President Trump’s decision to replace national security adviser H.R. McMaster with former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton drew quick applause Thursday from Iran hawks on Capitol Hill.
“[Bolton is] an excellent choice to take the baton from General McMaster,” Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said after Trump revealed the decision.
Cotton offered high praise for McMaster — “a warrior and a scholar, one of the best generals of his generation,” he said — whose departure clears the way for one of the aggressive Iran hawks in Republican foreign policy circles. Bolton’s open support for regime change in Iran could make him a notable ally for Cotton, who won last year an internal administration debate that resulted in Trump taking a key procedural step towards abandoning the nuclear deal negotiated by former President Barack Obama’s team.
“I know John Bolton well and believe he is an excellent choice who will do a great job as National Security Advisor,” Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., concurred. “General McMaster has served, and will continue to serve, our nation well and I thank him for his service.”
Bolton’s elevation to the post of national security adviser is a stark turnabout from August, when he lamented that “staff changes at the White House have made it impossible” to show Trump his proposal for how the United States could “abrogate” the nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
At the time, Trump was mulling whether he would decline to certify that the Iran nuclear deal is in the American national interests, over the opposition of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. In the midst of those internal deliberations, Bolton protested that Tillerson favored “the wrong policy” for countering the threats posed by Iranian and North Korean nuclear weapons programs.
“The president in the speech today … particularly on Iran and North Korea, could not have been more clear,” Bolton said in September following Trump’s address to the United Nations General Assembly. “The issue is whether the rest of his government feels the same way.”
In the event, Cotton persuaded Trump not to certify the deal, but to delay renewing the Iran deal sanctions. Instead, the administration is using the threat of sanctions to force European allies to negotiate improvements to the Iran deal. Those talks are ongoing, but could come to an impasse over Trump’s determination to impose new restrictions on Iran’s ability to develop nuclear material.
“I can’t predict whether we will reach an agreement with them or not,” Brian Hook, the State Department director of policy planning who led a U.S. delegation to Europe for a round of meetings last week, told reporters. “We have a goal in mind, and we either will reach agreement or we won’t.”
Bolton’s appointment comes just days after Trump fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and tapped CIA Director Mike Pompeo, another notable Iran hawk, to replace him. The personnel changes may bring Trump’s foreign policy team more in line with his own instincts regarding Obama’s top foreign policy achievement.
“When you look at the Iran deal, I think it’s terrible,” Trump said after firing Tillerson. “I guess [Tillerson] thought it was OK. I wanted to either break it or do something, and he felt a little bit differently. So we were not really thinking the same. With Mike, Mike Pompeo, we have a very similar thought process. I think it’s going to go very well.”
Bolton is a fierce critic of the Iran deal, as he doubts the efficacy of sanctions to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions. “They have certainly not worked in the case of Iran and North Korea for 25 years,” Bolton said in September. “There’s no prospect they will work in year 26.” In January, he said that Trump should support Iranian dissidents when protests broke out against the regime, with the understanding that “our goal should be regime change in Iran.”
If Bolton convinces Trump to withdraw from the pact, that would be a more aggressive tactic even by the standards of other Iran hawks.
“I think my long-standing hope for a fix to the Iran deal just died,” said Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which has argued that the Iran deal has destabilized the Middle East, tweeted after Bolton’s appointment. “Time of death: Afternoon of March 22, 2018. Now what?”
That question has been echoed even by foreign policy experts who regard Bolton’s proposal as a high-risk, high-reward play.
“The full John Bolton may not get a deal but you may get yourself in a situation where you have a better check on Iranian power, but my criticism of John is that the way this plays out is it almost entirely relies upon the use the military force at some point,” a Middle East expert, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Washington Examiner in September. “Which I don’t rule out, of course … but that also raises a lot of unknowns if we go down that path. I just feel that John’s pathway after stage two or three, you really don’t know where you’re going to be.”
