I find the firing of Bolton to be one of the best decisions taken by Trump since the beginning of his presidency.
No irony here.
Dexter Filkins published what I thought was
a rather perceptive piece on John Bolton in
The New Yorker this week. For those of you who are blocked by the magazine's paywall, here's an excerpt:
Bolton is not, as he is often accused of being, a neoconservative. He couldn’t care less about spreading democracy around the globe. He is a cold-eyed realist—he believes in preserving and extending American power. He doesn’t have any use for the United Nations, the European Union, or anyone else who is given to lecturing the United States. Of the U.N.-headquarters building in Manhattan, he once said that if it “lost ten stories it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.”
You may not like Bolton’s world view; many of his enemies in Washington certainly despise it. But at least he has a world view: the U.S. contends for its own interests, amid a complex web of contingent alliances. Trump seems to see the global arena as a kind of supersized real-estate market, where bluster prevails, even the worst people are persuadable, and, if your adversary isn’t giving you what you want, you walk away. It’s a simpleton’s view of the world, but in this case the simpleton has a five-hundred-ship Navy and sixteen hundred nuclear warheads at his disposal. Someone has to contain him.
Bolton, it seems to me, was a bizarre choice to serve as national security advisor in a Trump Administration. Bolton is an interventionist, Trump an isolationist. Trump, where international policy is concerned, seems more closely aligned with the left wing of the Democratic Party than the right wing of the Republican Party, where Bolton resides. How did Bolton wind up as Trump's foreign policy advisor? Partly, I suspect, because nobody else with credentials that were acceptable to mainstream Republicans was willing to take the job. Partly, as Bolton himself has hinted, because Trump liked what he heard Bolton saying on the Fox cable news network without fully understanding it.
