Former National Security Advisor John Bolton has been involved with government since his White House internship days under VP Spiro Agnew during the Nixon administration and is known for his overtly hawkish and unilateral approach to foreign policy.
Unlike other architects of the disastrous Iraq War, Bolton has stayed within and without government since then and doesn’t hide his desire to push for regime change via military means in countries like Iran and Venezuela, something that the current administration has, so far, seemed to avoid due to Trump’s isolationist stance. Bolton defended his decision not to testify during the impeachment trial, convincing himself that his testimony would not have changed the eventual acquittal of President Trump.
Q: How does President Trump view the U.S. relationship with China as a rising power and a rising force?
BOLTON: Well, to the extent he views it systematically as anything, he views it through the prism of trade.
I think he has the correct insight that China's economic power is the basis on which its military and political power internationally rests so that if, as I think, is now more and more widely believed across the political spectrum in the United States, China has stolen intellectual property, engaged in forced technology transfers, discriminated against foreign trade investors all of those applicable to the US, applicable to Japan to Europe to many others and we call those structural issues in the trade relationship. If you don't get those resolved the growth of Chinese power continues unchecked, and and that's unacceptable. So there is an appreciation of the impact of the economic issues into the geopolitical and strategic realm, but mostly Trump looks at it as a balance sheet question our balance of payments, deficit with China is large he wants that to come down.
And I think it's through this prism of trade that a lot of the other issues have to be understood, whether it's dealing with Hong Kong, dealing with the Uyghurs dealing with religious freedom in China, dealing with the North Korean nuclear weapons program with the East China Sea the South China Sea cyberspace, you know, you name it, ultimately for Trump he sees it all through trade.
Q: Is trade the linchpin of the US-China relationship? Is that ultimately what the relationship is based on?
BOLTON: Right, well that's what I mean by the black hole.
I'm not saying trade is not important, obviously, it is and particularly when it rests on violation of international norms, American law, protection of intellectual property that kind of thing. I'm not saying it's a waste of time. I'm saying that the fact that Trump sees everything as a trade issue means you can't even get the other issues.
And in most of the discussions we have the secretary of defense never went to these trade meetings, because I couldn't get a word in edgewise, and I used to go to them I say in the book, ‘sitting through them made my head hurt.’ They were so disjointed so disconnected so so rambling.
But what what Trump wanted was the big trade deal with China, it would be the deal of the century and that's somewhat in competition with the Israeli-Palestinian deal which was also going to be the deal of the century, he didn't get either one of them.
But in a second Trump term, coming back to China, it's entirely possible that everything you've seen the past six months the COVID pandemic response, the Uyghurs, Hong Kong, all of this gets thrown aside again when he calls us Jinping and says ‘let's talk trade.’
Q: You’ve talked about the decision-making process between cabinet members like (Robert) Lighthizer, (Steven) Mnuchin, (Mike) Pompeo, etc. How does that process look like vis a vis China?
BOLTON: Well, I think in the trade area it's these endless meetings that — I don't know if you know what a food fight is, but in college when I was there food fights were people would just throw food at each other on the other side of the Dining Room, it was, it was what you did in college. That's what these meetings were like.
You could get one decision the next day and the next week you'd come back and get the opposite decision, made it very difficult to conduct consistent trade policy, let alone consistent strategic policy with respect to China, the administration's divisions were all well known. I'm sure there were divisions on the Chinese side, but it was very hard to see what they were because they didn't tell us they didn't have them in public, but this is typical of the of the Trump approach to things, it was not done through a National Security Council process. I think that would have been more orderly but it wouldn't necessarily have bound Trump any more strongly he still would have done what he what he wanted to do.
Q: Are there cabinet members advocating for a tougher stance on China since the onset of the pandemic?
BOLTON: Well, I think it varies on issue by issue but what happened at the beginning of the pandemic at least from the west in the US perspective is the beginning in January and February, early from our perspective. There were people at the NSC staff, Centers for Disease Control and others, raising red flags, about what was potentially happening in China.
Both epidemiologically and economically and what the consequences of all that could be for the United States and Trump just didn't want to listen to it, he didn't want to hear anything bad about Xi Jingpin, he didn't want to hear anything bad about China covering up the extent of the corona virus infection, the effect it was having on the Chinese economy, he didn't want to hear anything that would kind of undercut China's ability to purchase agricultural and other projects in the limited trade deal that had been made in 2019 and most importantly of all, he didn't want to hear this could be really bad because he could see that would have a negative impact on the on the US economy which was his ticket to re-election.
So I think the US last months, when more activity might have mitigated the effect of the disease and the economic consequences as well.
Now, it's clear that people understand the extent of the Chinese cover-up in the section that they practice on the rest of the world. So the policy is very tough on China now, on the Uyghurs, on Hong Kong, and so on.
But, as I say in the book in several places, it was a pattern that Trump's national security decisions were often based on the domestic American political consequences of taking the wrong decision, not based on the merits of the arguments on foreign and defense policy grounds but based on the political blowback that he could face if he went in a certain direction.
Now after the election, the political connection is much reduced, so that the consequences, the negative consequences politically are not as severe in the second term as they are in the first. Therefore, one really doesn't know what direction on many of these things Trump would go in, but I think it's almost inevitable he would return to the trade deal as a very high priority.
Q: Is your time in public service done? Do you see yourself going back?
BOLTON: In my own case I don't expect to go back into government at any point really, certainly not while Trump is president and if Biden wins in November I don’t, I’m not going to wait around for all from him either. So, you know, I was, I was I've been in and out of government many times and there are times when it's, you might expect to go in, there plenty of times when you don't expect to go in and that's the period I think we're in now from my perspective.
Q: What’s your single largest regret from your time in public service?
BOLTON: Well, you know there are a lot of things you don't accomplish.
Everybody ultimately works for somebody, including the President who is at the top of the pyramid. And you have to acknowledge that, you know that your advice is not always going to be followed. I'd like to say in my last job I was the National Security Advisor not the national security decision maker.
So there's always more that you could have done, but you know if you spent your life second guessing what you did you'd spent an awful lot of time looking backward not looking forward.
So that's one reason I've written this book and the book I wrote before “Surrender is not an option.” I've tried to put it out on paper, historians, others can read it and as some already have on this book to tell me what mistakes I made what I could have been what I could have done better so there'll be a lot of commentary to that effect, I'm sure.
Q: What are your future projects and/or priorities?
BOLTON: Well, in the short term, I hope to do what I can to help keep a Republican majority in the Senate, I think that's very important whether Trump wins or loses but if Biden wins in particular, the Democrats control the House, the Senate and the presidency. That's very worrisome.
But if Republicans can keep a majority in the Senate, then that's a check on the particularly the left wing of the Democratic Party. So that's what I'm going to do between now and November and then after November I think there has to be a discussion within the party about what to do in the post-Trump era, whether he wins or loses and I still think that a strong American foreign policy what Reagan called ‘peace through strength’ is very important so I expect to be involved in that too.