by Dr. Jiri and Leni Valenta
[John Bolton] maintains, correctly, that Americans support leaders who are not appeasers but defenders of American values, vital national interests, and human rights.
John Bolton, photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikipedia
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,327, October 29, 2019
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: In
Syria, President Trump, like Obama before him, seems oblivious to the
reality that when the US withdraws, its enemies advance and fill the
vacuum. Ousted NSA John Bolton has said that America is constraining its
range of action through foolhardy entanglements with international
institutions and naive bilateral agreements that promise too much to
America’s enemies in exchange for too little. He maintains, correctly,
that Americans support leaders who are not appeasers but defenders of
American values, vital national interests, and human rights.
Something unprecedented happened last month. A
National Security Advisor, Ambassador John R. Bolton, was forced out by a
cabal of TV commentators and foes of Bolton and President Donald Trump.
Perhaps for the first time, the departing NSA then publicly repudiated
the president for his foreign policies. Prominent American attorney Alan
Dershowitz described Bolton’s purge as a ”national catastrophe.”
Bolton’s purge has serious national security
implications for the future of the US. Kudos to him for sacrificing his
job if he felt the president was marching in the wrong direction.
Bolton’s pain may well have been caused by his no longer being able to
endure Trump’s “Obama moments.”
Strategic patience vs. strategic savvy
“Obama moments” involved “leading
from behind” in what was essentially an absence of strategy. His
policies “produced only failed states, Islamist-fed chaos, growing
terrorist attacks in Europe, and catastrophic debt.” To that list, add a
lack of resolve and a tendency to make imperfect compromises and
concessions to foreign foes. Obama’s aides coined the phrase “strategic patience” to describe this doctrine.
By contrast, at the start of 2017, under the
guidance of Defense Secretary James Mattis and NSA H.R. McMaster,
President Trump started his term with several “bangs.”
First, he punished Syrian dictator Bashar Assad with a successful attack on a Syrian airfield for
his presumed use of chemical warfare on his own civilians. This assault
by Trump had tremendous significance. Perhaps the most memorable “Obama
moment” was Obama’s 2013 back-pedaling from his own red line against
chemical warfare. He called back destroyers headed for Syria’s shores and instead made a deal with Vladimir Putin to remove all chemical weapons from Syria.
After the aerial assault, Trump dropped a MOAB (Massive
Ordinance Air Blast, or “Mother of All Bombs”) on the Taliban in
Afghanistan. This decisive move was followed by the dramatic use near
North Korea’s coast of a large armada of naval ships, coupled with moves against the North Korean dictator by the US Army and Air Force as well as Trump’s own rhetorical pressure.
A new captain was steering the ship of state, and
his team did not put off problems in the manner of previous US
administrations. The new team met problems head-on, sending a clear
message on the need to stop a maniacal North Korean leader from further
developing his nuclear weapons and delivery systems which, as in Guam, were already capable of reaching American shores.
Signaling the end of “strategic patience,” these moves seemed to debut an emerging Trump doctrine that could be dubbed “strategic savvy” –
clever diplomacy, resolve, courage, and the judicious use of economic
instruments as well as military force. Bolton, then a TV commentator and
Chairman of the Gatestone Institute, a role he has since resumed, was
possibly impressed by the president’s “pro-American”-ness, as indicated
in an interview published in March 2019:
I would describe myself as pro-American. The greatest hope for freedom for mankind in history is the United States, and therefore protecting American national interests is the single best strategy for the world.
Bolton added that America has slowly constrained
its range of action through foolhardy entanglements with international
institutions such as the UN and naive bilateral agreements that promised
too much to America’s enemies in exchange for too little.
The reason for Bolton’s September 2019 falling-out
with the president seems to have been his growing objection to Trump’s
gradual return to the unworkable Obama policies of strategic patience
and retreat.
Trump’s Obama moments in Syria
In some areas of foreign policy, such as strong support for America’s ally Israel, Trump and Bolton agreed, as they did on arming Ukraine with Javelin missiles and keeping Iran at bay.
In Syria, however, Trump, like Obama before him,
seems to have failed to grasp that when the US withdraws, its enemies
advance and fill the vacuum. Secretary of Defense Mattis resigned
apparently in objection to this retreat. Bolton would do the same months
later, evidently over the president’s invitation to the Taliban to come
to Camp David while excluding the US-allied Afghan government –on the
week of the commemoration of the 9/11 attacks on the US. Like Mattis,
Bolton sacrificed his job because of foreseeable negative consequences
to US national interests.
America’s Kurdish allies have now been left by
Trump to be slaughtered by Turkey. The US troop withdrawal also has a
detrimental impact on Ukraine, as it, along with other countries, is
negatively reassessing US reliability.
At the time of the withdrawal, Russian President
Vladimir Putin launched what appeared to have been a feint in the
direction of the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, as he did once before
in 2015. His real objective seems to have been a new and bloody joint
attack together with Syrian dictator Bashar Assad and the Islamic
Revolutionary Guard Corps against rebels in the Syrian province of
Idlib. The Russo-Syrian offensive appears to have intensified after it
became clear that Trump’s response to the new carnage was not going to
exceed an angry tweet.
North Korea: Back to strategic patience
After demonstrating strategic savvy with Kim
Jong-un in 2017-18, Trump reverted to strategic patience. After the show
of strength came the summits.
Trump seems to have believed he could talk Kim
into cooperation as though he were a real estate client. Thus, he
praised the bloody, merciless, Stalin-like Kim as having “a great
personality,” rejoiced at the “good chemistry” between them, and uttered
other unpresidential comments that were likely embarrassing to Bolton.
As Bolton warned, “Under current circumstances, he [Kim] will never give up the nuclear weapons voluntarily.”
North Korean officials have made it a longstanding
practice to wine, dine, entertain, and hoodwink American negotiators as
they build their nuclear arsenal. Under President George W. Bush, for
example, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was so eager to have an
agreement with the present dictator’s father that she engaged in what
then-VP Dick Cheney called
“concession after concession.” In a particularly desperate move, Rice
even took North Korea off the list of state sponsors of terrorism.
Trump is following a similar playbook. Over
Bolton’s objections, he agreed to Pyongyang’s major demand – the
cancellation of US-South Korean military exercises, with no North Korean
reciprocity.
Turning point in Iran
A major turning point came when the Iranians
attacked allied shipping in the Persian Gulf and shot down a US drone.
Trump’s decision not to respond militarily – and his pulling back of US
planes that were ready to bomb targets in Iran – reminds one of the
fecklessness of Obama. His failure to retaliate against either the
attacks on allied shipping or the Iranian strike on a Saudi
oil-producing enterprise can only encourage future Iranian military
actions against allied assets in the Persian Gulf.
Trump seems to be signaling that he thinks all
differences can be resolved through negotiations. However, all US
presidents since Nixon would likely have punished Iran for using
military force – with perhaps the lone exception of Obama.
Trump would like to negotiate a new nuclear deal
with Iran’s leaders, but – like the North Koreans – they will not stop
their bomb-making. Period. So keep the sanctions, let the regime
crumble, and use force if and when necessary. One of Trump’s greatest
achievements was when he scrapped the disastrous, unsigned “Nuclear
Deal” with Iran (the JCPOA), which actually paved the way for Iran to
have as many legitimate nuclear weapons as it liked.
A troika of tyranny: Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua
Bolton has dubbed Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua a
“troika of tyranny” in the US’s strategic backyard. Venezuela, once a
wealthy OPEC country flush with oil, has devolved in 20 or so years into
a failed state whose people live under unbearable conditions of
starvation and want – a sinkhole of drugs, crime, and Hezbollah
terrorists.
Vladimir Putin, with the help of Cuba, has flouted
America’s Monroe Doctrine by giving military aid to Venezuela’s
“socialist” regime and propping up the regime of its illegitimate
president, Nicolás Maduro. But not even the arrival of Russian and
Chinese “advisers” and the delivery of military aid to the country
appears to have moved Trump. Significant action to oust Maduro has yet
to occur. Tweets and empty threats have not worked, unsurprisingly.
Trump’s “Obama moment” emboldened Erdoğan
The crescendo of the Russian-Syrian offensive in
the summer of 2019 can now be seen in the tens of thousands of Syrian
civilians fleeing their country and trying to reach Europe through
Turkey. The new Syrian exodus is providing Turkish president Recep
Tayyip Erdoğan with an excuse to issue repeated threats that he will flood Europe with 3.6 million refugees from Turkish camps.
Trump is going to have to deal with the challenge
Erdoğan is presenting to the US. Erdoğan is no longer America’s
strategic ally, as he made clear when he chose to purchase Russian
weaponry incompatible with the requirements of NATO, to which he is
theoretically committed.
Learn from Reagan
President Trump would do well to follow the
recommendations of military and foreign policy experts who know history,
strategy, and geopolitics. He is displaying an unfortunate course
correction with policies reminiscent of the worst decisions of the
Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations.
Above all, Trump would be well advised to work
toward reconciliation and the building of a productive relationship with
the emerging Bolton wing of the GOP.
Late in Ronald Reagan’s 1983-84 election campaign,
when he was besieged by Democrats calling him a warmonger, he refused
to project the image of a president seeking peace at any price. He
invaded the island of Grenada, which had just deposed a brutal Leninist
regime in a bloody coup.
The American people do not necessarily elect
candidates exclusively engaged in the search for peace. Bolton is
correct: Americans support leaders who are not appeasers but defenders
of American values, vital national interests, and human rights –
particularly in the country’s own backyard. It is not too late for
President Trump. He needs to wake up.
This is an edited version of an article published by the Gatestone Institute on October 15, 2019.
Dr. Jiri Valenta is a member of the U.S.
Council on Foreign Relations and an expert on strategic studies,
specializing in Russian and U.S. military interventions, terrorism, and
Israel’s relations with central European countries. He is also a
non-resident Senior Research Associate with the BESA Center for
Strategic Studies.
Leni Friedman Valenta, a playwriting graduate
of the Yale School of Drama, is senior editor of the Valentas’ website,
jvlv.net. She has written articles for The Middle East Quarterly, The National Interest, The Aspen East Central Review, Miami Herald, Kyiv Post, and others.
Source: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/purge-john-bolton/
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