John Bolton | Reason ArchivesThe leading libertarian magazine and covering news, politics, culture, and more with reporting and analysis.(c) Reason
2024-03-28T07:00:54Z https://reason.com/feed/atom/WordPressBonnie Kristianhttps://reason.com/people/bonnie-kristian/https://reason.com/?p=82310982023-08-24T04:34:08Z2023-05-07T10:00:57Z
The 2024 Republican presidential primary has largely been framed as a referendum on former President Donald Trump. He's expected to face at least half a dozen serious rivals, with one possible contender, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, sometimes—but not always—outpolling him in head-to-head matchups.
But Trump's fate isn't the only big question this primary could settle for Republicans. Arguably more important is the future of the party's foreign policy. No consensus has emerged since Trump's surprise 2016 victory, the drawdown of America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the turn toward great power conflict, which was accelerated in 2022 by Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the pattern of reciprocal provocations around Taiwan by Beijing and Washington.
Two decades ago, the Republican perspective on military engagement abroad was unified and clear. Then-President George W. Bush had come to office promising a "humble" foreign policy, saying during the 2000 campaign that he was "not so sure the role of the United States is to go around the world and say, 'This is the way it's got to be.'" But in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, he swiftly dropped the humility talk to govern as if, in fact, that were exactly the United States' role.
Neoconservatism—or at least an interventionist mindset contiguous with longstanding right-wing assumptions about the American prerogative to serve as a virtuous hyperpower—became the prevailing stance. In his 2002 State of the Union address, Bush named Iran, Iraq, North Korea, "and their terrorist allies" as a new "axis of evil."
At that point U.S. boots were on the ground in Afghanistan already, and soon the U.S. would invade Iraq as well. The global war on terror was underway, understood to be a project unbounded by chronological or geographic limits. There was a real optimism about the United States' ability to militarily dominate distant societies and remake them in our democratic image. Iraq, recall, would be a "cakewalk," advocates of the invasion told us at the time.
With the added insight of 20-odd years, such optimism is hard to come by even in Republican circles. Then-Rep. Ron Paul's opposition to the post-9/11 wars failed to win over most GOP voters in 2008 and 2012, but in 2016 Trump found a receptive audience for his critique of those poorly aging occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Trump's more intellectual supporters praised "his ability to identify America's national interest clearly and pursue it without regard to outdated ideological investments," as Modern Age editor Daniel McCarthy put it in The American Conservative. This proved a generous way of describing a chaotic and contradictory approach to foreign affairs. Trump didn't end any wars—even the exit from Afghanistan his administration sought was left incomplete when he exited the Oval Office—and his diplomatic achievements were far more discussed than realized.
Thus, Republicans come to the 2024 race as a party without a dominant foreign policy. The pre-Trump GOP establishment, with its neoconservative lean, has diminished. Yet a coherent Trumpist approach never fully took root. The party remains at a crossroads on this issue, and the 2024 presidential nominee may become its new navigator for years or generations to come.
The Old Guard
Our first faction will be the most familiar. These are Republicans whose foreign policy is more consonant than not with the interventionist model of the Bush-era GOP. Circumstances are different, but the basic standpoint is about the same: The U.S. is the leader of the free world and has not just the right but the responsibility to guide the international order, including through military intervention.
Members of the old guard "support U.S. overseas bases, foreign-assistance programs, and a strong American military," as George Mason University political scientist Colin Dueck put it in an article for the American Enterprise Institute. "They back the idea that the U.S. stands at the head of an American-led order of partnerships overseas. They are open to working through international organizations and are generally unyielding toward American adversaries. They tend to favor open trading arrangements with U.S. allies."
In the Republican rift over U.S. aid to Ukraine, then, this is the faction eager to keep the guns and dollars flowing east. It is critical of Russia, in continuation of Cold War–era habits and in sharp contrast to Trump, who last year called Russian President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine "pretty smart." China is seen as a rising problem with which America must actively contend to retain worldwide dominance. But Beijing isn't given quite the priority in the hierarchy of foreign threats it tends to receive from Trump and the Republicans attempting to systematize his impulses, nor is the threat from China so often linked to "globalization" and the culture war.
Crucially, the old guard does not join the majority of Americans in regretting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some may venture a few tactical criticisms, but more often their reflections on the post-9/11 years blame a lack of "resolve" or "credibility" or "commitment to victory." The U.S. failed in the Middle East, in this telling, not because our projects of regime change, nation building, and long-term asymmetric warfare were doomed from the beginning, but because we did not try hard enough to win, did not spend enough money, did not surge in enough troops.
Though rather sprightly by the standards of American gerontocracy, at 75, Sen. Mitt Romney (R–Utah) seems unlikely to reprise his 2012 campaign. But if he did, he'd land in this camp. So would former Sen. Ben Sasse (R–Neb.), who resigned from representing Nebraska to be a university president in Florida, and so would Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.), should he decide to seek the White House again. Sen. Tim Scott (R–S.C.), who has launched a presidential exploratory committee and traveled to early primary states, has a fairly thin foreign policy record. (His 2022 campaign website, for example, featured only domestic topics in its issues section.) Yet details such as his charge that the Biden administration has been too slow and stingy in its aid to Ukraine and his history of opposing U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan suggest he may be best located here, too.
Most likely to represent the old guard on a debate stage in 2024 are former Vice President Mike Pence and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. Though both were members of the Trump administration, their foreign policy records aren't really in a Trumpian vein.
Pence is the more characteristically old guard of the two, as observers in venues from National Review to Slate have noted, despite his longer tenure in Trump's retinue. "Pence was a George W. Bush neoconservative in the mid-2000s," the Stimson Center's Emma Ashford recalled at Foreign Policy in 2020. "In fact, he was far more extreme; when he was a congressman, he sponsored a bill that would have prevented Bush from withdrawing any troops from Iraq," she added. "A Pence administration would continue Trump's harsh approach to China and Iran, but probably ramp up tensions again with North Korea and potentially commit more troops to the Middle East."
Pence's expansive vision of American military power was on full display in a commencement speech at West Point in 2019. "It is a virtual certainty that you will fight on a battlefield for America at some point in your life," he told the graduates, launching into a revealingly long list of possible theaters of war: the Middle East, the Korean Peninsula, the Indo-Pacific, Europe, and the Western Hemisphere. A Vice President Pence could envision near-term wars for the United States on nearly every continent. A President Pence, convinced it's Washington's job to restrain evil worldwide, might take those wars from vision to reality.
Haley's foreign policy record, meanwhile, comes largely from her two years as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, a role widely regarded as preparation for her now-launched presidential run. Her 2018 resignation allowed her to escape the Trump administration before its late-stage theatrics and to remain in apparently good stead with much of the old and new guard alike.
Indeed, pursuing a mostly conventional GOP foreign policy without overtly angering Trump became something of a specialty for Haley, who has compared herself to the neoconservative Reagan administration diplomat Jeane Kirkpatrick. "Whenever President Donald Trump says something that veers outside the Republican foreign policy mainstream, you can count on Nikki Haley, his ambassador to the United Nations, to soothe the terrified establishment," Politico foreign affairs correspondent Nahal Toosi wrote in 2017.
She "emerged as the security blanket that Republicans and even some Democrats—not to mention America's allies—can cling to when trying to grasp where the Trump administration stands on global affairs," Toosi continued. "Haley is not only pro-America, pro-Israel, and tough on terrorism—she's also wary of Russia and attuned to human rights concerns. It's pretty much traditional Republicanism, with a glint of neoconservatism."
Other old-guard candidacies may come from two Arkansas politicians, former Gov. Asa Hutchinson and Sen. Tom Cotton. Hutchinson, who has launched a campaign, has argued it is "naïve" to propose decreasing U.S. aid to Ukraine, and he wants to use U.S. "strength [abroad] in the cause of freedom." Formerly an undersecretary of homeland security in the George W. Bush administration, Hutchinson's approach to foreign affairs has been compared to that of Ronald Reagan and George W. himself: He wants the U.S. to "assert global leadership," work closely with allies, and reject what he dubs the "isolationist" posture of the post-Trump Republican Party.
But Hutchinson broke with many others in his party in welcoming refugees from Afghanistan to his state in 2021. And a decade prior, welcoming refugees the Constitution Project's task force on detainee treatment at Guantanamo Bay, which concluded "it is indisputable" that the U.S. engaged in torture at the facility and assigned responsibility for that torture to some of "the nation's highest officials."
Cotton, who favors Ukraine aid, has called the 2007 surge in Iraq Bush's "finest hour." He believes, as he told The Wall Street Journal in 2017, "there is always a military option. That is the case everywhere in the world."
A pal of the neoconservative commentator Bill Kristol, Cotton has argued the U.S. could win a war against Iran in "two strikes," and he regurgitates the Bush-era "kill them there before they kill us here" line verbatim. He is, however, more attentive to China than the average old guarder—in 2021, he issued an 82-page report entitled "Beat China" in which he called for a long-term strategy of "the 'breakup or the gradual mellowing' of the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) power," directly inspired by Cold War antagonism with the Soviet Union and starting with "targeted decoupling" in the economic realm.
The New Guard
Eight years in, the reality of a philosophical Trumpism—not merely an aggregate of the man's own choices but a systematic policy perspective—remains debatable. But that failure of fulfillment is not for lack of trying, especially where military intervention is concerned.
Members of this Trumpist (or, if you prefer to gussy it further, Jacksonian) new guard "favor a robust U.S. military and strong presidential leadership together with aggressive counterterrorism," writes George Mason University's Dueck. "They have no difficulty believing that a dangerous international environment requires a punitive attitude against numerous threats. At the same time, they recoil from global governance projects, multilateral pieties, and extended nation-building missions overseas."
In broad strokes, this group is ambiguous in its stance toward Russia and Ukraine and wary of international alliances that could constrain American options. It takes a dimmer view of the post-9/11 war on terror than the old guard, but not because of principled noninterventionism. On the contrary, the new guard tends to be militaristic and possessed of a patriotism that verges on chauvinism.
The new guard mostly supported bringing U.S. combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan to a close over the last few years. But that wasn't about being opposed to war; it was just tired of these wars and ready to move on to great power rivalry with Beijing. Countering a rising China—with protectionist economic policies and culture war posturing, but perhaps also with military force—is the new guard's overwhelming concern now.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson is the cable news spokesman for this camp, and Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.), a congressional wunderkind frequently mentioned in the same breath as Cotton, is a prominent representative on the Hill. But the most prominent new guard figure is, naturally, Trump himself. If he wins the GOP nomination again, we can anticipate more of the signature combination of the instincts displayed in the 2019 episode in which Trump authorized a military strike against Iran in the wake of the downing of a U.S. drone but backed off at the last minute. Those instincts will be applied, however, to a new mix of challenges abroad.
In his first term, Trump was often a voice—if not an effective force—for scaling down the American military interventions of which he had wearied, overseeing drawdowns in Syria, Iraq, and Somalia. At the same time, Trump vetoed a drawdown of U.S. involvement in Yemen, while escalating intervention in Venezuela and Nicaragua and increasing drone strikes in Africa.
If he returns to office in 2025, quite possibly on the heels of three years of escalation in U.S.-China tensions over Taiwan, Trump is likely to be much less interested in restraint. A confrontation with China might produce another "endless war," but it could be one Trump would relish.
If Haley is on the new edge of the old guard, former CIA chief and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo—who has signaled interest in campaigning or at least positioning himself as an option for vice president—is on the old edge of the new. As a member of the Trump administration, Pompeo more than many of his colleagues echoed his boss's bombastic rhetoric and defended him to the bitter end. He left office with tweeted boasts of "swagger," a juvenile but accurate summation of his indelicate mode of diplomacy.
Though he paid lip service to "realism, restraint, and respect" as guiding principles in foreign affairs, Pompeo's own foreign policy record shows little of the sort. He has advocated preventive war and forcible regime change in North Korea and is reliably hawkish on Iran, pushing the "maximum pressure" policy and nuclear deal abandonment that together brought U.S.-Iran relations to their present dismal state.
Pompeo is also known for "his support for Guantanamo Bay and the brutal interrogation of terror suspects," as Alex Ward wrote at Vox in 2017, and is more hostile to Moscow than Trump tends to be. He reserves special antagonism for China, and he gives his arguments a culture-war edge by speaking often of "the Chinese Communist Party" rather than "China" or "Beijing."
Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who entered the Republican race in February, has a short policy record across the board. What little he has said about foreign affairs, however, suggests a new guard lean. "The main thing should be the main thing: focus on China," he tweeted shortly after launching his campaign. "China wants the Ukraine war to last as long as possible to deplete Western military capacity before invading Taiwan. It's working: we think we *look* stronger by helping Ukraine, but we actually *become* weaker vs. China."
Ramaswamy has accused Beijing of "violating our sovereignty" with its spy balloons and repeatedly called for military intervention in Mexico, in the style of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to wage the drug war. He would "limit any further funding or support to Ukraine," he told Carlson, and would scale down the overall U.S. commitment to European security. As for the Mideast, he argued in 2021 that the Taliban's takeover in Afghanistan was a problem of American " wokeness" and that the U.S. only should have withdrawn with "a credible threat…to completely decimate the Taliban if the latter reneged on its prior agreements"—that is, with a plan to return.
The Oddballs
Dueck's analysis of GOP foreign policy factions included a third category, but it's a category which may go unrepresented in the 2024 lineup: noninterventionists. The only remotely plausible candidate in this vein, so far, is Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.), who sometimes sounds like the new guard but remains far more skeptical of military intervention. Paul is also willing to break ranks on issues like Yemen and China, arguing against saber rattling at Beijing in 2022 while other Republicans couldn't rattle hard enough. "Abandoning that policy [strategic ambiguity about Taiwan] in favor of strategic clarity discards a successful strategy for a reckless one that makes war [with China] more likely, not less," Paul warned.
"Saudi Arabia's air and naval blockade of Yemen is an abomination," Paul wrote in 2021, introducing "legislation to cancel an American arms sale to Saudi Arabia that aids and abets the subjugation of the Yemeni people." He has also written against sacrificing U.S. troops "in every war on the planet, even when the call for war is sought by fellow aspirants for liberty," an argument made in the context of the war in Ukraine but clearly applicable to Taiwan as well.
Yet Paul, who reportedly guided Trump in a less bellicose direction on Iraq and Syria and may wish to remain in that sort of advisory role, seems unlikely to run for president again in 2024.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of former National Security Advisor John Bolton.
Bolton is a hawk's hawk, maybe the one declared presidential contender of whom Trump could say, honestly and without qualification, "I'm the one that tempers him." He's known for admitting to plotting covert coups (including an unsuccessful effort in Venezuela), for arguing for a preemptive attack on a nuclear North Korea, for wanting to bomb just about everything.
He is, as The New Yorker put it in the most neutral description imaginable, "the Republican Party's most militant foreign-policy thinker—an advocate of aggressive force who ridicules anyone who disagrees." Or more vividly, as Seth Harp wrote in Rolling Stone, "a war criminal, a man better described as a black-pilled, death-worshipping ghoul drenched in the blood of Muslim children than compared to an elegant specimen of the family Accipitridae." And he said in early January that he just might want to be president.
The Bridge?
A Bolton candidacy is a long shot on grounds of the mustache alone—America hasn't elected a president with facial hair in more than a century—but his all-purpose aggression is also out of line with much of the Republican base. Recent polling suggests the average GOP voter is far from anti-war but closer to the new guard than the old, let alone to someone like Bolton.
Republican voters increasingly want to focus on domestic problems instead of pursuing an activist foreign policy. Their top three foreign policy priorities, per Morning Consult numbers from January 2023, are immigration, terrorism, and drug trafficking—all about as domestic as foreign affairs can get. The same data set reports that seven in 10 Republicans want U.S. global engagement, including military intervention, to stay at current levels (28 percent) or decrease (45 percent). Only 15 percent want it to rise.
No single policy issue will decide the GOP's 2024 primary, of course—not even one as important and central to presidential power as foreign affairs. Still, if current voter trends hold, the candidate best positioned to herd the Republican Party to a new foreign policy may well be one who can lead the new guard without alienating the old. And though it's too early to make any confident predictions, at this stage that sounds an awful lot like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Though best known for helming the state government in Tallahassee, DeSantis spent nearly six years in the U.S. House of Representatives, building the foreign policy record many governors lack. He also served as a legal officer at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in 2006 and in Iraq in 2007. That history, plus his more recent culture war battles and commentary on Russia and China, would allow him to straddle old and new.
On the old guard side of the balance sheet: DeSantis has been doggedly anti-Iran, outdoing Trump in his haste to demolish the nuclear deal and insisting, over and over during his congressional tenure, that Tehran is a major threat to the U.S., an "enemy of our country" and "terror state" with whom "we do not share any interests." (Not even peace?)
DeSantis has recently followed Paul and new guarders in pushing for boundaries and accountability for U.S. aid to Ukraine, opposing a "blank check" to Kyiv and a great power "proxy war" over the Crimean Peninsula. In a March statement to Carlson, he said "becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not" a "vital national interest" and opposed any U.S. aid to Kyiv "that could require the deployment of American troops or enable Ukraine to engage in offensive operations beyond its borders."
Despite the moral equivocation in his "territorial dispute" phrasing (which he later walked back), DeSantis is also markedly more negative toward Russia than Trump is, criticizing the invasion of Ukraine and accusing Moscow of attempting "nefarious…espionage or influence operations" in Florida. He has dismissed Putin, whose strength Trump openly admires, as an "authoritarian gas station attendant."
DeSantis hasn't repudiated the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—in fact, he has barely commented on these wars at all. What little he has said of the post-9/11 conflicts could place him in either camp: Americans aren't "war weary," he claimed in 2014, only "weary of missions launched without a coherent strategy and are sick of seeing engagements that produce inconclusive results rather than clear-cut victory."
On China, however, DeSantis has a noticeably newer feel. He speaks of U.S.-China relations in ideological terms, describing the "Communist Party of China…worming its way" into America and linking Chinese communism to "woke corporations."
"I don't see how anyone could've lived through the last year and a half and not come to the conclusion that there's something fundamentally wrong with how [Beijing] is influencing so many institutions and industries around the world," DeSantis said in summer 2021. "There is no single entity that exercises a more pervasive nefarious influence across a wide range of American industries and institutions than the Communist Party of China."
A DeSantis administration, without doubt, would make opposition to China the centerpiece of its international engagement. And that prospect, coupled with a foreign policy record that would fit as comfortably within GOP norms in 2004 as in 2024, may be precisely what Republican voters want. After a scrambled decade—and despite real shifts on matters including nation building, alliances, and regional focus—the new consensus might look a lot like the old one.
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Eric Boehmhttps://reason.com/people/eric-boehm/Eric.Boehm@Reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=82275372023-03-20T20:15:25Z2023-03-20T18:05:43Z
Twenty years after the disastrous American invasion of Iraq, one of the war's chief architects says the Bush administration's biggest error was not making the conflict an even bloodier, costlier catastrophe.
Writing in National Review, former Bush and Trump adviser John Bolton defends the decision to topple Saddam Hussein's regime and expresses regret for only one aspect of the decadeslong debacle: that America didn't use the opportunity to destabilize Iran too. Having already invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, Bolton writes, the Bush administration should have tried to go three-for-three and "seek regime change in between, in Iran, before Tehran's own WMD programs neared success."
"Unfortunately," he concludes, "as was the case after expelling Saddam from Kuwait in 1991, the United States stopped too soon."
It takes a special kind of hubris and a serious shortage of respect for the lives of other human beings to sit here, in the year 2023, and argue that the real problem with America's post-9/11 wars is that they didn't go far enough. The war in Iraq was a humanitarian and strategic disaster for the United States. It was "one of the most grievous errors in superpower history," as Brian Doherty wrote in the March issue of Reason. "Mendacious in its beginnings, incompetent in its aftermath, and downright criminal in the death and civilizational wreckage it caused, the Iraq War was a catastrophe America has not yet properly reckoned with."
If Bolton has his way, we never will.
Still, the idea that Iraq could have been used to launch a regime-change effort in Iran is possibly only the second most unhinged argument in Bolton's National Review column. He also hand-waves away any responsibility that America ought to bear for the violence and disorder in post-invasion Iraq.
The failure of the United States to prop up a functional and democratic government in Baghdad, Bolton argues, "is separable, conceptually and functionally, from the invasion decision. The subsequent history, for good or ill, cannot detract from the logic, fundamental necessity, and success of overthrowing Saddam, a threat to American national security since he invaded Kuwait in 1990."
This is a telling argument—one that reveals how Bolton has failed to learn even the most basic of lessons from the past 20 years, and one that ought to disqualify him from advising future administrations. Of course, it matters what comes after the decision to invade. Of course, any policy can be made to look like a success if you only focus on the positives—as Bolton does, praising the rapid victory of the U.S. military—while ignoring everything else.
Even if the promise of a successful, prosperous, democratic post-Saddam Iraq hadn't been comprehensively tied up in the arguments for launching the war in the first place, no one should want to live in a world where great powers can violate national sovereignty with impunity, then decline to take responsibility for the mess they've made. This is a toddler's view of reality.
One might suspect that Bolton imagines a world where actions should not have consequences because he's been living in exactly that type of world for the past two decades. Somehow, he's retained his Washington status as a foreign policy expert, media commentator, and presidential advisor despite having been so horrifically wrong about Iraq.
But the rest of America—particularly younger generations—is unlikely to be fooled again. "After watching the failures of America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, young Americans appear to be less supportive of military solutions for international challenges, especially compared to older generations," notes a 2021 report by the Eurasia Group Foundation, a geopolitics-focused think tank.
Writing at Responsible Statecraft—a publication of the Quincy Institute for Public Policy, a noninterventionist think tank—Blaise Malley points to a 2019 poll from the Center for American Progress that found members of Gen Z to be more likely than any other generation to agree with the statement that "The wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan were a waste of time, lives, and taxpayer money, and they did nothing to make us safer at home."
Good. But Bolton's ongoing influence in Republican politics means he (or someone like him) could easily end up inside the next GOP presidential administration, where he could once again push the country toward armed conflict with Iran—as he reportedly did during a brief stint in the Trump administration—or toward more regime-change efforts like the coups he's admitted he helped plot.
And that's the real reason why Bolton's National Review essay matters: because it reveals that he's refused to learn anything from the past 20 years and failed to gain an ounce of humility regarding America's ability to affect regime change with impunity—and to deal with what comes after the bombs stop falling.
Bolton's selective historical analysis and wish casting for even more war put him wildly out of touch with most Americans who lived through the past 20 years. Unfortunately, he's still dangerous—and still very, very wrong.
After years of hyperventilation about foreign interference in U.S. elections, it's remarkable when a former high-ranking U.S. government official casually references his expertise at overthrowing governments in other countries. Few people want foreign powers meddling in political processes; creating domestic chaos is usually considered a local privilege. But complaints about such interference lose credibility when it turns out that fiddling with overseas governance is a hobby of your own.
"As somebody who has helped plan coups d'etat, not here, but other places, it takes a lot of work," John Bolton, whose most recent government post was as national security advisor under former President Donald Trump, told CNN's Jake Tapper earlier this week. Bolton spoke to rebut charges that Trump's actions after he lost the 2020 presidential election represented an effort to overthrow the government.
"It's not an attack on our democracy," Bolton added. "It's Donald Trump looking out for Donald Trump."
Bolton's characterization of the former president as a survival-minded narcissist lacking the competence for nefarious scheming rings true. But his boast that he knows what it takes to stage a coup and Trump isn't up to it rightfully draws attention after years of very public fretting that other countries, and especially Russia, have violated the alleged sanctity of the American political process.
"Specified harmful foreign activities of the Government of the Russian Federation — in particular, efforts to undermine the conduct of free and fair democratic elections and democratic institutions in the United States and its allies and partners…continue to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States," President Joe Biden wrote in April in a letter extending a then-year-old "national emergency with respect to specified harmful foreign activities of the Government of the Russian Federation."
Biden's letter was only the latest complaint about foreigners tainting American politics. A 2019 federal report concluded that "the Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion." And it's not all about Russians: the British government backed candidates and planted fake news stories as part of its efforts to recruit the U.S. to the Allied cause before World War II.
"As long as there have been American elections, foreign powers have sought to influence them," Reason's Eric Boehm noted in 2021.
The U.S. hasn't been shy about playing that game itself, and Bolton isn't the first American to openly admit that fact. In 2018, when asked whether the U.S. ever interfered in foreign elections, former CIA chief James Woolsey answered, "oh, probably. But it was for the good of the system in order to avoid the communists taking over. For example, in Europe in '47, '48, '49, the Greeks and the Italians." When asked if such shenanigans continue, he replied, "only for a very good cause."
Interference in Italy's 1948 general election was especially momentous against the backdrop of Soviet dominance of eastern Europe and is still discussed today. But it was hardly an isolated incident.
"Great powers frequently deploy partisan electoral interventions as a major foreign policy tool," Dov Levin, then of UCLA and now at the University of Hong Kong, wrote in 2016. "For example, the U.S. and the USSR/Russia have intervened in one of every nine competitive national level executive elections between 1946 and 2000."
"I was alarmed in 2016 by how policymakers and commentators frequently described Russian interference in our election as unprecedented," agrees the Wilson Center's David Shimer, who wrote Rigged, also published in 2020. "Many former CIA officers told me in interviews that they viewed the '48 operation in Italy as the agency at its best. And in the aftermath of that operation, as the CIA's chief internal historian put it to me, the agency and the KGB went toe to toe in elections all over the world."
Shimer maintains that Russia continues to interfere in elections while the U.S. has backed off the tactic. But American actions are sufficiently recent that both John Bolton and James Woolsey can draw on their memories of efforts to influence the outcome of elections or to outright overthrow governments.
That said, foreign intervention in an election isn't necessarily bad. Everybody has a right to debate ideas and policies across borders.
"In sum, there is nothing inherently wrong with people trying to influence electoral outcomes in nations other than their own," argued George Mason University's Ilya Somin in 2019. He offered the example of foreign powers openly backing a hypothetical anti-slavery campaign. He added that "electoral interference is often wrong if it involves activities like hacking and deception. But the reason why such activities are reprehensible has little to do with the nationalities of the people involved. And the moral presumption against deception can be overcome in cases where it is essential to averting a greater evil."
That means funding anti-communist political parties in the 1948 Italian election when Soviet-backed totalitarians were seizing power across eastern Europe is perfectly defensible; that's not far from an anti-slavery campaign, after all. But coups d'etat, which are forcible, extra-legal replacements of other countries' governments, are a lot sketchier in the absence of important justifying context.
That's awkward in terms of complaints about foreign interference in American elections. It's difficult to credibly complain about Russians hacking email accounts, planting stories on social media, and favoring one candidate over another when political players like Bolton casually discuss even more aggressive interventions elsewhere. The outrage comes across as wildly hypocritical.
Ultimately, the U.S. has weathered foreign interference in its elections in the past, both overt and covert, just as it has interfered in other countries' political processes. If this country is now more sensitive and vulnerable to such meddling than before, that's because its people are more deeply divided and its institutions more brittle than in earlier years. Nobody made Americans hate one another or contemplate violence to achieve their goals; those are self-inflicted wounds and in their absence foreign dirty tricks would count for little.
And if our political class wants to be taken seriously when it complains about foreign governments messing with our domestic disputes, it needs to get over its own habit of meddling overseas. Otherwise, such political interference is just a taste of our own medicine.
On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that the Justice Department has opened an investigation into former National Security Advisor John Bolton to determine whether his 2020 book, The Room Where It Happened, improperly disclosed classified government information.
Many people will rightly find Bolton to be an unsympathetic figure in this dispute: A tireless advocate for the U.S. to escalate and even start wars, Bolton never belonged anywhere near an administration that purports to be charting a less interventionist course on foreign policy matters. But President Trump selected Bolton for the job, and now he must face the consequences for that mistake, which include having to suffer Bolton's tell-all about his time in the White House.
Citing national security concerns and breach of contract, the Trump administration fought like hell to prevent Simon & Schuster from publishing the book, but a judge ultimately ruled that it was too late to prevent the information from getting out. Now the Justice Department appears to be hunting for reasons to subject Bolton to criminal penalties. According to The New York Times:
Mr. Trump has made clear that he wants his former aide prosecuted. He said on Twitter that Mr. Bolton "broke the law" and "should be in jail, money seized, for disseminating, for profit, highly Classified information." He has also called Mr. Bolton "a dope," "incompetent" and the book "a compilation of lies and made up stories, all intended to make me look bad."
Lawyers for the National Security Council and the Justice Department expressed reservations about opening a criminal case, in part because Mr. Trump's public statements made it seem like an overtly political act, according to two officials briefed on the discussions. Others noted that a federal judge this summer said that Mr. Bolton may have broken the law, and that the case had merit.
The attorneys' concerns have obvious merit: It's clear that Trump wants to punish Bolton for badmouthing him, and is looking for a pretext to do so. Any effort to sanction Bolton will come at the expense of a vital principle: the right of citizens to be informed about their governments' misdeeds. As I wrote previously:
The administration should not be able to invoke the dreaded specter of "national security" every time someone is prepared to say something that might cause the government embarrassment. This is reminiscent of the efforts to stop whistleblower Edward Snowden from publishing his own book about the federal government's vast ability to spy on U.S. citizens. Knowing that it was unlikely the very power apparatus his book was criticizing would give him a fair shake, Snowden opted not to submit his manuscript for government review, which led a court to rule that the authorities could seize the book's profits.
That Bolton finds himself in a similar position to former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden is, of course, deeply ironic, notedReason's Scott Shackford, given that "Bolton accused Snowden of treason for revealing the government's secret surveillance of American citizens and declared in 2013 that Snowden's disclosures were a 'grave threat to national security.'" But Bolton's own penchant for branding whistleblowers as traitors does not mean that he should be denied fair treatment. Instead of pursuing a vindictive witch hunt against the former national security advisor, the Trump administration should discredit his ideas by showing that the U.S. is made safer and more secure by doing the opposite of what Bolton wanted.
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Eric Boehmhttps://reason.com/people/eric-boehm/Eric.Boehm@Reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=80685202020-06-18T20:16:46Z2020-06-18T20:20:01Z
Rather than securing a better trade agreement for American farmers and blue-collar workers, the real goal of President Donald Trump's trade war with China was a second term in the White House. So says John Bolton, Trump's former national security advisor, in a Wall Street Journalexcerpt from his forthcoming book, The Room Where It Happened.
Bolton writes that he would be "hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision" that wasn't driven by the president's re-election plans. But Bolton singles out Trump's fraught and sometimes frothy relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping as a particularly striking example of how Trump "commingled the personal and the national."
Bolton relates the details of a conversation Trump had with Xi by phone in June 2019, in which Trump stressed that "making a trade deal with China" would be "a big plus for him politically." In a separate conversation between the two men months later, Bolton writes, Trump "stressed the importance of farmers and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome." He adds that he would use the exact words uttered by Trump, "but the government's prepublication review process has decided otherwise."
Later in the summer, as China was cracking down on protesters in Hong Kong and as the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre approached, Bolton reportedly tried to persuade Trump to speak out about China's terrible human rights record. "Who cares about it? I'm trying to make a deal," was Trump's response, Bolton writes.
Bolton was fired from the White House in September of last year, so he wasn't around to witness the final stages of what became a limited "phase one" trade deal signed by Trump and Xi in December. But it seemed apparent to many observers—myself included—that the deal had more to do with domestic politics than it did with boosting international trade or easing tensions between the world's two biggest economies.
For starters, there was the promise that China would increase its purchases of American farm and industrial goods by $200 billion. Those targets were never realistic—and indeed, China is not even close to being on pace to hit them. But the key thing, politically, is that the U.S. agreed not to hold China accountable until 2021 at the earliest. In other words, not until after the 2020 presidential election.
That meant Trump could hit the rally circuit to boast about how he had stood up to China—as he quickly did, telling a gathering of Ohio farmers in January that they'd have to buy bigger tractors to keep up with the demand from China under the deal he'd inked.
In that regard, Bolton's descriptions of Trump's priorities seem to fit what we know perfectly. Rather than getting tough on China, Trump appears to care far more about the appearance of getting tough with China than actually accomplishing substantial policy.
That's been fairly obvious to anyone who cared to look. After all, how many economists and journalists have debunked Trump's claim that China is paying for the cost of his tariffs, or pointed out that trade deficits don't work the way Trump seems to think they do? But the tariffs were a useful way to appear to be doing something. From the outside, Trump's trade policy has looked like a haphazard, self-interested mess from the start; Bolton confirms that's how it looked inside the White House too.
"Trade matters were handled from day one in a completely chaotic way," Bolton writes in the Journal excerpt. "Over and over again, the same issues. Without resolution, or even worse, one outcome one day and a contrary outcome a few days later."
"The whole thing made my head hurt," Bolton concludes.
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Eric Boehmhttps://reason.com/people/eric-boehm/Eric.Boehm@Reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=80683362020-06-18T15:26:56Z2020-06-18T13:35:09Z
Having wrongly claimed that Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction, former Pentagon official and national security advisor John Bolton knows a thing or two about big mistakes. Had he expressed any regret about advancing the lie that led America to invade Iraq, he might be considered a pretty good judge of when a White House is dangerously out of control—and that's the case Bolton attempts to make in a tell-all book of his time as President Donald Trump's national security advisor, In The Room Where It Happened.
Yet the incident Bolton singles out as "the most irrational thing I ever witnessed any President do," according to The New York Times' review of his book, has nothing to do with Trump asking foreign leaders for political help or cozying up to dictators. No, the worst thing Bolton witnessed Trump do is decide not to start a war with Iran.
"The moment he cites as the real 'turning point' for him in the administration had to do with an attack on Iran that, to Bolton's abject disappointment, didn't happen," writes Jennifer Szalai in the Times' review of the book. "In June 2019, Iran had shot down an unmanned American drone, and Bolton, who has always championed what he proudly calls 'disproportionate response,' pushed Trump to approve a series of military strikes in retaliation. You can sense Bolton's excitement when he describes going home 'at about 5:30' for a change of clothes because he expected to be at the White House 'all night.' It's therefore an awful shock when Trump decided to call off the strikes at the very last minute, after learning they would kill as many as 150 people."
Bolton's book will be big news regardless of whether the White House succeeds in stopping its publication due to concerns about classified information—read Reason's Scott Shackford's in-depth take on all of that here. Among the dribs and drabs that have leaked so far, the biggest bombshell seems to be the allegation that Trump's impeachable conduct with Ukraine was not a one-time mistake but part of a pattern. In addition to pressuring the Ukrainian government to investigate Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, Trump also directed U.S. policy towards Turkey and China with an eye toward winning reelection.
"Trump commingled the personal and the national not just on trade questions but across the whole field of national security," Bolton writes in an excerpt of the book published by The Wall Street Journal. Much of Trump's trade war with China, Bolton alleges, was conducted with the intent of helping the president win reelection and little more. "I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my White House tenure that wasn't driven by re-election calculations," Bolton writes.
In another anecdote, this one reported by The New York Times, Bolton relates that Trump had no idea the United Kingdom was a nuclear power and that he did not know Finland was not a part of Russia. Elsewhere in the Journal excerpt, Bolton accuses Trump of giving Chinese President Xi Jinping his blessing to build concentration camps in Xinjiang, a province where the Chinese government has brutally repressed the Uighurs, a Muslim minority population.
His WMD fibs aside, there's no reason to doubt that Bolton is telling the truth about all this. After all the ridiculous and insane things Trump has said and done in public—in front of TV cameras, even—it is nearly impossible to be surprised by anything that he's reportedly said or done in private. Remember when the president stood on the driveway in front of the White House and told reporters that China should open a "major investigation into the Bidens" while he was actively being impeached by Congress for allegedly asking Ukraine to open an investigation into the Bidens?Exactly.
Bolton's book might add some specific details that no one previously knew, but it is unlikely to tell us much about Trump that isn't already apparent after watching his first three years in office—or scrolling through his Twitter feed. The man is an open book.
But no one should believe for a second that Bolton wrote this book out of a sincere desire to speak truth to power. If Bolton believed Trump was an imminent danger to the country, he could have told Congress what he knew, without waiting for a subpoena, during the impeachment proceedings. Doing so may not have changed many minds, but it might have changed enough of them to remove from office a man Bolton seems to believe is dangerously incompetent.
U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer says the idea that Trump sought to leverage trade policy to get Xi to help with Trump's reelection "absolutely untrue," and the Trump campaign issued a statement saying the claim was "absurd." Trump is, of course, using the same lines he uses about everyone who leaves the White House and then speaks frankly about the incompetence they witnessed there. It really makes you wonder who is hiring these people.
President Trump responds to @AmbJohnBolton's book: "He broke the law. He was a washed up guy, I gave him a chance… I wasn't very enamored… He was one of the big guns for let's get into Iraq…. He broke the law… It's highly classified information."
Any libertarian—and, for that matter, anyone who possesses an ounce of concern for the wellbeing of other humans—should prefer to see Bolton criticizing the White House from afar instead of advising the president about what countries to bomb next.
Trump's foreign policy might be an inchoate mess operating with the sole purpose of getting the president reelected, but that's at least less evil than Bolton's gleeful warmongering.
FREE MINDS
Have we reached a tipping point in Americans' overall view of the police? A new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll finds that a combined 59 percent of Americans say police departments across the country need either a complete overhaul (22 percent) or major reforms (37 percent), even as the majority of Americans (57 percent) say they disagree with the "Defund The Police" slogan popularized during recent protests against police brutality.
That's part of a trend. As Reason's Peter Suderman noted last week:
A Washington Post poll released this week found that 69 percent of Americans say Floyd's killing represents a systemic problem with policing, while just 29 percent say it's an isolated incident; six years ago, the Post reports, more than half of Americans saw police killings of unarmed black men as isolated events, with just 43 percent viewing them as part of a wider trend.
What's behind this shift? There are many factors, but the biggest one is probably the fact that almost every American carries a high-definition video camera at all times. Police misconduct can no longer be explained away or hidden. It must be addressed.
FREE MARKETS
Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben could be going the way of Sambo's—and that's just fine.
The Quaker Oats Company, which is owned by PepsiCo, announced that it will remove the image of Aunt Jemima from its packaging and change the name of the brand later this year. "We recognize Aunt Jemima's origins are based on a racial stereotype," Kristin Kroepfl, chief marketing officer of Quaker Foods North America, said in a statement Wednesday. "While work has been done over the years to update the brand in a manner intended to be appropriate and respectful, we realize those changes are not enough."
Mars Food, which owns the Uncle Ben's brand of rice, also announced that it would "evolve" the brand, though the brand did not offer specifics. While the terms "Aunt" and "Uncle" have unsavory historical connotations—during the Jim Crow era, southern whites would use those terms to refer to older black women and men as a way to avoid addressing them as "Mrs." or "Mr."—the specific character of "Uncle Ben" is reportedly based on a Chicago restaurateur rather than a southern farmer.
But before anyone gets upset about Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima getting canceled—oops, too late—let's be clear about one thing: PepsiCo, the Quaker Oats Company, and Mars Food can put whatever labels they want on their packaging, and you don't have a right to buy a box of five-minute rice or poor quality maple syrup with a black person's image on the front.
• If Major League Baseball returns this year, National League teams are reportedly going to use a designated hitter—which means the end of amazing stuff like this:
Since it looks like the NL DH is finally here, I'm going to start a thread of monster home runs by pitchers.
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Scott Shackfordhttps://reason.com/people/scott-shackford/sshackford@reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=80681912020-06-17T17:08:36Z2020-06-17T17:10:24Z
The Justice Department is suing to try to block John Bolton, former national security adviser, from releasing his White House tell-all The Room Where It Happened.
It's extremely unlikely they'll stop the book's release, which is slated for next week, but what they're really going after is the money Bolton will make off of it.
The Room Where It Happened purports to document the inner operations of President Donald Trump's White House from spring 2018 to fall 2019, when Bolton served. The Amazon summary of the book says Bolton saw a president who cared only about getting reelected regardless of whatever impact it had on national security. He argues that the dealings with Ukraine (trying to make government officials dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden) that led to Trump's failed impeachment were not isolated: "Trump's Ukraine-like transgressions existed across the full range of his foreign policy—and Bolton documents exactly what those were, and attempts by him and others in the Administration to raise alarms about them."
The summary is also full of Boltonesque whining that Trump's foreign policy was all about making friends with foreign leaders and not nearly enough saber rattling, so we can fully expect his criticism of Trump to partly revolve around Bolton not getting the harshly punitive or even militaristic responses to conflicts with countries like North Korea or Iran that he wants.
But that's not really what's at issue here. Because of Bolton's role in government, there's a lengthy review process that requires that the book's contents be scrutinized before publication so as not to reveal classified information. This is part of a binding agreement that all federal employees with high-level access to secret information have to sign. Violate the agreement and the feds have the power to take former employees to court to demand all the profits the book makes.
According to the lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Bolton submitted the book to National Security Council (NSC) staff for the review process in December 2019. Bolton was told in January that the book contained significant amounts of classified information that would have to be deleted before publication. Nevertheless, publisher Simon & Schuster began advertising the book's pending release in January and a New York Times story that month discussed the contents of the manuscript, even though it had not passed review. According to the lawsuit, Bolton was already violating his non-disclosure agreement with the federal government by discussing what was in the book with others.
The NSC allegedly completed the review of the book in April and determined that, though he had excised confidential information, the book was not yet cleared to publish. Bolton was told the process for approval was ongoing. Then, a second review of the book was ordered in May at the urging of Trump's assistant for National Security Affairs. (The lawsuit claims these higher-ups had greater access to top-level intelligence reports and would be better able to recognize confidential information in Bolton's book.)
Bolton and Simon & Schuster pushed forward anyway after completing the initial review and have scheduled the book's general release for June 23.
The lawsuit is attempting to force Bolton to yank the book until he completes the review process and asking Simon & Schuster to delay the release and retrieve any copies currently in the hands of third parties. Failing that, the Justice Department wants to force Bolton to fork over any money he may derive from the publication of the book (including movie rights).
While this all looks like a high-profile feud between Trump and Bolton, the reality is that Bolton is far from alone in his fight to disclose what happens in high levels of government, nor is such a struggle confined to the Trump administration. The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, partnering with the American Civil Liberties Union, filed suit in 2019 challenging the constitutionality of prepublication review, representing five former government employees.
Their lawsuit argues that the review process violates both the First and Fifth Amendments for censoring the authors via a vague and inscrutable system that takes months or even a year to complete. They argue the reviews often result in overly broad demands for content to be deleted, without any real analysis of whether disclosure of such information would actually cause harm to the nation's security or any determination of whether the classified information had already been made public. They also argue the censorship orders are sometimes biased based on the content: Books that criticize the CIA's torture of prisoners have historically been more heavily redacted than books that praise the CIA's methods.
Their lawsuit in the U.S. District Court of Maryland was dismissed in April when the court agreed with the government that the prepublication system is constitutional. The Knight First Amendment Institute is appealing.
It's ironic that Bolton may end up in the same boat as whistleblower Edward Snowden. Bolton accused Snowden of treason for revealing the government's secret surveillance of American citizens and declared in 2013 that Snowden's disclosures were a "grave threat to national security."
Last year, when Snowden published Permanent Record, which detailed his decision to reveal the National Security Agency's surveillance, the Justice Department did the same thing to him that they're trying to do to Bolton (and they succeeded—a federal judge gave the feds permission to seize Snowden's proceeds for the book because he did not complete the prepublication review process).
The White House sent a threatening letter to former National Security Advisor John Bolton's attorneys declaring that his forthcoming book, The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir, is a threat to national security and cannot be published.
"Based on our preliminary review, the manuscript appears to contain significant amounts of classified information," wrote Ellen Knight, senior director for records at the National Security Council, in the letter to Bolton's attorneys. "The manuscript may not be published or disclosed without the deletion of this classified material."
The full letter was obtained by CNN's Jake Tapper:
WH letter to Bolton warning him against publication of his book as it is right now pic.twitter.com/dsICaKQuJe
Bolton has indicated that he would be willing to testify at the president's impeachment trial in the Senate, though it's currently unclear whether there are enough Republican senators who will vote to allow witnesses at all. Bolton may have information that is damaging to Trump's defense. As Reason reported previously:
In a book that is soon to be released, Bolton says that Trump held up $391 million in congressional authorized security assistance from Ukraine so he could pressure President Volodymyr Zelenskiy into announcing investigations that zeroed in on Trump's political rivals, namely former Vice President Joe Biden. In December, Trump was impeached by the House on abuse of power and obstruction of Congress in connection with the incident.
The Bolton allegations threw a wrench into the Senate trial as Republicans mull if they want to introduce witnesses and additional evidence after arguments conclude. Lawmakers will need a simple majority to hear new testimony, and Sens. Mitt Romney (R–Utah) and Susan Collins (R–Maine) have expressed that they will likely vote in favor. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.) has emphasized the need for speedy proceedings and expressed his desire that no witnesses be called.
Senate procedure is one matter. But regardless of whether Bolton is able to present his information at the trial, it's incredibly suspicious for the White House to seek to suppress the book itself. The administration should not be able to invoke the dreaded specter of "national security" every time someone is prepared to say something that might cause the government embarrassment. This is reminiscent of the efforts to stop whistleblower Edward Snowden from publishing his own book about the federal government's vast ability to spy on U.S. citizens. Knowing that it was unlikely the very power apparatus his book was criticizing would give him a fair shake, Snowden opted not to submit his manuscript for government review, which led a court to rule that the authorities could seize the book's profits.
There are, some legitimate secrets the government has an interest in protecting—the names of intelligence assets, for instance—and it's not wrong for the White House to review a former top advisor's book for inadvertent slips. But there's reason to be deeply skeptical that the White House's concerns are related to these actual, sensitive matters. The president himself recently characterized Bolton's potential testimony as a national security issue along the following lines:
"When [Bolton] knows my thoughts on certain people and other governments, and we're talking about massive trade deals and war and peace and all these different things that we talk about, that's really a very important national security problem," Trump told reporters in Davos, Switzerland.
Bolton knowing Trump's "thoughts on certain people and other governments" may be embarrassing for the administration, but it is not a rational basis upon which to censor him. Too often, national security is invoked to quell legitimate questions about government operations.
Readers should not be deprived of access to Bolton's book. They may end up rejecting its relevance, truthfulness, indictment of Trump—indeed, there are many good reasons to be skeptical of Bolton in general—but that's for the American people to decide, not the national security state.
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Elizabeth Nolan Brownhttps://reason.com/people/elizabeth-nolan-brown/elizabeth.brown@reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=80440612020-01-29T14:58:38Z2020-01-29T14:30:14Z
Bolton the Disrupter. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.) says Republicans don't have enough votes to block witnesses from testifying in the impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump, which means we could soon see John Bolton, Trump's former national security adviser, giving us a personal preview of his new book from the Senate floor.
On Tuesday, Trump's impeachment defense team wrapped up its portion of the proceedings. (More on that here.) Now, the Senate will vote on whether to call in witnesses. And Bolton will almost certainly get the first invite from Democrats if they do.
In return, "Republicans may react to a subpoena of Bolton by summoning Hunter Biden and the government whistleblower, whose complaint sparked the impeachment inquiry, to testify," suggests Zachary Evans at National Review.
One fun thing about all this is how much Bolton seems to be getting under Trump's skin, judging by the increasingly exasperated digs at Bolton the president has been tweeting.
….many more mistakes of judgement, gets fired because frankly, if I listened to him, we would be in World War Six by now, and goes out and IMMEDIATELY writes a nasty & untrue book. All Classified National Security. Who would do this?
Then again, Trump isn't wrong that that Bolton would have us "in World War Six by now" (or at least well on the way there) if he got his way.
Firing Bolton may be the best idea Trump has had in office, and we're all safer and better off because of it. (It would have been nicer if he had never hired Bolton in the first place, but let's call that water under the bridge for now.) Bolton turning on Trump once fired just makes it all that much better.
Republicans on social media often rejoice in liberals "eating their own" during online outrage mobs—which, I admit, can indeed be fun to watch. But it's so much better when the people putting each other on the menu are power-wielding warmongers and corrupt bozos in high office.
QUICK HITS
The Pentagon last week said that only 12 U.S. troops had suffered brain injuries in an Iranian attack on a U.S.-manned military base in Iraq. The number has now gone up to 50 troops who were harmed.
Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is now topping fellow Democratic 2020 presidential candidate (and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor) Pete Buttigieg in some polls.
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Elizabeth Nolan Brownhttps://reason.com/people/elizabeth-nolan-brown/elizabeth.brown@reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=80438142020-01-28T15:19:57Z2020-01-28T14:30:43Z
President Donald Trump must be having second thoughts about firing national security adviser John Bolton last September. (Though thank goodness he did.) Bolton—who was particularly salty that Trump wouldn't let him bomb Iran—is now dishing about the president in an upcoming book, a draft copy of which was leaked by an unknown source to The New York Times.
In addition to "dozens of pages" on the Ukraine situation that's now at the center of Trump impeachment proceedings, the book also mentions that Bolton had concerns about the president's relationship with Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Chinese president Xi Jinping, and that he had reported these concerns to Attorney General William Barr.
The manuscript for Bolton's book—titled The Room Where It Happened—was submitted to the White House in December for a national security review.
In the manuscript, Bolton alleges that Barr had been concerned certain Trump comments to Erdogan and Xi would jeopardize Department of Justice cases against Chinese telecommunications company ZTE and state-owned Turkish bank Halkbank. Barr "said he was worried that Mr. Trump had created the appearance that he had undue influence over what would typically be independent inquiries," according to the Times. More here.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) replied in a statement late last night that it had not yet reviewed Bolton's book manuscript but considered the Times article to have "grossly mischaracterize[d] what Attorney General Barr and Mr. Bolton discussed."
"There was no discussion of 'personal favors' or 'undue influence' on investigations, nor did…Barr stat[e] that the President's conversations with foreign leaders was improper," the DOJ statement continues. And:
If this is truly what Mr. Bolton has written, then it seems he is attributing to Attorney General Barr his own current views—views with which Attorney General Barr does not agree.
The leaked manuscript provides more fodder for those saying Bolton should be called to testify in the Senate impeachment proceedings.
On yesterday's Reason Roundtable podcast, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch talked about whether Bolton would or should be called to testify and discussed whether anything he said could "change the way people interpret the Trump administration's 2019 actions vis-a-vis Ukraine."
"A week into the trial, most lawmakers say the chances of 51 senators agreeing to call witnesses are dwindling, not growing," writeTimes reporters Maggie Haberman and Michael S. Schmidt. (Bolton has said that he would testify if it came to that.)
Here's how Trump responded on Monday to Bolton book allegations that he had indeed tied Ukrainian aid to the country doing his investigatory bidding:
I NEVER told John Bolton that the aid to Ukraine was tied to investigations into Democrats, including the Bidens. In fact, he never complained about this at the time of his very public termination. If John Bolton said this, it was only to sell a book. With that being said, the…
Legal challenges to development of an old water filtration site in Northwest D.C. are costing the city about $6,500 per day and have "boosted the cost of the project by $100 million over the past five years," DCist reports.
Atari-themed hotels are slated to be built in Austin, Chicago, Denver, Las Vegas, Phoenix, San Francisco, San Jose, and Seattle.
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Matt Welchhttps://reason.com/people/matt-welch/matt.welch@reason.comKatherine Mangu-Wardhttps://reason.com/people/katherine-mangu-ward/kmw@reason.comPeter Sudermanhttps://reason.com/people/peter-suderman/peter.suderman@reason.comNick Gillespiehttps://reason.com/people/nick-gillespie/gillespie@reason.comhttps://reason.com/?post_type=podcast&p=80436592020-01-28T14:05:46Z2020-01-27T20:50:01ZReason Roundtable podcast: why we should be worried about the rise of Bernie Sanders]]>
Now that John Bolton's pick me! exertions have gotten so loud that even Republican senators are saying that they might consider issuing a subpoena to a materially relevant witness in the impeachment trial, some natural follow-up questions tumble forth, such as: Should the mustachioed former national security advisor be summoned to testify? Does his account, however disputed, change the way people interpret the Trump administration's 2019 actions vis-a-vis Ukraine? Does any of it excuse the attempt by the lead House manager, Rep. Adam Schiff (D–Calif.), to justify not subpoenaing Bolton in the first place by saying that they needed to stop Trump before he could election again?
These questions and more lead today's episode of the Reason Roundtable podcast, featuring Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch. The roundtablists also volunteer their biggest critiques of suddenly re-rising presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), try to dampen the panic about the latest global coronavirus, and discuss the bountiful local goings-on of National School Choice Week. And yes, Kobe Bryant gets a mention.
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Jacob Sullumhttps://reason.com/people/jacob-sullum/jsullum@reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=80436482020-01-27T19:11:49Z2020-01-27T19:00:16Z
In his upcoming memoir, The New York Timesreports, former National Security Adviser John Bolton says Donald Trump explicitly drew a connection between his delay of congressionally approved military aid to Ukraine and "investigations into Democrats," including former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter. That account, which is based on interviews with "multiple people" who have seen Bolton's manuscript, helps explain why the White House, where copies of the book have circulated as part of the prepublication review process, is keen to prevent Bolton from testifying during Trump's impeachment trial.
The Times notes that Bolton's description of Trump's motive "could undercut a key element of his impeachment defense: that the holdup in aid was separate from Mr. Trump's requests that Ukraine announce investigations into his perceived enemies." But there has always been a tension between that "key element" and another argument deployed by Trump's lawyers, who say his request for what he has described as "a major investigation into the Bidens" was perfectly legitimate, reflecting his sincere concern about rooting out official corruption in Ukraine.
In the memoir, the Times says, Bolton describes how he, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Defense Secretary Mark Esper unsuccessfully urged Trump to release the aid "nearly a dozen times." During an August 2019 discussion of the issue, Trump said "he preferred sending no assistance to Ukraine until officials had turned over all materials they had about the Russia investigation that related to Mr. Biden and supporters of Mrs. Clinton in Ukraine."
That description makes it sound like Trump's focus in his conversation with Bolton was not on the dubious allegation he raised during his July 25 telephone call with Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskiy—i.e., that Biden had improperly used his influence as vice president to help his son by pressuring the Ukrainian government into firing a prosecutor who was investigating Burisma, an energy company that employed Hunter Biden as a board member. Instead it sounds like Trump was complaining about Ukraine's supposed role in instigating the investigation of Russia's attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election, including possible collusion between Russian agents and the Trump campaign. It's not clear exactly how Biden figures into that purported plot to undermine Trump.
Trump nevertheless thought it was important to deny that he said what Bolton reportedly claims he said. "I NEVER told John Bolton that the aid to Ukraine was tied to investigations into Democrats, including the Bidens," the president wrote on Twitter last night. "In fact, he never complained about this at the time of his very public termination. If John Bolton said this, it was only to sell a book."
Trump added that he "released the military aid to Ukraine without any conditions or investigations—and far ahead of schedule." That last part, of course, is plainly not true, since Ukrainian officials, Trump's own appointees (evidently including not only Bolton but also Pompeo and Esper), and members of Congress from both parties were all concerned about the Trump-ordered delay of the military assistance. Trump released the aid only after the delay became public and controversial, partly because of a whistleblower's complaint that Trump was improperly pressuring Ukraine into announcing an investigation of Biden with the aim of discrediting a political rival and improving his re-election prospects.
Trump's defense also ignores the fact that Zelenskiy had scheduled a CNN interview during which he planned to announce the investigations that Trump wanted of the Bidens and of alleged Ukrainian efforts to help Hillary Clinton win the 2016 election. Zelenskiy canceled that interview only after Trump released the aid and after William Taylor, the acting U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, urged him to do so.
Trump's lawyers have said he delayed the aid partly because he was concerned about Ukrainian corruption. They also have said the investigations he sought reflected that concern. In other words, they have implicitly conceded that there was a connection between the aid and those investigations, which supposedly would have been a sign that Zelenskiy was serious about tackling corruption.
At an October 17 press briefing, acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney said "the corruption related to the DNC server"—i.e., the fantastical notion that the server from which Democratic National Committee emails were stolen in 2016 was stashed away somewhere in Ukraine—"absolutely" did figure into the aid delay. "No question about that," he said. "But that's it. And that's why we held up the money."
Today a lawyer for Mulvaney directly contradicted his client's October 17 statement, saying Mulvaney never had "a conversation with the President or anyone else indicating that Ukrainian military aid was withheld in exchange for a Ukrainian investigation of Burisma, the Bidens, or the 2016 election." When Mulvaney referred to "the corruption related to the DNC server," he was clearly talking about the 2016 election—specifically, a bizarre conspiracy theory alleging that Ukrainians stole the DNC emails and framed Russia for that crime in an attempt to discredit Trump and help Clinton.
Back in October, Mulvaney did say "the money held up had absolutely nothing to do with Biden." But if investigating Biden was perfectly appropriate, as the president and his lawyers insist, why deny that connection? Presumably because using the aid to pressure Ukraine into announcing an investigation of the leading contender to oppose Trump in this year's election—the quid pro quo at the heart of Trump's impeachment—looks an awful lot like an abuse of power for personal gain. If Trump specifically mentioned Biden while defending the aid freeze to Bolton, especially if he mentioned Biden in connection with the Russia investigation rather than Burisma, it reinforces the impression that Trump's aim was tarnishing a political opponent's reputation.
Bolton, who declined to testify during the House impeachment hearings because Trump did not want him to do so, has said he is prepared to testify in Trump's Senate trial if he receives a subpoena. The votes of four Republicans would be required to approve such a subpoena. Today two Republican senators, Susan Collins of Maine and Mitt Romney of Utah, said the news about the contents of Bolton's book reinforces the case for calling witnesses.
"From the beginning, I've said that in fairness to both parties the decision on whether or not to call witnesses should be made after both the House managers and the President's attorneys have had the opportunity to present their cases," Collins said in a press release. "I've always said that I was likely to vote to call witnesses, just as I did in the 1999 Clinton trial. The reports about John Bolton's book strengthen the case for witnesses and have prompted a number of conversations among my colleagues." Romney told reporters "it's increasingly likely that other Republicans will join those of us who think we should hear from John Bolton," adding that "it's important to be able to hear from John Bolton for us to be able to make an impartial judgment."
Even Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.), one of Trump's most stalwart defenders, seemed to concede that Bolton's testimony might be relevant. "Let's see what's in the manuscript," Graham said. "Let's see if it's relevant, and if it is, then I'll make a decision about Bolton." But he coupled that suggestion with a demand that Joe and Hunter Biden also testify—a nonstarter as far as Democrats are concerned.
According to "associates" of Bolton interviewed by the Times, Bolton "believes he has relevant information, and he has also expressed concern that if his account of the Ukraine affair emerges only after the trial, he will be accused of holding back to increase his book sales." Unless two more Republicans join Collins and Romney in supporting a Bolton subpoena, it looks like he will profit from Trump's stonewalling and the incuriosity of GOP senators who are determined to acquit the president regardless of what the evidence shows.
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Elizabeth Nolan Brownhttps://reason.com/people/elizabeth-nolan-brown/elizabeth.brown@reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=80413992020-01-13T15:31:35Z2020-01-13T14:40:06Z
NBC is reporting that President Donald Trump was mulling the hit on Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani seven months ago, with war hawks such as John Bolton urging him to go for it. This further erodes the administration's claim that the assassination was done to stop an "imminent" attack on U.S. lives.
"According to five current and senior administration officials," NBC reports, Trump gave the order in June 2019, "with the condition that Trump would have final signoff on any specific operation to kill Soleimani." Trump said that signoff would come if any Americans were killed, their sources said, which "explains why assassinating Soleimani was on the menu of options that the military presented to Trump two weeks ago for responding to an attack by Iranian proxies in Iraq." That proxy attack killed a U.S. contractor.
The strike was carried out on January 3. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo quickly and repeatedly attributed it not to retribution but to an alleged imminent threat to dozens (sometimes "hundreds") of American lives.
The killing looked like something former National Security Advisor John Bolton would have hatced, but Bolton has been gone since September. Now it seems that Bolton's imprint may have been on this operation after all. From NBC:
After Iran shot down a U.S. drone in June, John Bolton, Trump's national security adviser at the time, urged Trump to retaliate by signing off on an operation to kill Soleimani, officials said. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also wanted Trump to authorize the assassination, officials said.
Yesterday, Defense Secretary Mark Esper toldFace the Nation that he knew of no "specific evidence" to support the claim that Iran was planning embassy attacks. Rep. Justin Amash (I–Mich.) has been blasting the Trump administration for continuing to push this story:
The administration didn't present evidence to Congress regarding even one embassy. The four embassies claim seems to be totally made up. And they have never presented evidence of imminence—a necessary condition to act without congressional approval—with respect to any of this. https://t.co/Eg0vaCnqFd
Anti-Catholic law in Montana comes to Supreme Court. When it considers Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenuelater this month, the U.S. Supreme Court "has the opportunity to do more than just settle the fate of one controversial tax credit; it could also junk Montana's Blaine Amendment, finding it in violation of the Constitution's religious-freedom and equal-protection clauses," writes Nick Sibilla at The Atlantic. "In doing so, it would set a strong precedent against any law born of bigotry."
The case concerns "a modest tax-credit scholarship program in Montana," notes Sibilla, but it "could have major ramifications for educational-choice programs across America, which help nearly half a million students attend private schools."
FREE MARKETS
Times editorial board lays out plans to "fortify" the FDA. On Sunday, the New York Times editorial board praised the Food and Drug Administration while worrying over its (lack of) leadership and admitting that it often fails. Its proposed solutions for "fortifying" the agency? Giving it even more power, of course. (Sigh.) To fix the FDA's flaws, the paper claims, "the agency needs to be made stronger, not weaker."
"Fortunately," they write, "options for fortifying the F.D.A. abound":
For instance, laws that would make it easier for regulators to police the cosmetics industry and to hold medical device companies to account have been floating through Congress for years. A group of former F.D.A. commissioners last year proposed an even bolder fix: Restore the agency's autonomy by extracting it from the Department of Health and Human Services. The F.D.A.'s decisions used to be final, but for decades now they have been subject to layers of political interference. Making the agency independent, as the Federal Reserve and the Social Security Administration are, could help reverse that trend.
ELECTION 2020
Vermin Supreme won the New Hampshire Libertarian Party convention's pick for the party's presidential nomination.Heavyexplains what this means:
The Libertarian Party hosts a series of primaries and caucuses where non-binding votes are cast, indicating a state party's preference for its presidential candidate. These preferences are not binding and delegates who are sent to the national convention can vote for whichever candidate they prefer. New Hampshire had the first primary. This self-funded presidential preference primary was actually conducted by mail, with results announced on January 11….
So the voting of Vermin Supreme was a statement of preference, but it does not bind the delegates when they vote at the national convention on May 21-25, 2020 in Austin, Texas.
Presumably, it's a picture from earlier last week, when it did snow, although the conspiracy theorists of Twitter are having a field day:
I don't want to sound like Alex Jones here but is this some sort of secret communication? Racking my brain to make any sort of sense of this. It nearly hit 70 degrees in DC today. https://t.co/aLwOz5HKVD
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Scott Shackfordhttps://reason.com/people/scott-shackford/sshackford@reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=80404832020-01-08T21:47:34Z2020-01-06T19:40:03Z
Former National Security Advisor John Bolton said today that he will comply with a subpoena if he's ordered to testify at the Senate's impeachment trial of President Donald Trump.
The possibility of Bolton's testimony had been up in the air. The White House has been trying to keep witnesses who worked for Trump from testifying to Congress in the matter, which centers around Trump's temporary withholding of aid to Ukraine to get the country to investigate rival presidential candidate Joe Biden's son.
The conflict ended up in the courts, as the Trump administration tried to stop former Bolton aide Charles Kupperman from complying with a House subpoena. Kupperman was essentially receiving contradictory orders and wanted a federal judge to tell him which branch of the government took precedence. But then the House withdrew its subpoena and impeached Trump anyway. So at the end of December a judge ruled the case moot, leaving it unresolved whether the administration has the authority to prevent former staffers from complying with congressional subpoenas and whether Congress would have the authority to punish those who do as the White House ordered.
Bolton is in the same position: Both sides have been making potentially contradictory demands. With the Kupperman case unresolved, it was unclear what would happen if the Senate called Bolton in.
The House has concluded its Constitutional responsibility by adopting Articles of Impeachment related to the Ukraine matter. It now falls to the Senate to fulfill its Constitutional obligation to try impeachments, and it does not appear possible that a final judicial resolution of the still-unanswered Constitutional questions can be obtained before the Senate acts.
Accordingly, since my testimony is once again at issue, I have had to resolve the serious competing issues as best I could, based on careful consideration and study. I have concluded that, if the Senate issues a subpoena for my testimony, I am prepared to testify.
Bolton already indicated that he would be open to testifying if the judge had ruled in the House's favor in the Kupperman conflict. Bolton's lawyer, in correspondence with the House's general counsel, flat out told them that Bolton was involved in many of the meetings and conversations that are at the heart of the investigation. Bolton's testimony could be harmful to Trump, given the conversations he was privy to, leading my colleague Jacob Sullum to speculate that the Senate's Republican leadership might not actually want to hear from him.
Bolton's public announcement comes right on the heels of Trump's decision to get aggressive with Iran, a move that Bolton heartily supports. You shouldn't assume that this announcement is an indicator of how Bolton feels about the administration's behavior. Though House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) thinks that Bolton's announcement is a significant game-changer:
The President & Sen. McConnell have run out of excuses. They must allow key witnesses to testify, and produce the documents Trump has blocked, so Americans can see the facts for themselves.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.) does not answer to the House, and Bolton's willingness to testify doesn't matter if Republicans follow Trump's wishes and decide not to call new witnesses. So the next fight may be over whether Trump and McConnell can keep Republican senators in line in a vote establishing the rules for the process.
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Jacob Sullumhttps://reason.com/people/jacob-sullum/jsullum@reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=80378462019-12-16T20:29:02Z2019-12-16T20:50:35Z
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) wants four current and former administration officials to testify during Donald Trump's impeachment trial next month. One of them is John Bolton, the former national security adviser, whose name is mentioned 129 times in the House Judiciary Committee's report charging the president with abusing his powers for personal gain. Bolton, who has publicly stated he has relevant information to share, could shed light on Trump's motives for withholding military aid to Ukraine and putting off a White House meeting with that country's president, although it's not clear he was privy to any incriminating statements by Trump himself.
Bolton declined to testify before the House Intelligence Committee about Trump's dealings with Ukraine, citing White House opposition. But Bolton, who was never subpoenaed, said he was prepared to testify if a court sided with Congress in its conflict with his former boss. In a letter to the House's general counsel last month, Bolton's lawyer said he "was personally involved in many of the events, meetings, and conversations about which you have already received testimony, as well as many relevant meetings and conversations that have not yet been discussed in the testimonies thus far."
A few weeks later, Bolton complained on Twitter that the White House had "refused to return access to my personal Twitter account" after his resignation in September, possibly "out of fear of what I may say." It's not clear that Bolton was referring specifically to Ukraine, as opposed to his broader complaints about an insufficiently hawkish foreign policy. Four days after that, Bolton tweeted that "our country's commitment to our national security priorities is under attack from within," a comment that is also open to interpretation, especially since he added that "America is distracted," which sounds like a knock against the impeachment inquiry.
For his part, Trump claims Bolton's testimony—which he opposed, ostensibly in defense of presidential prerogatives—would have vindicated him. "John Bolton is a patriot and may know that I held back the money from Ukraine because it is considered a corrupt country, & I wanted to know why nearby European countries weren't putting up money also," Trump tweeted on the same day that Bolton worried about "our national security priorities." But it is doubtful that Bolton's testimony would be helpful to Trump. Here are some of the points described in the House Judiciary Committee's report that Bolton would be able to confirm, dispute, or clarify:
• Bolton attended a July 10 meeting that included two senior Ukrainian officials; Secretary of Energy Rick Perry; Kurt Volker, then the U.S. special representative for Ukraine negotiations; Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union; Fiona Hill, then a Russia specialist on the National Security Council (NSC); and Alexander Vindman, the NSC's director for European affairs. Hill and Vindman testified that Sondland brought up investigations of purported Ukrainian interference in the 2016 presidential election and former Vice President Joe Biden's alleged efforts to protect his son Hunter from a probe of Burisma, an energy company that employed the younger Biden as a board member. Those are the investigations that Trump would ask Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to conduct during their much-scrutinized July 25 phone call.
• After Bolton left that meeting, Hill testified, Sondland told the remaining participants he and acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney had agreed that a White House meeting between Trump and Zelenskiy would happen only after the Ukrainian government publicly committed to those investigations. When Hill reported that conversation to Bolton, she testified, he instructed her to tell the NSC's legal adviser that "I am not part of whatever drug deal Sondland and Mulvaney are cooking up on this."
• William Taylor, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, testified that Bolton opposed Trump's July 25 call with Zelenskiy, worrying that "it was going to be a disaster" because "there could be some talk of investigations or worse."
• For months, Rudy Giuliani, Trump's personal lawyer, had been lobbying the Ukrainian government to investigate Burisma and the Bidens in the hope of uncovering "information [that] will be very, very helpful to my client," presumably because Joe Biden is a leading contender to oppose Trump in next year's presidential election. Bolton reportedly resented Giuliani's involvement in negotiations with Ukraine. According to Hill, Bolton said "nobody should be meeting with Giuliani" and repeatedly described him as a "hand grenade that was going to blow everyone up."
• Bolton was reportedly dismayed by Trump's decision to delay $391 million in congressionally approved military aid to Ukraine. "Sometime prior to August 16," Bolton met with Trump to discuss the hold on military aid. Tim Morrison, then the NSC's top Russia official, testified that Trump told Bolton he was not yet prepared to deliver the money. The reason Trump gave, if any, is obviously relevant to the allegation that he abused his power in an effort to discredit a political rival.
• Taylor testified that Bolton urged him to send an August 29 cable to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in which he complained about the "folly" of "withholding military aid to Ukraine at a time when hostilities were still active in the east and when Russia was watching closely to gauge the level of American support for the Ukrainian government." Taylor said he "could not and would not defend such a policy."
• Morrison testified that he twice discussed with Bolton what he understood to be a quid pro quo between the military support and the investigations Trump wanted. One of those conversations followed a September 1 meeting at which Sondland (according to his own testimony) told a senior Zelenskiy adviser "the resumption of U.S. aid would likely not occur until Ukraine took some kind of action on the public statement [about the investigations] that we had been discussing for many weeks." Morrison said he reported that exchange to Bolton, who told him to "make sure the [NSC's] lawyers are tracking" the situation.
• Bolton resigned as national security adviser on September 10. It's not clear what role, if any, Trump's Ukraine policy played in his resignation.
Bolton's opposition to the hold on military aid shows he did not agree it was justified by legitimate concerns about official corruption in Ukraine, as Trump maintains. That does not necessarily mean Bolton has direct evidence of a quid pro quo, although his reference to "many relevant meetings and conversations that have not yet been discussed" is certainly intriguing.
Similarly, Bolton's frustration with Giuliani's involvement could have stemmed from policy disagreements and resentment that Giuliani was undercutting the NSC's role, as opposed to a belief that the president was perverting foreign policy to serve domestic political interests. A misguided or haphazard foreign policy is not the same as a corrupt foreign policy. But if the testimony by Hill, Morrison, and Taylor is accurate, Bolton believed that the "favor" Trump wanted from Zelenskiy was inappropriate and that tying it to the military aid was potentially illegal.
If I were Trump, I would not want to hear what Bolton has to say. And since Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.) has said he plans to conduct Trump's trial however Trump wants, we probably won't.
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Christian Britschgihttps://reason.com/people/christian-britschgi/christian.britschgi@reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=80325112019-11-11T14:32:12Z2019-11-11T14:30:32Z
On the impeachment front… Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney wants to get in on a lawsuit that could prevent him from being forced to testify before Congress on the unfolding Ukraine scandal.
On Friday, Mulvaney asked to be added as a plaintiff in a separation-of-powers lawsuit first filed by Charles Kupperman, who served as deputy to former National Security Advisor John Bolton.
In late October, House Democrats subpoenaed Kupperman to testify about President Donald Trump's efforts to pressure the Ukrainian government to launch a corruption investigation into Hunter Biden, son of former vice president and current presidential candidate Joe Biden. The younger Biden had been paid $50,000 a month to sit on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma.
White House lawyers argued that current and former senior presidential advisors, including Kupperman, could not be compelled to testify before Congress. Unsure whether to abide by Congress's will or the president's, Kupperman sued, hoping that a federal judge would tell him which branch's orders take precedence.
Last week House Democrats subpoenaed Mulvaney, prompting his request to join Kupperman's lawsuit.
"Mr. Mulvaney, like Mr. Kupperman, finds himself caught in that division, trapped between the commands of two of its co-equal branches—with one of those branches threatening him with contempt," wrote Mulvaney's lawyers.
The suit's outcome could be crucial to Democrats' impeachment efforts. Not only might it determine whether Mulvaney ends up testifying, but it could also determine whether the House hears from Bolton too. According to a Saturday Axios report, Bolton kept detailed notes of his meetings with Trump and other officials.
Charles Cooper, a lawyer for both Bolton and Kupperman, said in a recent letter to House Democrats' lawyers that Bolton has knowledge of relevant meetings and conversations regarding Ukraine that have not been made public, but that his client would only testify about them if ordered to by a judge.
FREE MINDS
Bolivian President Evo Morales has resigned following mass protests and accusations that he rigged a recent election. That vote saw him elected to a fourth term as leader of the South American country.
On Sunday, the Organization of American States (OAS) published a report finding "clear manipulations" of the October 20 presidential vote. The group called for a deeper investigation to determine who was responsible for the election tampering.
The report capped off weeks of street demonstrations that have so far left three protestors dead
The head of Bolivia's military had also on Morales to resign, and police in the country mutinied and declared solidarity with the protestors. Morales has described the effort to remove him as a right-wing coup—a line take that's been eagerly picked up by many left-wing American journalists. That opinion isn't unanimous, though. Another leftist journalist, Zeeshan Aleem, notes that opposition to the president and his alleged vote-rigging spans the political spectrum and includes the country's largest trade union.
Given the chaotic situation, it is probably best in the near term to hold off on embracing any group's grand pronouncements on Morales' resignation and who is responsible for it.
FREE MARKETS
Saturday marked the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The iconic moment in world history serves as a marker for the collapse of Soviet-style communism across Eastern Europe.
Germans celebrated the anniversary by tearing down replicas of the wall at soccer matches and holding parades of horrible East German–manufactured cars.
As Gerard Bakernotes, the spread of civil liberties, democracy, and freer markets to former Eastern Bloc countries has brought not only personal and political freedoms, but also immeasurable economic benefits:
In less than 30 years, gross domestic product per capita has increased more than fivefold in Poland, sixfold in Hungary and almost eightfold in the Czech Republic. Eastern Germany may still lag the affluent west, but economic performance there has been markedly better too.
QUICK HITS
Seattle's lone socialist city councilmember, Kshama Sawant, has won a narrow reelection victory after early returns showed her losing to a more business-friendly challenger.
"A mandatory buyback is essentially confiscation which I think is unconstitutional. It means I am going to walk in your house and take something whether you like it or not." pic.twitter.com/9aBmcAb9eJ
Coffee shops in the San Francisco Bay Area are renting out glass jars and giving discounts to customers who bring their own mugs in an effort to cut down on their use of to-go coffee cups.
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said the killing of Washington Post writer Jamal Khashoggi by the Saudi Arabian government was a "mistake" akin to the trouble his company has had with self-driving cars, one of which struck and killed a pedestrian. He's since backtracked.
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Eric Boehmhttps://reason.com/people/eric-boehm/Eric.Boehm@Reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=80237132019-09-20T22:05:16Z2019-09-18T21:40:19Z
Recently fired national security advisor John Bolton is spending his first days of forced retirement complaining about how he was this close to finally starting a war with Iran—if only President Donald Trump hadn't stopped him.
Politico reports that Bolton, during a private lunch on Wednesday hosted by a neoconservative think tank, openly stewed about his inability to convince Trump to bomb Iran. In particular, Bolton claimed the United States should have attacked Iran in June, after the Islamic Republic was blamed for shooting down a U.S. drone.
"During Wednesday's luncheon, Bolton said the planned response had gone through the full process and everybody in the White House had agreed on the retaliatory strike," Politico's Daniel Lippman writes. "But 'a high authority, at the very last minute,' without telling anyone, decided not to do it, Bolton complained."
That high authority, of course, was the president himself—who may have been convinced to change course, somewhat incredibly, by Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Regardless of how weirdly Trump may have come to the decision, his willingness to pull back from a planned military strike is undeniably one of the strongest moments of his presidency. As I wrote at the time, Trump was absolutely right to conclude that killing an estimated 150 Iranians was "not proportionate to shooting down an unmanned drone."
Unsurprisingly, Bolton felt differently. That difference of opinion may have eventually led to Bolton's dismissal on September 10. Another key point of disagreement seems to have been the Trump administration's policy in Afghanistan. Trump has ordered Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to conduct peace negotiations with the Taliban in advance of a possible withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Central Asian nation, where we've been at war for nearly 18 years.
The possibility of ending a conflict that seems to accomplish nothing positive for American national security was reportedly anathema to Bolton. During Wednesday's lunch, Politico reports, Bolton said the U.S. should keep 8,600 troops in Afghanistan and said it "doesn't make any sense" to enter into peace negotiations with the Taliban.
But what really doesn't make any sense is Bolton's neoconservative foreign policy, which has been repudiated by nearly two decades of expensive, bloody, and futile military engagements across the Middle East and Central Asia that have left chaos and new breeding grounds for terrorism in their wake.
Similarly, Bolton reportedly attempted to undermine the president's halting attempts to make peace with America's other enemies.
In April 2018, for example, Bolton seemingly attempted to sabotage his boss's peace overtures to North Korea by suggesting that the U.S. would pursue the "Libyan model" of disarming the country. (The U.S. helped to overthrow Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi after he had agreed to give up his country's nuclear program.)
Bolton also helped to stall a U.S. exit from Syria. In December 2018, Trump announced that the U.S. would be withdrawing military forces from the country, only to have Bolton condition that withdrawal on a Turkish agreement to not attack Kurdish forces in Syria.
Whatever disagreements libertarians may have with Trump's foreign policy—and, indeed, there is plenty of room to criticize the president in that arena—his resistance to Bolton's warmongering ways and his eventual decision to cast off failed Bush-era "nation-building" policies should be applauded.
A world in which John Bolton says mean things about the president during lunch is far safer than a world in which John Bolton speaks to the president over lunch.
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Elizabeth Nolan Brownhttps://reason.com/people/elizabeth-nolan-brown/elizabeth.brown@reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=80224242019-09-12T11:33:16Z2019-09-11T13:30:23Z
John Bolton has been dismissed, and folks on the left and right are celebrating. The warmongering and walrus-mustachioed national security advisor lasted just 15 months in the Trump administration—thank goodness. As Christian Britschgi wrote here yesterday, "the fact that Bolton will no longer have a direct role in setting U.S. foreign policy is a huge win for those who think the U.S. should be fighting fewer wars."
Bolton claimed on Twitter that he had not been fired and the president only said so because Bolton had offered to resign. But even if that's the case, I have to say I'm with Stephen Colbert on this one.
"I have never been more grateful for the president's pettiness and stupidity," said Colbert on last night's Late Show. "Because today, he was stupidly petty enough to save us from a very smart warmonger."
Or, as Jacobin writer Liza Featherstone nicely puts it: "The disappearance of John Bolton from a position of power is a net gain for humanity no matter who made the decision and no matter what the reason."
Trump's decision to ditch his national security advisor comes as the famously hawkish Bolton butted heads with others in the administration about Afghanistan. Trump wanted to invite Taliban leaders to Camp David for peace talks, which Bolton opposed, and to withdraw more troops from Afghanistan than Bolton wanted to bring back. And this was far from the first time Trump and Bolton disagreed on foreign policy matters, with Bolton ballyhooing for interventions in Iran, Venezuela, and elsewhere. (The president apparently joked that Bolton evenwanted to invade Ireland.)
"Washington can and will focus for days on litigating that question of who called off the relationship," notes Jim Newell at Slate. "The important thing, though, is that John Bolton, whose proximity to the president's ear made the world a more dangerous place, is gone."
Financial Times writer Edward Luce suggests that the firing of Bolton "ends Donald Trump's hawkish phase." With Bolton out of the picture, it "paves the way for the president to open talks with the Iranians, which he has long wanted and Mr Bolton has fiercely resisted. It would not be a wild exaggeration to say that prospects for world peace rose markedly on Tuesday."
On Fox News last night, Tucker Carlson—who has referred to Bolton as a "tapeworm" infecting Republicans—cheered on Bolton's dismissal, albeit with the nonsensical assertion that Bolton was a man of the left.
Laura Ingraham said on her show that she liked Bolton but he wasn't a good fit in the Trump administration, since "Trump's allegiance isn't to any particular process or to any particular cabinet member" and "he came like a freight train at the old GOP foreign policy establishment that had gotten us bogged down in two costly wars."
"With Bolton gone, the Trump administration is now almost free of influence and advice from the old Republican Party," writes The Atlantic's Graeme Wood:
Neither the so-called neoconservative wing of the party, which had influence under George W. Bush, nor the Cold War Republicans, who held power before him and of whom Bolton is a late example, remain, with the exception of Attorney General William Barr.
One gets the impression that Wood finds this to be a dismaying thing ("also absent is anyone other than Barr with pre-Trump White House national-security experience"). It's not hard to find similar sentiments in other establishment circles—especially among Democratic leadership.
John Bolton's sudden departure is a symbol of the disarray that has unnerved our allies since day one of the Trump Administration. Steady leadership & strategic foreign policy is key to ensuring America's national security. https://t.co/MQIYet8pnA
I'm legitimately shaken by the grave instability of American foreign policy today.
I'm no Bolton fan, but the world is coming apart, and the revolving door of U.S. leadership is disappearing America from the world just at the moment where a stable American hand is most needed.
Rather than revel in Bolton's departure as a good sign for global affairs, Democratic leaders have taken it as yet another opportunity to slam Trump. And in so doing, they're implicitly backing the belligerent Bolton mindset. Which I suppose should come as no surprise…
Bolton may well have been the GOP "tapeworm" Carlson conjured, but his brand of foreign policy machismo—blind optimism in U.S. intervention mixed with blithe indifference to the lives of both American troops and those we drop bombs on—could be better likened to a bunch of cockroaches. Pervasive. Seemingly indestructible. Indiscriminate in their infestations. And—no matter where they appear—needing to be stamped out.
FREE MINDS
"While Silicon Valley faces an endless cavalcade of outrage, the telecom sector is suddenly seeing no scrutiny whatsoever,"notes Karl Bode at Techdirt. But it's been "Big Telecom" that has been driving calls for heightened action against internet companies.
It's routinely understated how telecom lobbying, not a sincere worry about market power or privacy, is what's driving much of this current policy paradigm in DC (including much of the hyperventilation over nonexistent Censorship of Conservatives). The telecom sector is pushing hard into an online advertising sector traditionally dominated by Silicon Valley. As such, telecom lobbyists have spent several years now pushing to hamstring their direct competitors with the help of cash-compromised lawmakers and full blown regulatory capture.
Yet somehow, there are still a lot of folks in tech policy circles who see the lopsided focus on "big tech" as entirely authentic, and any failure to police telecom as somehow coincidental.
Spiked sparkling water is outselling beer among millennials:
Millennials are drinking staggering amounts of hard seltzer instead of beer. In the most recent reported sales figures, White Claw and Truly outsold every craft beer brand put together. In July, White Claw claims it outsold Budweiser. Yes, Budweiser. https://t.co/3tKc5e0gQb
Interestingly, the way these beverages are made lets them avoid the stiffer taxes placed on spirits relative to beer and wine:
All of the seltzers are brewed, not formulated. It's an important distinction, because of the taxation regulations of the federal and state governments. If beverage alcohol is brewed, it is taxed at a much lower rate than beverage alcohol that is distilled after brewing. (Wine and cider are taxed at an intermediate rate.) If these seltzers were actually "spiked" with vodka or neutral grain spirits, they'd be significantly more expensive on the shelf thanks to higher taxes.
The Federal Trade Commission is going after a kid who reviews toys on YouTube.
A California church has been indicted by a grand jury for forcing homeless people into work:
This church is trafficking people, including under-age girls. Will we see any major anti-traffickers or orgs talking about this story? Give you ONE guess. https://t.co/5PFz8GmYYH
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Christian Britschgihttps://reason.com/people/christian-britschgi/christian.britschgi@reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=80223522019-09-10T17:59:34Z2019-09-10T18:05:18Z
National Security Advisor John Bolton is out. President Donald Trump tweeted today that the stridently interventionist Bolton was asked to resign this morning over continued policy differences with the president and other members of his administration.
"I disagreed strongly with many of his suggestions, as did others in the Administration, and therefore I asked John for his resignation, which was given to me this morning. I thank John very much for his service," the president declared in a tweet. Trump said a new national security advisor would be named next week.
….I asked John for his resignation, which was given to me this morning. I thank John very much for his service. I will be naming a new National Security Advisor next week.
The public nature of his White House departure seems to have come as a surprise to Bolton. The outgoing national security advisor tweeted that he had offered his resignation last night but was told by Trump that they'd discuss it today.
I offered to resign last night and President Trump said, "Let's talk about it tomorrow."
Trump's mention of differences between Bolton and "others in his administration" appears to be a reference to the conflict between Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Pompeo has been overseeing peace negotiations with the Taliban as a prelude to a U.S. drawdown of troops in Afghanistan.
According to reporting from The Washington Post, Bolton had opposed these talks, preferring a unilateral, partial withdrawal of U.S. forces.
This was not the first disagreement between the ultra-hawkish Bolton and the occasionally more intervention-skeptic Trump. Time and again, Bolton has appeared to undermine the president's efforts to scale back U.S. interventions abroad.
In April 2018, for example, Bolton seemingly attempted to sabotage his boss's peace overtures to North Korea by suggesting that the U.S. would pursue the "Libyan model" of disarming the country. (The U.S. helped to overthrow Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi after he had agreed to give up his country's nuclear program.)
Bolton also helped to stall a U.S. exit from Syria. In December 2018, Trump announced that the U.S. would be withdrawing military forces from the country, only to have Bolton condition that withdrawal on a Turkish agreement to not attack Kurdish forces in Syria.
To be sure, Trump himself has been—at best—an erratic and fair weather dove. He suggests troop withdrawals one day and then makes bellicose threats the next.
Trump has certainly needed no encouragement to take a hostile line on Iran. Nevertheless, Bolton clearly helped to raise tensions with that country during his time in the White House. In May, for instance, Bolton made a very public show of dispatching an aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf in order to send Iran "a clear and unmistakable message" of U.S. resolve.
Bolton's departure from the White House is being greeted with a collective sigh of relief from non-interventionists everywhere.
John Bolton never should have been hired. I hope the president's next national security adviser will focus on securing peace, not expanding war.
It's unlikely that Bolton will disappear from the scene completely. Having been unceremoniously let go from the Trump administration, he may well become a professional Trump critic on cable news.
Still, the fact that Bolton will no longer have a direct role in setting U.S. foreign policy is a huge win for those who think the U.S. should be fighting fewer wars.
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Christian Britschgihttps://reason.com/people/christian-britschgi/christian.britschgi@reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=80061472019-05-24T20:32:54Z2019-05-24T20:30:51Z
The Trump administration is sending more troops and weapons to the Middle East amidst rising tensions with Iran.
"We are going to be sending a relatively small number of troops, mostly protective," President Donald Trump said to reporters at the White House, according to the Associated Press. "Some very talented people are going to the Middle East right now and we'll see what happens."
The Trump administration also announced today that heightened tensions with Iran constitute a national emergency, thus allowing the administration to approve $8 billion in weapons sales to Saudi Arabia without authorization from Congress.
These moves come after White House officials spent weeks deliberately raising tensions with Iran. Last week, it was reported that Defense Department officials—at the urging of ultra-hawkish National Security Advisor John Bolton—were revising contingency plans to send 120,000 troops to the Middle East in the event Iran attacked U.S. troops in the region or ramped up its nuclear program.
Before that, Bolton, who's long advocated for war with Iran, announced that a U.S. carrier, the Abraham Lincoln, would be heading to the Persian Gulf ahead of schedule to counter a supposed, unspecified heightened danger from Iran.
The aggressive moves taken by the Trump administration provoked condemnation from across the political spectrum.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D–Hawaii) both issued statements on social media warning of the consequences of any war with Iran.
Cost of Iran war? A region engulfed in bloodletting, countless lives, many trillions $, our ntnl security undermined, ISIS/AQ strengthened, massive immigration crisis, likely confrontation btwn US & nuclear Russia or China. War without end because "victory" will remain undefined. pic.twitter.com/MY548KclBS
Libertarian-leaning Rep. Justin Amash (R–Mich.) also had harsh words for the president's end run around Congress.
.@POTUS is (again) going around Congress—this time to unilaterally approve billions in arms sales, including to the brutal Saudi regime. Congress must reclaim its powers. When will the legislative branch stand up to the executive branch? https://t.co/OInOaSO0YJ
Interestingly, Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) sent out a tweet expressing concern over increasing U.S. involvement in the Middle East. China is the real enemy we should be watching, he said.
Have to say I don't understand this. Why is Pentagon recommending sending thousands more troops to region where we already have too many, while the biggest threat to American security is Chinese imperialism? https://t.co/ggrQuM2FK6
The moves made by the White House in recent weeks are all incremental. Back in his private citizen days, Trump himself argued against any war with Iran.
As president, he's occasionally advocated for reducing the U.S.'s presence in the Middle East, although he hasn't followed through on pledges to pull troops out of Afghanistan and Syria.
Nevertheless, the lack of a clear strategy from the Trump administration raises the risks that these incremental moves will spiral into a conflict that no one really wants (except maybe John Bolton).
"I don't believe either side really wants a conflict, but you put this many troops from both sides in a small area and raise tensions like this, there's always the risk that something happens accidentally that spirals into a larger conflict," Emily Ashford, a Cato Institute foreign policy scholar, toldReason last week.
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Christian Britschgihttps://reason.com/people/christian-britschgi/christian.britschgi@reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=80046052019-05-14T19:15:09Z2019-05-14T19:20:25Z
Tensions between Iran and the United States have ratcheted up in the past two weeks, following a series of provocative actions and statements from the Trump administration, including news yesterday that senior defense officials are revising contingency plans to send thousands of troops to the Middle East to counter Iran.
On Monday, The New York Times reported that last Thursday senior defense officials reviewed plans to send 120,000 troops to the Middle East in the event that Iran attacks U.S. troops in the region or begins ramping up its nuclear program. The review of these plans, according to the Times, was initiated by John Bolton, the national security advisor and a noted Iran hawk.
This was not the first provocative action taken by Bolton in recent weeks. Last Sunday, Bolton announced that an aircraft carrier, the USSAbraham Lincoln, and a number of bombers would be headed to the Persian Gulf in response to unspecified warnings that Iran and its proxies were preparing to attack U.S. forces in the region.
The Abraham Lincoln was already headed to the area but was ordered to skip several scheduled stops at European ports. Its expedited journey, along with the additional bombers, was intended to serve as "a clear and unmistakable message" of resolve from the U.S. to Tehran, Bolton said, according to Reuters.
This was followed by the deployment of even more U.S. forces, including another naval vessel and an anti-missile battery, to the Persian Gulf on Friday.
Iranian military officials have upped their rhetoric in response.
"An aircraft carrier that has at least 40 to 50 planes on it and 6,000 forces gathered within it was a serious threat for us in the past. But now it is a target and the threats have switched to opportunities," said Amir Ali Hajizadeh, head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard's air force, to Al Jazeera on Monday.
The U.S. has assured the world that its intentions are peaceful, with the Department of Defense issuing a statement Friday saying that "the United States does not seek conflict with Iran, but we are postured and ready to defend U.S. forces and interests in the region."
Nevertheless, the threat of accidental escalation is real, says Emma Ashford, a foreign policy scholar at the Cato Institute.
"I don't believe either side really wants a conflict, but you put this many troops from both sides in a small area and raise tensions like this, there's always the risk that something happens accidentally that spirals into a larger conflict," Ashford tells Reason.
This risk, she says, is heightened by the possibility that militant groups aligned with Iran, but not directly controlled by the government, might stage an attack that leads to a U.S. response.
Over the weekend, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, both rivals of Iran, reported that their oil tankers were sabotaged in the Persian Gulf. On Tuesday morning, Saudi Arabian officials also said that terrorists used drones to attack two oil pumping facilities in the country.
Pentagon officials revising plans to add additional troops to the Middle East to counter Iran is more routine, says Ashford.
"The Pentagon has a plan for everything, and these plans are constantly revised to deal with changing circumstances," she tells Reason.
Nevertheless, that it was Bolton in particular who's been pushing defense officials to revise their Iran plans may indicate his willingness to exploit any bureaucratic opportunity to raise tensions with the country.
That the Trump administration itself lacks a coherent Iran strategy only raises the possibility that it will stumble into a conflict it doesn't want, says Ashford. As she told Reason, "there's a real risk someone will take a step that ends up putting us in a conflict situation."
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Elizabeth Nolan Brownhttps://reason.com/people/elizabeth-nolan-brown/elizabeth.brown@reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=80035192019-05-15T13:56:53Z2019-05-06T13:30:30Z
"The United States is not seeking war with the Iranian regime, but." So says a not-so-reassuring Sunday statement from National Security Advisor John Bolton.
Call it what you will, but it sure seems like Bolton and the Trump administration are trying to entangle us in another dick-swinging Middle Eastern military adventure.
The U.S. is sending a bomber task force and a Carrier Strike Group toward Iran, according to the statement. Bolton called it a way to send an "unmistakable message" that if the wrong people do something we don't like (to anybody), "the Iranian regime" will "be met with unrelenting force."
Ahhh, there's that sociopathic old "America: World Police" spirit that Bolton perfected during the George W. Bush years.
Invoking increasing tensions between Iran and the U.S., Bolton said "we are fully prepared to respond to any attack, whether by proxy, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or regular Iranian forces."
As White House Reporter Andrew Feinberg (and many others) have pointed out, "the US has pretty much constantly had a carrier on station in that area since the 1980s," so the fact that it's being sent there is pretty much business as usual. The fact that Bolton felt the need to put out a belligerent statement about it isn't.
FREE MINDS
Bartenders in Texas must now be clairvoyant if they want to avoid criminal charges. At least that's the message the state seems to be sending with the arrest of 27-year-old Lindsey Glass, who served drinks to a man named Spencer Hight before he went on a shooting spree that killed eight people. Glass has been charged with a misdemeanor for violating a Texas ban on selling alcohol "to an habitual drunkard or an intoxicated or insane person."
FREE MARKETS
TheWall Street Journal takes a somber look at newspapers in the U.S. "Local papers have suffered sharper declines in circulation than national outlets and greater incursions into their online advertising businesses from tech giants such as Alphabet Inc.'s Google and Facebook Inc," the paper reports.
The result has been a parade of newspaper closures and large-scale layoffs. Nearly 1,800 newspapers closed between 2004 and 2018, leaving 200 counties with no newspaper and roughly half the counties in the country with only one, according to a University of North Carolina study.
Meanwhile, about 400 online-only local news sites have sprung up to fill the void, disproportionately clustered in big cities and affluent areas, the UNC study found.
ELECTION 2020
Booker wants all gun owners to get federal approval. The Democratic candidates seem to be in competition for the most overbearing gun policy proposals:
Cory Booker announces new gun plan that would require every firearm owner to be licensed by the federal government. pic.twitter.com/FFC4avv9Sp
The Cat in the Hat is right about parenting, writes Katherine Mangu-Ward.
"Are we cool? We like to think we're cool," the Transportation Security Administration declares on Instagram. It gets worse from there…
That word…I do not think it means what you think it means:
I am continuing to monitor the censorship of AMERICAN CITIZENS on social media platforms. This is the United States of America — and we have what's known as FREEDOM OF SPEECH! We are monitoring and watching, closely!!
Not everyone is on board with plans to legalize (and commercialize) D.C.'s decriminalized marijuana scene. "You can grow it here, you can have six plants which actually is a lot," says Will Jones of the group Smart Approaches to Marijuana. "You can share it with people. If you want to do it, have fun. Grow it, use it, great. It's legal. But to say that we should allow commercial industry, that's a step too far."
"President Trump upended what appeared to be steady progress toward reaching a trade pact after he threatened on Sunday to impose still more tariffs on Chinese-made goods unless Beijing moves closer to a deal," reports The New York Times.
Former Obama administration official Mark Morgan is Trump's pick to run U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The United States has maintained some degree of military presence inside Somalia for much of the last three decades, but a pattern of escalation that began late in former President Barack Obama's second term has markedly accelerated in the two years since President Donald Trump took office. Airstrikes are on the rise; hundreds of U.S. boots are on the ground; and Trump's March 2017 decision to designate portions of Somalia as "areas of active hostility" means military operations can proceed with less oversight and greater tolerance for civilian casualties.
Somalia is thus, for all intents and purposes, another addition to Washington's roster of undeclared, undebated, and unnecessary wars of uncertain connection to U.S. security—and a Friday report from NBC News suggested Trump had finally come to see it that way. Citing multiple unnamed senior officials, NBC reported the administration would scale down the American military intervention in Somalia, "narrowing" the mission and shifting responsibility to local actors like the African Union and the Somali government.
"Not every nasty character out there is a threat to the U.S.," one official told NBC. "Do we want to do the Somali government's job for it?" A former counterterrorism advisor agreed, noting that Somalia's al-Shabab militants, the main target of U.S. intervention, are realistically "a parochial issue and not a direct threat to the United States." (These comments make key strategic distinctions too often overlooked in recent years of helter-skelter foreign policy: Not all bad guys are threats, and not all threats warrant a military response.)
By Monday, however, the Pentagon pushed back, denying any strategy shift. "There have been no recent policy changes regarding U.S. operations in Somalia," said a Defense Department statement. "We continue to support the Federal Government of Somalia's efforts to degrade al-Shabab."
Trump himself and other high-ranking security officials have yet to comment either way, which makes it difficult to decipher exactly what is going on here. On the one hand, it is possible NBC simply got it wrong. Perhaps the officials quoted were misinformed or working with outdated information. Perhaps they prematurely interpreted a hypothetical drawdown discussion to be a done deal.
That's certainly possible, but a more plausible scenario exists. Trump campaigned on avoiding and ending reckless wars of choice—for all his aggressive, "bomb the shit out of them" rhetoric, he also decried Washington's self-appointed role as "policeman of the world," pledging to "pursue a new foreign policy that finally learns from the mistakes of the past," one that would "stop looking to topple regimes and overthrow governments."
Trump's presidency, however, has generally continued the same interventionist policies of the last two administrations. His promises of peace, always inconsistent, have been smothered by the foreign policy establishment "blob."
But the last month has seem some glimmer of candidate Trump return: He announced a plan to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, pledging American soldiers there would be home with their families soon. He reportedly ordered the Pentagon to make plans for withdrawing half of the 14,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. And on a surprise visit with U.S. forces in Iraq right after Christmas, Trump returned to his campaign-era talk of ending needless interventions. "The United States cannot continue to be the policeman of the world," he said. "We are spread out all over the world. We are in countries most people haven't even heard about. Frankly, it's ridiculous."
This impulse toward restraint, sadly, may be short-lived, as Trump's framing of the Syria plan has already shifted. He started speaking of a "slow" exit, after which National Security Advisor John Bolton announced the withdrawal would not happen at all absent an unlikely guarantee from Turkey. Meanwhile, other administration officials revealed that if any troops do leave Syria, many will simply be redeployed to neighboring Iraq, not sent home as Trump had pledged.
It is not hard to surmise what happened here: Trump wanted U.S. troops to leave Syria; Bolton and other reflexively pro-war members of his advisory team—as well as most of "permanent Washington"—did not. Trump made the initial announcement, but the subsequent implementation, handled by Bolton and his allies, has endangered, if not outright killed, the withdrawal plan. One could be excused for wondering exactly how much Trump controls his own administration's policy.
There is a lesson here about advisor selection, and there is also likely insight into what is happening with the administration's Somalia policy. The president and/or some portion of his team are ready to extricate the United States, having rightly recognized this is not a battle crucial to American security. But they seemingly have been forestalled by more interventionist elements in the White House—figures like Bolton, who in December gave a speech outlining a widespread, activist, military role for the U.S. in Africa.
That is unfortunate because the initial push to draw down U.S. military intervention in Somalia was the right one. If Trump isn't planning to draw down U.S. intervention in Somalia, he should be. Counter-terror in Somalia is a parochial issue which poses no existential threat to America, and there's no reason for Washington to do Mogadishu's job.
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Christian Britschgihttps://reason.com/people/christian-britschgi/christian.britschgi@reason.comhttp://reason.com/2019/01/07/administration-hawks-try-to-derail/2019-01-07T18:40:00Z2019-01-07T18:40:00Z
President Donald Trump's abrupt announcement in late December that the United States would be ending its involvement in Syria's long-running, bloody civil war received cheers from non-interventionists, but subsequent comments from senior administration officials have cast doubt on the chances that U.S. troops will be out of the country anytime soon.
During a trip to Israel on Sunday, National Security Advisor John Bolton said that any withdrawal of military forces was conditioned on the total defeat of ISIS, plus assurances from Turkey that they would not attack U.S.-allied Kurdish militias.
"We don't think the Turks ought to undertake military action that's not fully coordinated with and agreed to by the United States, at a minimum so they don't endanger our troops," said Bolton, according to The New York Times.
Trump's secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, is also headed to the Middle East this week, where he will, according to comments from a senior administration official, try to persuade America's Arab allies that "the United States is not leaving the Middle East. Despite reports to the contrary and false narratives surrounding the Syria decision, we are not going anywhere."
All of this stands in marked contrast to statements from Trump himself.
On December 19, Trump announced that the U.S.'s goal of defeating ISIS in Syria was complete, ending the need for American forces to be in the country.
"We have won against ISIS. We have beaten them and beaten them badly," said Trump in a video message posted to Twitter. "It's time for our troops to come back home."
The timetable for this withdrawal was initially 30 days, which the traditionally hawkish Washington commentariat criticized as a reckless gift to Russian President Vladimir Putin and other American rivals in the region. The decision reportedly prompted Defense Secretary James Mattis to resign.
Trump later pushed back that 30-day window to four months. Comments from Bolton and other officials now suggest that any fixed schedule for withdrawal is toast.
This kind of walkback is hardly unprecedented. Back in Spring 2018, Trump announced at a rally that U.S. forces would be pulling out of Syria "very soon"; he even froze reconstruction funding for the country. The president was eventually persuaded to change course by his National Security Council.
The conditions Bolton is demanding are not the kind of things that can be completed overnight, says Emma Ashford, a foreign policy expert at the Cato Institute.
"Some of these things like protecting the Kurds, might be possible working with Turkey," says Ashford. A permanent defeat of ISIS, she tells Reason, would be a "very long-term commitment." Bolton has also said that U.S. troops would remain in Syria until Iranian forces had left, a goal Ashford described as "a generational effort."
All that said, statements from Bolton or Pompeo should not be read as definitive U.S. policy, but rather as what they want U.S. policy to be. Ashford notes that these pronouncements to the press may well be an attempt by two particularly hawkish members of the administration to publicly commit the ever-mercurial Trump to a course of action he instinctively opposes.
All this confusion only adds uncertainty to what is ultimately a wise decision to wind down U.S. involvement in Syria, says Ashford.
"Trump's instinct is absolutely right, withdrawing the troops makes sense," Ashford says. But "with U.S. policy so confused, it makes harder for every other actor in this conflict to figure out what they want to do."
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Eric Boehmhttps://reason.com/people/eric-boehm/Eric.Boehm@Reason.comhttp://reason.com/2018/11/01/if-you-liked-axis-of-evil-youre-gonna-lo/2018-11-01T20:15:00Z2018-11-01T20:15:00Z
In a Miami speech on Thursday afternoon, Trump administration national security advisor (and persistent advocate for spreading democracy at the point of a gun/drone/ballistic missile) John Bolton promised the United States would take a more aggressive stance towards left-wing dictators in Latin America.
Specifically, Bolton identified the nations of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela as a "Troika of Tyranny" responsible for "immense human suffering" and the cause of "enormous regional instability." Bolton made it clear that the Trump administration would be putting more pressure on Cuban president Raúl Castro, Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega, and Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro—with the goal of seeing "each corner of the triangle fall," according to The Washington Post's Josh Rogin.
If this seems like almost comically bad rebranding of the George W. Bush administration's "Axis of Evil"—consisting of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea—well, that's because it is.
It's also a political maneuver. Delivering this sort of tough talk just days before the midterms is at least partially an attempt to court Cuban voters (and Hispanic voters more broadly) who will be crucial to the outcome of Florida's gubernatorial and Senate races.
Though the speech lacked specific policy proposals, there are at least a few concrete plans. Vox reports that Bolton called on Maduro to release hundreds of political prisoners, while the Trump administration is also ramping up sanctions against Venezuela and tightening diplomatic backchannels with Cuba.
To be sure, dictators Castro, Ortega, and Maduro have openly embraced socialist economic policies that have ravaged their countries and created humanitarian nightmares. An estimated 2 million people have fled Venezuela since 2014, seeking refuge from the financial collapse that has made it virtually impossible to buy even the most basic goods. Latin America would be a better place without those three men and the poisonous ideology they've inflicted on millions.
The best thing the United States could do is accept the refugees fleeing those oppressive states and recognize them for what they are: human beings seeking freedom and a better life. Given the Trump administration's general view of immigration, however, I'm rather skeptical that's going to happen. Indeed, whatever form this more aggressive posture takes—particularly if it includes sanctions on countries where people are already starving—it is a good bet that it won't help the people who most need it.
Slapping labels like "Troika of Tyranny" on the three countries is unlikely to do much good. At best, it's a diplomatic mistake that will make it more difficult to do the important work of stoking capitalism and freedom across Latin America. Lumping together the different circumstances of three different countries is foolish—dealing with a slowly liberalizing Cuba requires a different approach than dealing with the complete humanitarian disaster that is Venezuela.
At worst, this is a prelude to policies that will make the situation worse, just like the infamous Axis of Evil speech was part of the calculated build-up to going to war with Iraq. In some ways, this is old hat for Bolton. Before he became one of the primary cheerleaders for the Iraq War, Bolton actually floated the idea of invading Cuba over suspected chemical weapons (which were later found to not exist).
It's unclear whether Bolton is suggesting that military options are on the table for dealing with these Latin American dictators—though Trump has already floated the incredibly stupid idea of a military invasion of Venezuela at least once, and Bolton has never been known for his foreign policy restraint.
Even if this isn't the first step on the road to a Latin American version of the Iraq War, Bolton's suggestion that he's seeking the "collapse" of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela should be worrying. As he should have learned by now, you can't fix regional instability by creating more of it.
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Joe Setyonhttps://reason.com/people/joe-setyon/joe.setyon@reason.comhttp://reason.com/2018/09/10/john-bolton-to-threaten-sanctions-if-int/2018-09-10T15:25:00Z2018-09-10T15:25:00Z
National Security Advisor John Bolton will reportedly take a hardline stance today against the International Criminal Court (ICC), which investigates allegations of war crimes and genocide.
In a speech at the conservative Federalist Society in Washington, Bolton will warn the the court not to probe the United States' wartime conduct in Afghanistan. "The United States will use any means necessary to protect our citizens and those of our allies from unjust prosecution by this illegitimate court," a draft of Bolton's speech reads, according to Reuters.
If the international body doesn't listen, the Trump administration could ban ICC judges and prosecutors from entering the country. That's not all: "We will sanction their funds in the U.S. financial system, and we will prosecute them in the U.S. criminal system," Bolton will say, according to The Wall Street Journal. "We will do the same for any company or state that assists an ICC investigation of Americans."
The Trump administration's stance against the ICC—also referred to as The Hague, after the city in the Netherlands where it is headquartered—isn't particularly surprising. The ICC was established in 2002 by the Rome Statute, but that treaty was never ratified by the U.S.
"It's a much more real policy matter now because of the potential liability in Afghanistan," a senior Trump administration official tellsThe WashingtonPost.
In addition to threatening sanctions against the ICC, Bolton will reportedly announce the closure of the D.C. office of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). According to the Journal, Bolton will claim the Palestinians aren't sufficiently committed to negotiating a long-term peace agreement with Israel.
Bolton's two announcements are tied together. Last September, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas called for the ICC to investigate and prosecute Israeli officials. The Trump administration responded by threatening to close the PLO office in D.C. "The United States will always stand with our friend and ally, Israel," Bolton will say today, according to Reuters.
Bolton has long opposed the ICC. The court "constitutes a direct assault on the concept of national sovereignty, especially that of constitutional, representative governments like the United States," he wrote in a Journalop-ed last November. Today, he'll say that "for all intents and purposes, the ICC is already dead to us."
As Reason's Matt Welch noted in 2013, residents of non-signatory countries such as the U.S. can only face trial before the ICC at the request of the U.N. Security Council. Bolton apparently plans to address that in his speech. "We will consider taking steps in the U.N. Security Council to constrain the court's sweeping powers, including to ensure that the ICC does not exercise jurisdiction over Americans and the nationals of our allies that have not ratified the Rome Statute," he intends to say, according to The Guardian.
It's not absurd to worry that the ICC violates U.S. sovereignty. There are several constitutional problems with international courts such as the ICC too.
Still, it's not crazy to entertain the possibility that the U.S. has committed war crimes. Those crimes should be investigated and all responsible parties punished, even if the ICC—which already has a hard time holding war criminals accountable—isn't right for the job.
In any case, Bolton's threats are a bit extreme. Refusing to cooperate with the ICC because you think it sets a bad precedent for national sovereignty is one thing. But threatening companies that dare to assist an investigation? That just seems over the top.
Bonus link: Click here to read about Welch's firsthand experiences with Bolton, including a contentious interview on the late, lamented Fox Business show The Independents.
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Matt Welchhttps://reason.com/people/matt-welch/matt.welch@reason.comhttps://reason.com/2018/04/09/bombs-away-in-syria/2019-10-01T16:27:29Z2018-04-09T19:00:00Z
"Many dead, including women and children, in mindless CHEMICAL attack in Syria," President Donald Trump tweeted over the weekend. "Area of atrocity is in lockdown and encircled by Syrian Army, making it completely inaccessible to outside world. President Putin, Russia and Iran are responsible for backing Animal Assad. Big price…to pay." So what will that mean, precisely?
The president said this morning that he would make a decision on responding to the "heinous attack" within the next 24-48 hours, adding that such a "barbaric attack…can't be allowed to happen." As he was making that announcement, the Reason Podcast, featuring Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, and me, was wrapping up its Monday episode. In addition to wargaming Syria, assessing new National Security Adviser John Bolton, and wondering what this all does to Trump's favored policy of troop withdrawal, the editorial quartet discussed refugee policy, the president's deployment of National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, our burgeoning trade war with China, and Facebook honcho Mark Zuckerberg's coming perp walk on Capitol Hill.
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Jacob Sullumhttps://reason.com/people/jacob-sullum/jsullum@reason.comhttps://reason.com/2018/03/23/5-things-about-john-bolton-that-are-wors/2018-03-23T17:50:00Z2018-03-23T17:50:00Z
Donald Trump reportedly hesitated to appoint John Bolton as his national security adviser because he was put off by the former U.N. ambassador's walrus mustache. While this is one of the few areas where I see eye to eye with the president, there may be more substantive reasons to think twice about taking advice from Bolton, who never met a war he did not like and represents precisely the sort of reckless interventionism that Trump criticized during his campaign. Here are five things about John Bolton that are worse than his facial hair:
1. Bolton supported the 2002 invasion of Iraq and still thinks it was a dandy idea. As undersecretary of state for arms control and international security affairs, Bolton was largely responsible for the deception used to justify the invasion of Iraq, a stratagem that Trump has condemned in no uncertain terms. "They lied," Trump said during a presidential debate in February 2016. "They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none, and they knew there were none." Bolton is not only a liar, according to Trump, but a liar who does not learn from his big, fat mistakes. "I still think the decision to overthrow Saddam was correct," he toldThe Washington Examiner in 2015.
2. Bolton supported the U.S. intervention in the Libyan civil war. In 2011, while seeking the Republican presidential nomination, Bolton called for the assassination of Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi, saying he was "a legitimate military target." While Trump initially favored ousting Gadhafi, he later described it as a mistake that, like the Iraq war, created chaotic conditions conducive to terrorism. "Each of these actions [has] helped to throw the region into chaos and [given] ISIS the space it needs to grow and prosper," Trump said in an April 2016 speech. "It all began with the dangerous idea that we could make Western democracies out of countries that had no experience or interest in becoming a Western democracy."
3. Bolton thinks the U.S. should have intervened in the Syrian civil war sooner and more aggressively. "Whatever slim chance there was of empowering a 'moderate' anti-Assad opposition when the civil war began four years ago disappeared while Mr. Obama dithered," he wrote in 2015. As a presidential candidate, Trump counted U.S. meddling in Syria as one of the actions that "helped to throw the region into chaos," although since taking office he has taken a somewhat different view.
4. Bolton agitated for war with Iran. "Iran will not negotiate away its nuclear program," he wrote in 2015. "Nor will sanctions block its building a broad and deep weapons infrastructure. The inconvenient truth is that only military action…can accomplish what is required. Time is terribly short, but a strike can still succeed."
5. Bolton favors attacking North Korea. While Trump recently agreed to a meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in the hope of negotiating denuclearization, Bolton (as always) favors a more aggressive approach. In a Wall Street Journalop-ed piece last year, he laid out three "military options," including a pre-emptive strike on "Pyongyang's known nuclear facilities, ballistic-missile factories and launch sites, and submarine bases."
Trump has never been a consistent skeptic of unnecessary wars. Since taking office, he has warmed to war in Syria and Afghanistan. And even when he was highlighting the unintended effects of past interventions, he bragged that he was "a very militaristic person" and promised more money for armed forces he said were already doing too much. The omnibus spending bill that Congress approved this week delivers on that promise with $700 billion in military spending for the current fiscal year, including what the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense touts as "the biggest year-to-year increase in defense funding in 15 years."
Even before that increase, the U.S. had a larger military budget than the next eight biggest spenders combined. Throwing even more money at the Pentagon hardly seems consistent with Trump's complaint that "we're all over the place, fighting in areas that we just shouldn't be fighting in." An outsized military budget invites outsized thinking about how to use it, and an adviser like Bolton will have plenty of ideas.
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Matt Welchhttps://reason.com/people/matt-welch/matt.welch@reason.comhttps://reason.com/2018/03/23/my-conversations-with-john-bolton/2018-03-23T17:20:00Z2018-03-23T17:20:00Z
President Donald Trump's announcement last night that he was replacing purported realist H.R. McMaster as his National Security Adviser with pre-emptive war aficionado John Bolton led me down memory lane, and not just to the days when some anti-interventionist naifs believed out loud that "if Trump actually wins the White House, the military-industrial complex is finished."
No, what I'll always remember fondest was this contentious interview Bolton gave about Iraq and George Orwell with me, Kennedy, and Kmele Foster on the late, great Independents:
It takes a certain amount of chutzpah not just to selectively misuse Orwell (similarly to how Bolton and his fellow hawks routinely abuse "Munich" and "appeasement"), but to run such crude argumentation up the flagpole a full decade after the disastrous Iraq War. This intellectual defiance is in sharp contrast to McMaster, who is interested in enough in the deadly costs of foreign policy fabulism that he wrote an entire reputation-making book on the subject: Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam. The Bolton-McMaster swap means less of an in-house brake on Trump coloring outside the lines, and more (along with the Mike Pompeo-for-Rex-Tillerson trade) White House support for the president's campaign-reinforced hostility to the Iran nuclear deal.
Yet, for what it's worth, Bolton has described himself to me (including in public) as basically a "hawkish libertarian." By which he mostly meant on domestic issues, such as government spending (agin'), gay marriage (for), and so on. But there's also a foreign policy overlap between the mustachioed one's cranky hostility toward international institutions and the sovereignty-guarding skeptics on the libertarian right, in the Ron Paul/Thomas Massie tradition. That the United States does not consider itself to be subject to prosecution under the Chemical Weapons Convention is in no small part thanks to John Bolton. He is contemptuous of nation-building, rejects the label "neoconservative," found the U.S. Kosovo bombing "very troubling," has a Public Choice-style critique of the State Department, and speaks fondly of Barry Goldwater—all positions shared by many non-hawks.
But whereas the Pauls and Massies of the world mix their anti-multilateralism with genuine anti-interventionism, Bolton relishes the American role as global cop. He is obsessed with having Washington ensure that weapons of mass destruction do not end up in the hands of bad guys, but is dismissive of most international apparatuses bent toward that goal, and not noticeably concerned with the many grave unintended consequences that can come with unilateral, violent weapons-removal.
He is also someone accustomed to having fruitful dialogue with people who find many of his views abhorrent, as this Matthew Waxman essay in the otherwise Bolton/Trump-averse Lawfare blog makes clear. It is something I have experienced in person—not only did Bolton come on The Independents a dozen times in its 15-month run, but we have bumped into each other in green rooms many times since then, and the conversation is always lively and respectful. There's a reason he gravitated toward smart/funny shows like Kennedy and Red Eye (the latter of which he was "president" of), and that intervention-skeptics like Andy Levy have some fondness for the guy.
President Donald Trump announced Thursday that former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton would replace H.R. McMaster as National Security Advisor.
Bolton is a strident neoconservative who invariably takes the position that the U.S. military should intervene in more conflicts around the globe. He was a prominent backer of both the Iraq War and the Obama-era intervention in Libya, and has advocated for nuclear war with Iran. Less than a month ago, he penned an op-ed making a legal case for attacking North Korea. (Read Reason's Eric Boehm for more on Bolton's blood-thirsty foreign policy approach.)
I am pleased to announce that, effective 4/9/18, @AmbJohnBolton will be my new National Security Advisor. I am very thankful for the service of General H.R. McMaster who has done an outstanding job & will always remain my friend. There will be an official contact handover on 4/9.
Bolton is thus a rebuke to Trump supporters who thought they were voting for a less interventionist GOP when they backed candidate Donald over more hawkish alternatives.
Trump himself has frequently criticized former President Bush's neoconservative foreign policy, but the choice of Bolton as National Security Advisor suggests Trump isn't particularly committed to a less hawkish foreign policy. In fact, Trump's biggest beef with Bolton might have been the man's mustache, rather than his enthusiastic support for the kind of nation-building Trump supposedly rejects, according to Vox's Zack Beauchamp.
Republican Sen. Rand Paul, a skeptic of endless wars, previously told me that he would do anything he could to prevent Bolton from becoming secretary of state. The National Security Advisor position, however, is not subject to Senate confirmation, which means the senator from Kentucky probably can't do much to stop him.
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Jacob Sullumhttps://reason.com/people/jacob-sullum/jsullum@reason.comhttps://reason.com/2016/12/21/trumps-tough-cookie-is-a-dangerous-warmo/2016-12-21T05:01:00Z2016-12-21T05:01:00Z
Donald Trump began to express doubts about the wisdom of overthrowing Saddam Hussein soon after the 2003 invasion of Iraq and by 2004 was criticizing the war as senseless and counterproductive—or, as he put it more recently, "a big, fat mistake." Hillary Clinton, by contrast, did not admit the war was a mistake until more than a decade after she voted for it.
John Bolton, the former U.N. ambassador whom Trump reportedly plans to nominate as deputy secretary of state, has Clinton beat: He still thinks the war was a good idea. Bolton's stubborn defense of a disastrous war he helped engineer, which by itself should be enough to disqualify him from any position related to foreign policy, reflects interventionist instincts that are glaringly inconsistent with Trump's critique of reckless regime change and naïve nation building.
In a recent speech, Trump reaffirmed his "commitment to only engage the use of military forces when it's in the vital national security interest of the United States." He said "we will stop racing to topple foreign regimes…that we know nothing about," promised that his administration will instead be "guided by the lessons of history and a desire to promote stability," and declared that "the destructive cycle of intervention and chaos must finally…come to an end."
It is hard to think of a worse candidate to help implement that vision than Bolton. As undersecretary of state for arms control and international security affairs, he was largely responsible for the deception used to justify the invasion of Iraq, a stratagem that Trump has condemned in no uncertain terms.
"They lied," Trump said during a debate last February. "They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none, and they knew there were none."
Bolton is not only a liar, according to Trump himself, but a liar who does not learn from his big, fat mistakes. "I still think the decision to overthrow Saddam was correct," he toldThe Washington Examiner last year.
Undaunted by the results of that intervention, which according to Trump created chaotic conditions conducive to terrorism, Bolton supported overthrowing Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi, which according to Trump continued "the destructive cycle of intervention and chaos." More recently Bolton has advocated bombing Iran and argued that the U.S. should have intervened earlier and more decisively in Syria's civil war.
Rand Paul, the Kentucky senator who briefly vied with Trump for the Republican presidential nomination and who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is dismayed by the gap between Bolton's belligerence and Trump's criticism of wanton war making. "I want Trump to pick somebody who agrees with what he said on the stump," Paul toldReason last week. "The fact that the administration would consider Bolton makes one wonder how deeply felt or deeply held those beliefs are."
In a Rare essay explaining why he will oppose any nomination of Bolton for a State Department position, Paul describes him as "a longtime member of the failed Washington elite that Trump vowed to oppose, hell-bent on repeating virtually every foreign policy mistake the U.S. has made in the last 15 years—particularly those Trump promised to avoid as president." Paul notes that Bolton "more often stood with Hillary Clinton and against what Donald Trump has advised."
Trump's puzzling fondness for Bolton, whom he calls "a tough cookie," is of a piece with his promise to "build up" a military that already receives more money than its seven closest competitors combined. "I'm a very militaristic person," Trump bragged during a debate last year, even as he criticized the Iraq war.
Trump says he aims, like Ronald Reagan, to achieve "peace through strength." But a military buildup hardly seems consistent with Trump's complaint that "we're all over the place, fighting in areas that we just shouldn't be fighting in." An outsized military budget invites outsized thinking about how to use it, and an adviser like Bolton would have plenty of ideas.
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Eric Boehmhttps://reason.com/people/eric-boehm/Eric.Boehm@Reason.comhttps://reason.com/2016/11/15/five-horrifically-bad-foreign-policy-ide/2016-11-15T22:10:00Z2016-11-15T22:10:00Z
Former U.S. Ambassador John Bolton is reportedly on the Trump administration's short list for secretary of state. Even though no official announcement has been made, Bolton's consideration is already drawing rebukes from libertarian-minded Republicans like U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, who on Tuesday called Bolton's foreign policy views "unhinged."
Paul's spot on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee gives him significant sway over the nomination of Bolton—or anyone else—as secretary of state, but you don't have to share Paul's skepticism about America's interventionalist foreign policy to be terrified by the prospect of having Bolton in charge of the State Department.
Here's a brief reminder of some of the terrible things Bolton has done (or wanted to do) in the realm of foreign policy. We only included five of the worst examples, but share your own not-so-fond memories of Bolton's disastrous ideas in the comments below.
1. Bolton was a primary cheerleader of the War in Iraq and stands for everything Americans rejected about the Bush administration's foreign policy.
Let's just get the obvious thing out of the way up front.
"We are confident that Saddam Hussein has hidden weapons of mass destruction and production facilities in Iraq," Bolton said in 2002 while serving as President George W. Bush's undersecretary of state for Arms Control and International Security. That wasn't true, as we'd later discover after it was too late.
"Obviously the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake," Trump concluded, before hammering Jeb for taking more than a week (earlier in the campaign) to answer a reporter's question about whether his older brother made a mistake by launching the invasion.
Now Trump wants to hire someone who has taken 13 years (and counting) to do the same?
2. Bolton wanted the U.S. to go to war with Cuba over WMDs that also didn't exist
A year before the United States would go to war with Iraq due (at least in part) to falsely believing that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, Bolton was advocating that the United States should go to war with Cuba because of later debunked reports that Fidel Castro was developing weapons of mass destruction.
In May 2002, during a speech at the Heritage Foundation, Bolton said he believed Cuba was developing biological weapons and was capable of distributing them to Libya and Syria.
The New York Times reported on the speech: "'The United States believes that Cuba has at least a limited offensive biological warfare research and development effort,' Mr. Bolton said, taking aim at the Communist government of Fidel Castro. Cuba, he added, has also 'provided dual-use biotechnology to other rogue states.'"
The Times noted that it was the first time an American official openly accused Cuba of developing biological weapons. When the Times asked Bolton's office to substantiate this historic and potentially bellicose claim, they offered no evidence.
Having apparently learned nothing from the decade-plus quagmire that resulted from the invade-now-come-up-with-an-exit-strategy-later Bush administration approach to the Iraq War, Bolton in March 2015 advocated for a similar bomb-now-and-figure-out-the-details-later approach to dealing with Iran.
In a New York Times op-ed titled "To Stop Iran's Bomb, Bomb Iran," Bolton argued that "only military action" could "accomplish what is required." The thing being required was preventing Iran from developing a nuclear bomb. A limited strike against known nuclear production facilities could set the country's nuclear ambitions back by three to five years, Bolton argued, and should be combined with "vigorous American support for….regime change in Tehran," because we all know about the successful track record of regime change in the Middle East.
As Reason'sMatt Welch noted at the time: "One of Bolton's main stated concerns is that Iran's pursuit of nukes will (and is already beginning to) set off a regional nuclear arms race, which would indeed be alarming. But isn't there another possible game-theory scenario here, in which a pre-emptive attack on Iran (like the pre-emptive, WMD-justified attack on Iraq) could incentivize regional powers and various nefarious regimes to go nuclear faster? After all, the U.S. doesn't spend a lot of time engaging in forcible regime change with countries (no matter how lousy) that already have the bomb. And Ukraine, for one, can tell you what happens to your defensive posture after emptying your nuclear arsenal."
4. President Obama followed Bolton's terrible advice about Libya and then Bolton blamed Obama for the resulting mess
In March 2011, while mulling a potential run for president, Bolton suggested to an Iowa crowd that the United States should try to assassinate Moammar Gadhafi, the then-dictator of Libya.
"I think he's a legitimate target," Bolton said, according to The Daily Beast. "He has murdered innocent American civilians. He has never faced responsibility for it. So I don't have any hesitation in saying that."
Later during the speech, Bolton admitted that he was willing to let Gadhafi live—"I personally would be happy to send him into exile somewhere," is how he put it, according to the Daily Beast—but said it would probably be easier to just kill him and let someone else take control.
That someone else, of course, turned out to be ISIS. After the Obama Administration intervened in the Libya to drive Gadhafi from power (the dictator was eventually captured and killed by his own people), a power vacuum developed and Islamic extremists have since set up shop in Libya—just like they did in Iraq and Syria…it's almost like there's a pattern here.
5. Bolton suggested Israel should unleash nuclear weapons against Iran
Perhaps the most terrifying manifestation of Bolton's desire to bomb Iran no matter the costs or consequences for America (to say nothing of the consequences for the people of Iran fixed in his crosshairs) occurred in 2009 while Bolton was speaking at the University of Chicago.
"Unless Israel is prepared to use nuclear weapons against Iran's program, Iran will have nuclear weapons in the very near future," Bolton said. It's been seven years and Iran hasn't developed a nuclear weapon (and Israel thankfully didn't follow Bolton's advice), so either Bolton was exaggerating the threat or he doesn't have a good understanding of the words "very near future."
The logic here is almost too twisted to untangle.
Bolton argued that Israel's preemptive use of nuclear weapon against an enemy (an act that would smash all international norms regarding the use of nuclear weapons) should not only be considered, but should be encouraged. Such an act would not destabilize the region (to say nothing of those smashed international norms), he seems to be arguing. Yet at the same time he believes that Iranian efforts to develop a nuclear bomb—perhaps as a defense against exactly this sort of threat from Israel or the United States—are destabilizing?
"There is a day after you use a nuclear weapon," he said. "If you want to maximize collateral damage and really make sure that the Iranian-Israeli conflict will be another unending Middle-Eastern conflict, then nuclear weapons is your path and John Bolton is your guy."
Pondering the consequences of an unhinged, aggressive foreign policy isn't Bolton's strong suit. It's stunning that someone who has been so wrong, so many times could end up running one of the most important parts of the U.S. government.
Before the election, many people were questioning the wisdom (or lack thereof) of giving a temperamental, vindictive, and irresponsible man like Donald Trump control over America's nuclear arsenal. Those fears hopefully will never be realized, but letting John Bolton set the country's foreign policy does nothing to calm the nerves.
Sen. Rand Paul implored President-Elect Donald Trump not to pick Rudy Giuliani or John Bolton to run the State Department and suggested he would be inclined to vote against their confirmation.
In an interview with Reason, Paul described Bolton and Giuliani as representatives of "the most bellicose interventionist wing of any party" and the antithesis of the restrained foreign policy platform Trump ran on. The selection of either man would be a serious betrayal of Trump's supporters, who wanted a clean break from the rabid interventionism of the past GOP administration.
"I can't support anybody to be our secretary of state who didn't learn the lesson of the Iraq War," said Paul.
After dropping out of the GOP presidential race, Paul focused on his own re-election to the Senate, and didn't offer Trump much in the way of vociferous support. But like many other libertarians, Paul found something to admire in Trump's stated opposition to neoconservatism.
"I don't think anybody believed that he was going to be libertarian on foreign policy, but there was at least a glimmer of hope that he would be less of an interventionist than Clinton," said Paul. "The things he says unscripted on the campaign trail were much less hawkish than Hillary Clinton."
That was a fair assumption, given Hillary Clinton's extreme hawkishness. Sen. Clinton was a key supporter of the Iraq War. And though she later regretted that vote, Secretary of Clinton repeated the error—and then some—when she pushed the Obama administration to intervene in Libya. The U.S.-backed ousters of Saddam Hussein and Moammar Gadhafi have destabilized the entire Middle East and contributed to the rise of ISIS.
But Trump's leading secretary of state candidates—Bolton, especially—have embraced all of Clinton's worst foreign policy blunders and would push the federal government to do even more. Indeed, Bolton has made public his support for taking the country to war with Iran.
Paul described Bolton as "unhinged."
"It concerns me that Trump would put someone in charge who is unhinged as far as believing in absolute and total intervention," he said.
Bolton would have almost no chance of getting Paul's support, unless the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations repudiated virtually everything he stands for. Giuliani would face a similarly uphill battle to persuade Paul, he said.
As Reason's Brian Doherty noted, Paul could make trouble for an unacceptable secretary of state pick. Paul sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which is currently split 10-9. If he voted with the Democrats, he could certainly send a message—though this would not prevent the full Senate from voting to confirm, according to The Washington Post.
When asked to name a suitable alternative, Paul pointed to Sen. Bob Corker—who is also on Trump's short list—as a better choice.
"I would say, while not being libertarian, [Corker] is more of a reasonable, realist kind of person," said Paul. "I think he would be less likely to say tomorrow we need to drop bombs on Iran."
In any case, it's unsettling that Trump was so immediately tempted to choose unrepentant hawks to run his State Department—especially considering that he owes the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party very little. Most neoconservatives abandoned Trump and supported Clinton, Paul noted.
"[Bolton and Giuliani] don't represent even the mainstream of foreign policy," said Paul.
It's too soon to say whether Trump will betray his non-interventionist supporters. But the possibility of a Bolton or Giuliani running the State Department is truly frightening, and libertarians should be grateful that Paul was willing to speak up in defense of principle. We can only hope it makes a difference.
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Brian Dohertyhttps://reason.com/people/brian-doherty/bdoherty@reason.comhttps://reason.com/2016/11/15/rand-paul-on-prospective-trump-secretary/2016-11-15T17:27:00Z2016-11-15T17:27:00Z
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is not happy with the news that former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton may get nominated for secretary of state in the upcoming Trump administration.
One of the things I occasionally liked about the President-elect was his opposition to the Iraq war and regime change. He not only grasped the mistake of that war early, but also seemed to fully understand how it disrupted the balance of power in the Middle East and even emboldened Iran.
We liberated Iraq, but today their best friend is Iran, their second greatest ally is Russia, and their third strongest alliance is with Syria. Trump really seems to get the lesson. Hillary Clinton never did.
But the Bolton news, Paul thinks, casts doubts on whether or not Trump has any non-interventionist sense:
John Bolton never learned and never will…John Bolton more often stood with Hillary Clinton and against what Donald Trump has advised.
None of this is secret. It's all out there. Perhaps the incoming administration should take a closer look.
Paul goes on to point out that Trump was willing to say that the Iraq invasion was a mistake, based on lies. Bolton also thought that it was right that we should have intervened to overthrow Gadhafi in Libya, another decision candidate Trump decried.
Further, Paul writes:
The fact that Russia has had a base in Syria for 50 years doesn't deter Bolton from calling for all out, no holds barred war in Syria. Bolton criticized the current administration for offering only a tepid war. For Bolton, only a hot-blooded war to create democracy across the globe is demanded.
Paul is even willing to go for the implicit "chickenhawk" argument:
Bolton would not understand [the dangers of war] because, like many of his generation, he used every privilege to avoid serving himself. Bolton said, with the threat of the Vietnam draft over his head, that "he had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy." But he's seems to be okay with your son or daughter dying wherever his neoconservative impulse leads us: "Even before the Iraq War, John Bolton was a leading brain behind the neoconservatives' war-and-conquest agenda," notes The American Conservative's Jon Utley.
Paul concludes bluntly: "President-elect Donald Trump campaigned on changing our disastrous foreign policy. To appoint John Bolton would be a major first step toward breaking that promise."
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Matt Purplehttps://reason.com/people/matt-purple/http://reason.com/2016/08/17/john-bolton-trumps-likely-secretary-of-s/2016-08-17T15:00:00Z2016-08-17T15:00:00Z
When George W. Bush nominated John Bolton to be his ambassador to the United Nations in 2005, it was cathartic for many conservatives, who had been stewing for years over the bureaucracy at Turtle Bay. A working-class guy from Baltimore with a Yosemite Sam mustache, Bolton had once opined that if U.N. headquarters "lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference." It was easy to imagine him hurling abuse and possibly heavy objects at gelatinous U.N. functionaries as they fled down the hallway.
Alas, Senate Democrats filibustered Bolton's nomination, limiting him to a recess appointment. His term was brief, controversial, and idealistic, as he set about trying to reform the U.N.'s farcical and mass murderer-dominated Human Rights Commission, which earned him rare praise from the New York Times. So when Donald Trump announced he was mulling Bolton to be his secretary of state, it seemed like a solid pick. Who wouldn't want a sworn foe of bureaucracy at the cumbersome State Department?
The problem with Bolton isn't his aversion to the UN, but his penchant for counterproductive war. Whereas Trump, for all his faults, has laid out a foreign policy that attempts to correct some of the mistakes of the past (even if it ultimately replaces them with new ones), Bolton remains immersed in the failed thinking of the Bush administration.
On the calamitous invasion of Iraq, he remains steadfast. "I still think the decision to overthrow Saddam was correct," he told the Washington Examiner last year, and anyway, "you can't assume if [Saddam] had stayed in power, sweetness and light would prevail in the Middle East today." That's true, but you can assume that if Saddam had been removed from power, mayhem and madness would prevail in the Middle East—because that's exactly what happened.
Bolton's support for regime change has remained a constant. In March 2011, he declared that the United States should assassinate Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi and "end the regime right there." At the time, Gaddafi had surrendered his WMDs and was aiding the war on terror; after the Obama administration destroyed his government, Libya disintegrated into anarchy and ISIS opened up shop. The president, guilty of taking Bolton's advice, was later excoriated by Bolton for being weak on Libya.
On Iran, Bolton's prescription was to drop bombs, and then, once that was accomplished, to drop more bombs—all of it "aimed at regime change in Tehran." Heeding his counsel would have torn open a vacuum as Iranian moderate and hardline elements duked it out to replace the deposed government, and the Islamic State would have attempted to fill the space, eager to strike at the heart of Shiite Islam. It also would have crippled the anti-ISIS campaign in Iraq, which is heavily dependent on Iran-linked militias.
The goal of bombing Iran's nuclear program, Bolton wrote, was, "rendering inoperable the Natanz and Fordow uranium-enrichment installations and the Arak heavy-water production facility and reactor." Today, all those sites are subject to daily weapons inspections, Fordow is being converted into a research center, and Arak has been filled with concrete, all thanks to diplomacy, not war.
Still, at least Bolton was merely advocating conventional ordnance against Iran and not thermonuclear war. During a speech in 2009, he said, "Unless Israel is prepared to use nuclear weapons against Iran's program, Iran will have nuclear weapons in the very near future." He was wrong again: Israel didn't nuke Iran and Iran today doesn't have nukes.
Even when Bolton finds a way around destructive policies, he still manages to lasso his ankles in the process. "I would vote against an authorization to use force," he said in 2013 of the Obama administration's plan to attack Syria's Bashar al-Assad. But this was merely a matter of timing: "In the days just after Saddam's ouster in 2003, conditions were optimal (if nonetheless imperfect) for overthrowing Assad," he wrote. Yes, because then we would have opened the Syrian front to jihadists nine years earlier and saddled our financial books with the rebuilding of two nations. What could have been more brilliant than that?
John Bolton might be allergic to U.N. meandering, but he's also chemically addicted to regime change. He never plans for the day after a binge. He can't break his habit even after the wicked hangovers of Iraq and Libya. Those who try to wean him off are shouted down. And if Trump puts him at the State Department, it's the rest of us who will end up with his tab.
John Bolton, the former U.N. ambassador with dreams of a more muscular and mustachioed America, announced today that he will not run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. Fortunately, voters craving a nuanced, measured debate about U.S. foreign policy will still be able to enjoy the subtle arguments of Mike Huckabee:
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Matt Welchhttps://reason.com/people/matt-welch/matt.welch@reason.comhttps://reason.com/2015/03/26/bomb-iran-now-work-out-the-details-later/2015-03-26T15:33:00Z2015-03-26T15:33:00Z
The inconvenient truth is that only military action like Israel's 1981 attack on Saddam Hussein's Osirak reactor in Iraq or its 2007 destruction of a Syrian reactor, designed and built by North Korea, can accomplish what is required. Time is terribly short, but a strike can still succeed.
Rendering inoperable the Natanz and Fordow uranium-enrichment installations and the Arak heavywater production facility and reactor would be priorities. So, too, would be the little-noticed but critical uranium-conversion facility at Isfahan. An attack need not destroy all of Iran's nuclear infrastructure, but by breaking key links in the nuclear-fuel cycle, it could set back its program by three to five years. The United States could do a thorough job of destruction, but Israel alone can do what's necessary. Such action should be combined with vigorous American support for Iran's opposition, aimed at regime change in Tehran.
This is not new territory for Bolton. At a Conservative Political Action Conference panel a month ago the one-man mustache said "I think our policy for the past 15 years should have been, and would be if I became president, the overthrow of the ayatollahs." And unlike his CPAC co-panelist Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Bolton was willing to say the P-word out loud: "The only…alternative is the pre-emptive use of military force."
Other members of the growing Bomb Iran Caucus include Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) ("I think it's time to bomb Iran"), Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) ("Absolutely!"), and foreign policy commentator Joshua Muravchik ("Does this mean that our only option is war? Yes").
One of Bolton's main stated concerns is that Iran's pursuit of nukes will (and is already beginning to) set off a regional nuclear arms race, which would indeed be alarming. But isn't there another possible game-theory scenario here, in which a pre-emptive attack on Iran (like the pre-emptive, WMD-justified attack on Iraq) could incentivize regional powers and various nefarious regimes to go nuclear faster? After all, the U.S. doesn't spend a lot of time engaging in forcible regime change with countries (no matter how lousy) that already have the bomb. And Ukraine, for one, can tell you what happens to your defensive posture after emptying your nuclear arsenal.
If the bombs-plus-regime-change tune sounds familiar, that's because conservative hawks were singing it in 1998 about Iraq, albeit with much greater skepticism about the nuke-destroying efficacy of bombs alone. Here's another New York Times op-ed, this time from William Kristol and Robert Kagan, from Jan. 30, 1998:
Unless we act, Saddam Hussein will prevail, the Middle East will be destabilized, other aggressors around the world will follow his example, and American soldiers will have to pay a far heavier price when the international peace sustained by American leadership begins to collapse. […]
Four heavy divisions and two airborne divisions are available for deployment. The President should act, and Congress should support him in the only policy that can succeed.
One of the defining hallmarks of American foreign policy these awful past 15 years has been the readiness to bomb first, figure out a strategy later. We bombed a nasty regime out of existence in Libya in 2011, and the results have not been very pretty for the interests of either Libya or the United States (despite some premature endzone dancing at first). We invaded Iraq without any workable sense of what comes next. We toppled the Taliban without defining an end game. We're at semi-war right now with the Islamic State, and if there's any noticeable strategy it certainly has escaped my attention. Meanwhile, the Middle East is literally on fire.
In the face of this track record, the burden of proof rests on the interventionists. Not simply to state the scary threat, but to work through the details of what happens next. To the extent that anyone in the Bomb Iran Caucus has sketched those out, the results have been wildly unimpressive. Here's Muravchik:
[A]n air campaign targeting Iran's nuclear infrastructure would entail less need for boots on the ground than the war Obama is waging against the Islamic State, which poses far smaller a threat than Iran does.
Wouldn't an attack cause ordinary Iranians to rally behind the regime? Perhaps, but military losses have also served to undermine regimes, including the Greek and Argentine juntas, the Russian czar and the Russian communists.
Wouldn't destroying much of Iran's nuclear infrastructure merely delay its progress? Perhaps, but we can strike as often as necessary. Of course, Iran would try to conceal and defend the elements of its nuclear program, so we might have to find new ways to discover and attack them. Surely the United States could best Iran in such a technological race.
Much the same may be said in reply to objections that airstrikes might not reach all the important facilities and that Iran would then proceed unconstrained by inspections and agreements. The United States would have to make clear that it will hit wherever and whenever necessary to stop Iran's program. Objections that Iran might conceal its program so brilliantly that it could progress undetected all the way to a bomb apply equally to any negotiated deal with Iran.
Perhaps, but we can strike as often as necessary isn't the strategy of a thinker, it's the chest-thumping of a J.V. football player. Hawks may feel like they've got the wind at their sails again, but they blithely dismiss Americans' lack of appetite for military adventurism at their peril.
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Matt Welchhttps://reason.com/people/matt-welch/matt.welch@reason.comTodd Kraininhttps://reason.com/people/todd-krainin/todd.krainin@reason.tvhttps://reason.com/2015/02/28/cpacs-foreign-policy-split-old-hawks-and/2015-02-28T15:06:00Z2015-02-28T15:06:00Z
The Conservative Politcal Action Conference (CPAC) for the last few years has embraced the Paul family, with both Ron and Rand Paul having won straw polls in the past. But that doesn't mean that the Republican party is ready to abandon its stance for Paul-style skepticism towards aggressive foreign policy, military intervention, and regime change.
What do the party elite think about going to war? And how does it differ from how the conference attendees think about war? Reason TV's Matt Welch hit the conference floor to find out how conservatives think we should react to the rise of ISIS and Russia's aggresive expansion under Putin.
Why is John Bolton, the mustachioed uber-hawk who played the wacky neighbor on The Independents, thinking of running for president? What about Peter King, the New York congressman and lapsed IRA fan who thinks journalists should be prosecuted for reporting the Snowden leaks? Or Lindsey Graham, John McCain's understudy in the Senate? None of these people have a serious shot at the Republican nomination. So why run?
Benjy Sarlin of MSNBC suggests an explanation: They're there to block Rand Paul, the Kentucky senator and likely presidential candidate who doesn't share their passion for a muscular, handsome foreign policy. They might not be able to take the presidential prize themselves, but they hope they can keep it from Paul by keeping a spotlight on his views about global affairs.
When Sarlin called the candidates to confirm his suspicions, two out of three conceded that Paul was on their minds. King told Sarlin that it was Paul who "really generated my concern"—not a surprise, since King's been saying words to that effect since last July. (He's wary about Ted Cruz too.) And Bolton
said he planned to force Paul to account for his "neo-isolationism" (a label Paul rejects) should they meet on the primary trail.
Graham is less eager to put himself so explicitly in the anti-Paul camp. Asked by msnbc what impact Paul's ambitions had on his decision to explore a run he responded: "Zero."
"It's all about my vision for the country and national security and economic security," Graham said.
Still, as one of Paul's top antagonists in the Senate, it's easy to imagine Graham taking a similar tack. He's derided Paul as part of an "isolationist movement in the party" and called his positions "to the left of Obama"—the ultimate GOP insult.
While I have no illusions that Paul's foreign policy ideas have taken over the Republican Party, this marks a significant shift. In the last two Republican races, the relatively libertarian antiwar voices—Ron Paul in 2008, Paul and Gary Johnson in 2012—were widely seen as marginal figures running to protest the party's direction. Now it's the most hard-core hawks who are jumping in just to make sure their views get a hearing. It's not enough, apparently, that pretty much every frontrunner except Rand Paul thinks the U.S. military should be even more active around the world. They want to make sure the subject is aired.
As Sarlin puts it,
The anti-Paul contingent all say they aren't worried his views on foreign policy are gaining ground with GOP voters. Since the Islamic State took over swaths of Iraq and Syria and began executing Western hostages, polls show Republicans have reverted to their Bush-era instinct towards aggressive counterterrorism abroad….The fear, rather, is that Paul could get the nomination despite his unconventional foreign policy views if the campaign, as it did in 2012, focuses largely on domestic affairs.
"Republicans are small government conservatives and so an ideological libertarian says a lot of things they agree with," Bolton said. "The consequences if you don't require the candidates to elaborate on their national security views [is that] somebody with a view that doesn't reflect the vast majority of the party might slip by."
If Paul gets remotely close to taking the nomination, you can expect the party establishment to wield weapons against him that are far more potent than King, Graham, Bolton, or even Bolton's 'stache. But if this is a sideshow, it's a notable sideshow. The hawks' anxieties are newsworthy in their own right.
The more that candidates like that are allowed to speak for the party's hawks, the easier it should be for Paul to present himself as a reasonable and necessary alternative. Since the impulse of many of the other hawks in the debate will be to express agreement with the hard-line no-hopers, the no-hopers' presence could also have the effect of dragging the more competitive hawkish candidates into adopting much more unpopular positions than they might otherwise take….
The hard-liner protest candidates may want to combat Paul and whatever it is they think he represents, but they will more than likely end up undermining candidates that agree with them on foreign policy. As so often happens in our foreign policy debates, the hard-liners haven't thought through the consequences of their plans here and could end up empowering the people that they are trying to oppose.