By appointing John Bolton to replace Gen. H.R. McMaster as his national security adviser, President Trump is giving himself the benefit of support from a tough-minded expert who knows how to work the system constructively.
Trump is at turns creative and destructive. Bolton can be expected to steer him toward the former and away from the latter. The new national security adviser is as blunt as his boss, so although he respects both process and the chain of command, he will give the president his unvarnished opinion and the benefit of his considerable knowledge and intellect.
Bolton will probably have an especially positive influence where Trump needs it most, which is in strategy and tactics toward Russia’s leader, President Vladimir Putin. Bolton has long recognized the threat Putin poses and has consistently pushed for more effective action against the Kremlin. In an interview last week, he lambasted Britain for not taking more aggressive action to retaliate for Russia’s poisoning of a former intelligence agent.
Beyond his encyclopedic knowledge of security matters, Bolton will help Trump because of his personality. He knows how Washington works but, like the president, he does not try to move without a trace through the federal capital. That is, he makes waves better than he makes friends. He intimately understands the national security bureaucracy, but he has never truly belonged to it. From his time as a State Department undersecretary for former President George W. Bush to his short tenure as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Bolton has declined to play the Washington game of winning new friends and earning better jobs. Yet he has managed to influence those around him.
Like Trump, he has trusted his own determination and judgment. Like Trump, he is suspicious of consensus viewpoints. And like Trump, he is unafraid to ruffle feathers. Indeed, like Trump, he seems to enjoy it. These similarities will help Trump trust him, and will give the president the benefit of their widely dissimilar levels of knowledge and judgment.
An obstacle to the formulation of a coherent and credible policy toward Putin so far has been Trump’s deep distrust of those who have been advising him. He seems to take actions and make statements that smack of fondness for Putin in part because the intelligence community advises him not to.
It is clear that many in the national security bureaucracy do not respect the president, to put it no more strongly. To acknowledge this, even without endorsing Trump’s suspicion that those very advisers covertly seek to undermine him, nevertheless makes plain that the man in the Oval Office has lacked people he trusts to guide him on foreign and security policy. But by nominating CIA Director Mike Pompeo to run the State Department and now by appointing John Bolton as national security adviser, the president is putting in place high-caliber people suited to those positions, but also, crucially, likely to put the president more at ease in deciding what to do on crucial issues.
Trump will probably be more willing to listen to intelligence briefers when they tell him about the dangers of Putin’s expansionist agenda and Russia’s broad and deep hostility toward America. Where Trump’s policy toward Russia has lurched between tactical unpredictability and strategic chaos, it can now start to make sense, and give assurance both domestically and to our allies.
With Bolton, the president should feel some assurance that he is being advised by someone who wants him to succeed rather than to fail. Trump will know where Bolton is unconvinced by what the foreign, intelligence, and police communities are saying, he will make it known plainly enough.
We hope and trust that Bolton will help Trump understand that Putin’s agenda is to undermine the U.S.-led international order and to degrade the democratic security of Western Europe.
His appointment is thoroughly welcome.
