Jimmy Carter calls Donald Trump’s decision to appoint John Bolton his ‘worst mistake’

Politics

Former President Jimmy Carter criticized President Donald Trump’s decision to appoint John Bolton as his national security adviser, telling the PBS NewsHour in an interview Monday that it was Mr. Trump’s “worst mistake” since taking office.

Bolton, who served as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under President George W. Bush, “has been very eager to go to war with different people including North Korea and Iran,” Mr. Carter told NewsHour anchor and managing editor Judy Woodruff.

Trump announced last week that Bolton would take over for national security adviser H.R. McMaster in April. The shakeup followed Trump’s decision earlier this month to oust Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and replace him with CIA Director Mike Pompeo.

Pompeo must be confirmed by the Senate to lead the State Department; Bolton’s appointment does not require Senate confirmation. Trump’s nomination to replace Pompeo, Gina Haspel, will also requires Senate confirmation. The deputy CIA director, a 30-year veteran of the agency, will likely be questioned during her hearings for her role in enhanced interrogation techniques and destroying tapes of those tactics.

Democrats have warned that Bolton and Pompeo’s ascension marks a sharp turn to the right in U.S. foreign policy. Carter joined the chorus of critics, saying that he was skeptical the U.S. could convince North Korea to give up its nuclear program with Bolton in a top White House post. “I just have very little confidence in him,” Carter said of Bolton.

Carter said he believed the U.S. was on a path to “nuclear confrontation” with North Korea, and warned that Trump “doesn’t realize the threat that he faces” if the two nations go to war. Carter added that “the North Korean issue may be the most difficult we face at this point.”

Trump agreed earlier this month to meet with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un sometime in May, though a date has not officially been set. Carter said he offered to help Trump resolve the issue, including flying to North Korea to help broker an agreement. The former president said he has been briefed on North Korea by Trump administration officials but didn’t say if his offer had been accepted.

Carter, who is now 93, has remained active on the world stage and met with foreign leaders since leaving the White House in 1981. He visited North Korea in 2011 as part of an effort to calm tensions between North and South Korea. The former president also visited in 1994 and 2010.

Three thoughts about the meaning of John Bolton

It's all on the foreign policy hawks now.

by Daniel W. Drezner

The hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts did not have a positive initial reaction to the news that President Trump would name John Bolton to replace H.R. McMaster as national security adviser.

One of the advantages of having a couple of days to mull over the news is to read the takes of other, really smart people on Bolton’s new job.

Now that I have digested the news, I have three thoughts:

1) Bolton will be the most powerful national security adviser Trump has had. There are conflicting accounts of how Bolton will run the National Security Council. The Washington Post’s Greg Jaffe reports that Bolton sees himself more in the Henry Kissinger imperialist mode of running the NSC. On the other hand, Axios’s Jonathan Swan suggests that Bolton will play a more restrained honest broker role: “Bolton has always admired the way Brent Scowcroft handled the interagency process during the Bush 41 Administration.”

As I’ll suggest below, this is a distinction without a difference. What really matters is that Bolton will have tremendous power over Trump’s foreign policy for three reasons. First, Trump does not know a lot about foreign policy. He’s a year into the job, and he hasn’t budged an inch down the learning curve. As Elizabeth Saunders has noted, unprepared presidents automatically give greater latitude to their subordinates.

Second, Bolton knows far more about the policymaking process than either Michael T. Flynn or McMaster. As someone who possesses genuine foreign affairs experience and has a reputation for being a bureaucratic street fighter, Bolton will be a better bureaucratic player than either of his predecessors.

Third, by the standards of the traditional NSC-State rivalry, the State Department is severely weakened. Foggy Bottom is hemorrhaging senior staff and in leadership limbo until Mike Pompeo is confirmed. Unless Bolton burns to the ground the staff he inherits (an admitted possibility) he has a serious home-field advantage.

2) It’s all on the hawks now. The idea that Bolton will act as an honest broker implies that there will be divergent points of view within the national security team. The White House turnover of the past month has homogenized its foreign policy perspectives, however. Gary Cohn is gone, and his replacement is a non-factor on foreign policy questions. Mike Pompeo is much more of a hawk than Rex Tillerson. Bolton is way more hawkish than McMaster. Jim Mattis is the most dovish member of this foreign policy team, and this is a guy who was sidelined by the Obama administration for being too hawkish on Iran.

For foreign policy hawks, this will be the best of times and the worst of times. It will be the best of times because they are running the entire foreign policy show now. There is no bureaucratic constraint, no countervailing faction, no informed president to block their moves. They have no more impediments. For decades, they have fantasized about the right ways to take out Iran, defang North Korea and checkmate China. Trump has given them the keys to the kingdom.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that none of these problems is easy. If the hawks worsen the situation, they will have no one to blame but themselves. Of course, they will blame their predecessors anyway, but you get my meaning.

3) Maybe, just maybe, Trump has found a way to signal resolve. To put it bluntly, Trump has developed a reputation for being a man of hollow words and feeble actions. This month, he blustered a ton about applying steel and aluminum tariffs widely, and then backed down and exempted an awful lot of countries with no evidence of any real concessions on their part. This past Friday, Trump threatened to veto the omnibus spending bill and shut down the government and then did no such thing. No one should take anything this White House says at face value.

If Trump’s words don’t matter, that’s a problem for his foreign policy. How can he communicate resolve on the global stage? One way is to hire new people with known brands, and the one thing Bolton has is a brand. It’s a somewhat toxic brand that renders him Senate-unconfirmable. It’s possible that he’ll run into security clearance issues. But while he’s around, he sends a clearer signal than Trump’s chicken-hawk rhetoric. As Matt Fay notes, “After this appointment, anyone who thought Donald Trump was the ‘dove’ in the 2016 election should have his or her pundit and/or analyst card revoked.”

I am under no illusions that Trump intended to do this as a way of signaling resolve. He does not possess that forethought. But that does not mean the signal hasn’t been sent. I am pessimistic that this will lead to better coercive bargaining in the near future. But at least we will all see whether this is true. Because — remember — it’s all on the hawks now.

I fear that my initial reaction will be proved correct. But I hope that I am wrong.

Who is John Bolton, Trump's new national security adviser?

The former UN ambassador under George W Bush and a notorious hawk, Bolton has called for bombing Iran and North Kore.
 The Guardian

John Bolton, the incoming national security adviser, will have the ear of Donald Trump at a perilously fraught moment in world affairs.

A notorious hawk who advocates the unilateral wielding of US might, Bolton is dismissive of international diplomacy, and has called for the bombing of both Iran and North Korea.

The departure of HR McMaster, who was credited by some as being a moderating force on the president, and his replacement by one of the most aggressive thinkers in the world of US foreign policy, will spread fear in diplomatic circles that the Trump administration could be poised to take a dramatic hawkish turn.

The shuffle comes as Washington is already bracing itself for the potential of imminent face-to-face talks between Trump and the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un over the regime’s development of nuclear weapons.

Bolton, who will leave his post as a senior fellow at the rightwing American Enterprise Institute to join the White House on 9 April, has made clear his preference for how to deal with North Korea – bomb it. Last month he wrote an opinion column for the Wall Street Journal in which he made a legal case for a pre-emptive strike.

“It is perfectly legitimate for the United States to respond to the current ‘necessity’ posed by North Korea’s nuclear weapons by striking first,” he wrote.

The former ambassador, whose basic approach to diplomacy is summed up in the title of his book Surrender is Not an Option, has made a similarly combative case for Iran. He was scathing of Barack Obama’s attempt to deal with Tehran’s nuclear program through negotiation, writing in the New York Times in 2015 that only bombing by the US and Israel would take out Iran’s uranium-enrichment installations and prevent disaster.

The mustachioed Bolton has had a long, frequently controversial career in government. He held senior positions in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and the elder George Bush, where he led successful US opposition to joining the international criminal court and made a strident attempt to block the introduction of stronger global controls on biological weapons.

He came to prominence as a household name under George W Bush who appointed him to be the US ambassador to the UN in 2005, when the Iraq war was still blazing. To put Bolton at the heart of the US relationship with the community of nations was contentious, to say the least, as he made little attempt to disguise his deep-seated contempt for the world body.

He once noted if that if the 38-floor UN building in New York “lost 10 stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference”. His other legendary remark was that “there is no United Nations. There is an international community that occasionally can be led by the only real power left in the world, and that’s the United States, when it suits our interests.”

Bolton’s arrival in the inner sanctum of the Trump presidency has been a long time coming. Michael Wolff revealed in his inside account of the White House, Fire and Fury, that Trump’s former senior counselor Steve Bannon had urged the president to hire Bolton.

So too did the late Fox News executive, Roger Ailes. “He’s a bomb thrower,” Ailes said last year, according to Wolff. “And a strange little fucker. But you need him.”
Trump seems now to have come round to that way of thinking.