Welcome to the Dick Cheney administration

The problem with John Bolton isn’t that he’s an extremist. It's that he’s mainstream.

The other shoe dropped. On the heels of his cowardly fire-by-tweet dismissal of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Donald Trump has dismissed National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster and replaced him with John Bolton, the hard-line former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Uber-hawk Mike Pompeo is headed from the CIA to the State Department, and Gina Haspel, a CIA loyalist who ran a torture site for George W. Bush and authorized the destruction of videotapes documenting what the CIA was doing, has been picked to replace him. What is going on there in the White House? Stephen M. Walt who is the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University, has shed light on the newly arranged US administration under Donald Trump.

The second interpretation is more alarmist and basically tells you to start digging that backyard bomb shelter. In this view, the departures of Tillerson and McMaster and the arrivals of Bolton, Pompeo, and Haspel herald the ascendance of a hawkish contingent that may tear up the internationally agreed and the UN-backed nuclear deal with Iran known as JCPOA, reinstate the torture regime, and eventually start a war with North Korea that goes way beyond a simple “bloody nose.” And with Bolton in the White House, Trump is going to be advised by a guy who never saw a war he didn’t like, when observed from a safe distance, of course.

Bolton’s appointment is on par with most of Trump’s personnel choices, which is to say that it’s likely to be a disaster. His views on foreign policy are crude and bellicose, and his track record as a policy advocate and pundit do not, to put it politely, inspire confidence. Nor does he seem to have learned a thing from his past mistakes. And where McMaster and Tillerson did what they could to limit the damage that Trump has done to America’s international reputation and critical alliance partnerships, Bolton’s particular skill as a diplomat seems to have been finding creative new ways to offend America’s friends.

But Bolton’s arrival is hardly a return to the Trump that we saw in the 2016 campaign. Trump ran for president by attacking the entire foreign-policy establishment, suggesting that it was out of touch, unaccountable, and prone to get the United States into pointless wars. Since becoming president, however, Trump has increased defense spending, escalated in Afghanistan, given the Pentagon and certain headstrong U.S. allies the green light to use more force in more places with disappointing results, and generally doubled down on the same overly militarized approach to foreign policy that had repeatedly failed under Bill Clinton, Bush, and, yes, even Barack Obama. Bolton’s appointment along with Trump’s other personnel shifts is not a bold move toward “America First” — if that term means a smarter and more restrained foreign policy that would reduce U.S. overseas burdens, improve the country’s strategic position, and actually make Americans safer and richer.

Instead, whether Trump knows it or not, putting Bolton, Pompeo, and Haspel in key positions looks more like a return to “Cheneyism,” by which one meant a foreign policy that inflates threats, dismisses serious diplomacy, and thinks allies are mostly a burden, is contemptuous of institutions. Such an administration believes that the United States is so powerful that it can just issue ultimatums and expect others to cave, and believes that a lot of thorny foreign-policy problems can be solved by just blowing something up.

That formula really worked well the last time the United States tried it, didn’t it? No wonder a sophisticated foreign-policy expert like Trump wants to try it again. Thus, the real lesson of the Bolton appointment has less to do with Bolton himself and more about what it says about the U.S. foreign-policy establishment. You’re undoubtedly going to read and hear a lot of heartfelt, knickers-in-a-twist commentaries in the next few weeks about the dangers of appointing a radical to such a sensitive position, but the plain fact is that Bolton is not really an outlier within the U.S. foreign-policy community. It’s not like Trump just appointed Rand Paul or even an experienced and knowledgeable tycoons in the United States. Instead, he appointed someone with decidedly hawkish views but who is still within the “acceptable” consensus in Washington.

Look at Bolton’s pedigree and career. He’s a graduate of Yale University and Yale Law School. He worked at Covington & Burling, a venerable D.C. law firm where former Secretary of State Dean Acheson also worked. He has been a senior fellow for years at the conservative but mainstream American Enterprise Institute. Is this your idea of a “fringe” figure?

True, Bolton was a vocal supporter of the Iraq War, but that hardly makes him a weirdo. He’d be the first to point out, a lot of other people including Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, James Steinberg, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Susan Rice, Robert Gates, and a long, long list of other so-called “respectable” figures. And don’t forget that the other geniuses who dreamed up and sold that disaster — people such as William Kristol, James Woolsey, Robert Kagan, Bret Stephens, Max Boot, Eliot Cohen, David Frum, Paul Wolfowitz, etc. — are still sarcastically ‘respected’ figures in the foreign-policy establishment despite having never admitted they were wrong or expressed any public regret for launching a disastrous war in which hundreds of thousands of people were killed.

Like Trump, Bolton seems particularly worried about Iran and North Korea, but so are most members of Congress and much of the hardline think tanks in D.C., too. Bolton is also something of an Islamophobe and is deeply suspicious of international institutions, but that hardly makes him unique in U.S. foreign-policy circles either. He seems especially fond of using military force, but how many prominent foreign-policy intellectuals are openly opposed to it and willing to stand up and say so? Let’s say damn few, because nobody angling for a top job in Washington wants to be seen as “soft.” Remember how Democrats and Republicans alike applauded Trump when he authorized some strategically meaningless cruise missile strikes on Syria? That simple fact goes a long way toward explaining how the United States came to be waging wars of various sorts in a dozen or more countries, with no end in sight and with hardly anyone saying boo about it. Bolton is just a more outspoken member of the consensus here, too.

We are not trying to “normalize” this appointment or suggest that it shouldn’t concern you. Rather, we are suggesting that if you are worried about Bolton, you should ask yourself the following question: What sort of political system allows someone with his views to serve in high office, where he helps talk the country into a disastrous war, never expresses a moment’s regret for his errors, continues to advocate for more of the same for the next decade, and then gets a second chance to make the same mistakes again? So by all means worry. But the real problem isn’t Bolton — it’s a system that permits people like him to screw up and move up again and again.

EA/ME