Incoming White House national security adviser Robert O’Brien was pushed by Mitt Romney, a Trump critic and failed 2012 Republican nominee, as an ideal person for the role in 2016.
“I wouldn’t be surprised — indeed I’d be relieved — if Robert is the next president’s national security advisor,” Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, who tapped O’Brien as an adviser for each of his presidential bids, wrote in a prescient endorsement of O’Brien’s While America Slept, a collection of essays released in September of 2016.
O’Brien is President Trump’s fourth national security adviser, after nearly a year and a half as Trump’s special envoy for hostage negotiations at the State Department. His previous foreign policy experience includes a stint as a U.S. diplomat at the United Nations, where he worked alongside then-Ambassador John Bolton from 2005 to 2006. He also was the co-chairman of a State Department initiative to reform the justice system in Afghanistan, a tenure that began under Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice in the waning years of George W. Bush’s presidency and continued into Barack Obama’s first term, when Hillary Clinton was the top diplomat.
That resume might expose him attacks from Trump loyalists who worry that president’s agenda is being undermined from within the government, but O’Brien’s appointment drew initial applause. “I am confident he will advance our national security during this time of heightened global tension, when enemies like Iran and rivals such as Russia and China are challenging us with new dangers, and I look forward to working with him in confronting those dangers,” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who previously worried that “deep state forces” who oppose Trump’s maximum pressure campaign against Iran would take advantage of Bolton’s ouster.
O’Brien has been a harsh critic of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which he described as “rank appeasement” in a 2018 interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt prior to joining the administration. He made clear that he shares Bolton’s hard-nosed attitude about how to negotiate with Iran and the outgoing White House adviser’s skepticism about past U.S. efforts to strike an agreement to dismantle North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.
“The Iranians are very good negotiators. They took us to the cleaners with the Iran deal,” O’Brien told Hewitt. “The North Koreans have been doing this for many years, and have taken a number of presidents to the cleaners. No one is going to take John Bolton to the cleaners in a negotiation. If you’re President Trump, you know, having Mike Pompeo, the former CIA director on one hand, on one side, and having you know, Ambassador John Bolton, the best lawyer foreign policy hand in America in either party on the other side, that puts you in a very powerful position in those negotiations.”
But Trump disliked Bolton’s approach to high-stakes national security issues. The North Korea negotiations “were set back very badly” by Bolton’s comments that the talks could follow the “Libya model” — a reference to the late dictator Moammar Gadhafi’s agreement to stop attempting to develop nuclear weapons. And Bolton reportedly resigned in part over Trump’s apparent willingness to consider easing sanctions on Iran.
O’Brien described Bolton as “the best lawyer foreign policy hand in America in either party.” His criticisms of Obama’s record could foreshadow stylistic disputes with Trump, who has made high-profile symbolic overtures to dictators while clashing with leading European allies.
“[Obama] labels his critics as ‘neo-cons,’ sets up a straw man choice between his ‘lead from behind’ policies and all-out war, distances himself from key allies, and apologizes to or weakly negotiates without our adversaries,” O’Brien wrote in the introduction to his 2016 book.
