it is in the best interest of the United States to preserve the nuclear deal. Iranians have decided to keep JCPOA even if the United States will attempt to rescind it. Amid growing uncertainty about US-Iran relations, Tehran has been contemplating various responses to the United States’ decision. In the worst-case scenario, Trump can abrogate the agreement and reimpose previously waived secondary sanctions.

A lesser decision would be to withdraw from the agreement but not seek to enforce any nuclear-related sanctions. In the first case, Trump would likely jeopardize United States’ trans-Atlantic relationships, which consequently does not serve the interests and the international standing of the United States while at the same time making any nuclear agreements with the North Korean government much more difficult.

Understanding Iran

The majority of those following the issue of US-Iran relations are concerned about the potential impact on international peace-building efforts while ignoring the undoubtedly consequential impact of Trump’s injudicious decision on Iranian domestic politics. The withdrawal of the United States from JCPOA will have a tremendous negative effect on Iranian domestic politics. Initially, the nuclear agreement with the West divided the reformers (eslahtalaban) and the radical conservatives (mohafezeh karan rastgara) inside Iran, and this political division has continued today. The reformers backed the presidency of Hassan Rouhani, who committed himself to pushing for a nuclear agreement with the West.

For the reformers, a nuclear agreement with the West would have allowed the country to open up gradually to the outside world and embrace democratic norms in politics. Iran’s reform movement began with Mehdi Bazargan, who was the first prime minster of the provisional government after the Iranian Revolution in 1979. This intensified as a social movement with the presidency of Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005). Reformers stood for democracy, democratic norms in government and society, and were in favor of opening up the country to the outside world, especially the West. The reformers have also tried hard in the last four decades to stand against authoritarianism. Radical conservatives, on the other hand, were against the establishment of JCPOA and democratic norms in politics, and they opposed opening up the country to the outside world, especially the West.

This battle between the two political sides continued and formed the nucleus and the essence of Iranian politics today. Under the pressure of the reform movement, Iran has taken precarious, but meaningful, steps in establishing a civil society (though it remains extremely fragile) and has adopted a few infant democratic institutions, including a free (but not fair) election. Radical conservatives, who have enjoyed the support of Supreme Leader of Iran Ayatollah Khamenei, the Revolutionary Guard, the judiciary branch, and who possess enormous economic resources in the country, stood against democratic norms and preferred antagonism against the West.

This antagonistic attitude of the radical conservatives and Ayatollah Khamenei toward the West, and especially the United States, could be understood only in the context of the Cold War and the appetites that communism had developed for dissent and opposition to the West. The radical conservatives and Ayatollah Khamenei in Iran have tried relentlessly to impose a Cold War on Iran against the West and the United States in order to overwhelm a society that continuously fought for reform and democracy.

Stolen Democracy

Understanding this duality in the politics of Iran is not impossible or even difficult. Nevertheless, some in the West with ideological interests have tried to ignore it. Among the millions of reformers who stood for JCPOA are Sadegh Zibakalam and Mostafa Tajzadeh. The former is a university professor and the latter was a member of Khatami’s cabinet. Zibakalam has recently received a two-year jail sentence, while Tajzadeh has served five years in jail and was released last year. Similar to thousands of reformers, they paid a heavy price for being outspoken against authoritarianism in Iran and the policies that ignored the interests of the whole nation.

All reformers, among them these individuals have advocated for a nuclear agreement with the West because they considered international tension an anathema to any efforts for democratic reform and gradual change inside Iran. Trump’s withdrawal of the United States from the Iran nuclear deal only serves the interests of the radical conservatives in Iran and directly plays into the hands of those with authoritarian predispositions who would like to destroy any peaceful and gradual attempts toward inaugurating democratic norms inside the country.

Iranians have already experienced the United States’ disregard and disrespect for the interests of the nation and democratic changes inside the country. In the early 1950s, Mohammad Mosaddeq, a nationalist and democratic leader, was democratically elected to nationalize the oil industry and tame authoritarianism of the Pahlavi monarchy in favor of the rule of law and democratic norms in government. The Americans and the British carried out a coup in 1953, toppling Mosaddeq’s government and paving the way for authoritarian domination over the government and society.

The Iranians have never forgotten the chance at democracy that was stolen from them. Donald Trump and his cabinet of disruption, especially the role that John Bolton could play in shaping American foreign policy toward Iran, will not help Iran’s path toward gradual moderation and democratization. The withdrawal of the United States from JCPOA — a deal that has the support of the international community, the majority in the United States and Europe, and the majority in Iran and all reformers — is not judicious and may help radical conservative right in Iran may push for the model that North Koreans have adopted. Iran will turn toward enrichment as the head of the Iranian nuclear program Ali Akbar Salehi has announced, meaning the West will have to deal with a nuclear Iran in the future. An annulment of the agreement will also undoubtedly harm any attempts at international peace building and disrupt the reformist measures inside Iranian politics in immeasurable ways, once again directing the nation away from democratic values and ideals.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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