By Derek Chollett
March 23, 2918
“Let me just say from the outset that I don’t consider Bolton credible.” Those aren’t the words of one of my former Obama administration colleagues, who are thinking much worse. That’s none other than George W. Bush, as reported by the New York Times’ Peter Baker. John Bolton is a long-standing member of the Washington swamp. Thinking back over the past 20 years – heck, let’s say 60 – I am hard pressed to think of any foreign policy official who has caused such angst before they even started the job. So this isn’t going to end well. Bolton is known for many things, but being a team player is not one of them. Just ask any former Bush 43 official (outside of Dick Cheney’s office). His tenure in Colin Powell’s State Department was so turbulent that Powell quietly worked against his promotion to UN ambassador. Bolton tangled with the intelligence community, pushing claims on Iraq’s alleged WMD and trying to end the careers of junior officials who disagreed with him. Once in New York, he regularly butted heads with Condoleezza Rice and her team, especially on issues like Iran and North Korea. Hence Bush 43’s back-of-the-hand dismissal of Bolton lacking credibility. The interagency process is not going to get any better. To the extent there has been such a process in this administration, it has been rife with dysfunction, but it’s about to get more so.
This will be a huge challenge for Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and the Pentagon. The harmony in civil-military relations is about to end. With Bolton Mattis will be facing something entirely different: an experienced bureaucratic knife-fighter who plays dirty and has a lot of ideas about how the military should be used. Bolton won’t show the Pentagon the same deference it has enjoyed for the past 14 months, so expect a lot of requests from him for military options on all matter of things. That won’t go over well in the Pentagon. There will be a lot of pushback, and we’ll be hearing about how he is not in the chain of command. So this will be a true test of Trump’s instinct to defer to military leaders versus Bolton’s desire to push them to do things they don’t want to do. My guess is that the Trump-Bolton relationship, like pretty much all of Trump’s relationships save for the flunkies and the dudes in the club grill room, will sour. For reasons of both process and policy, Bolton’s tenure in the White House will not turn out any better than that of his two predecessors – for him, or for the country. In fact, it will almost certainly end up worse.
