Over the weekend, we learned something both fascinating and disturbing: last year, White House national security adviser John Bolton asked the Pentagon to prepare military strike options against Iran.
The request came after Shia militias affiliated with Tehran launched several mortars into Baghdad’s diplomatic quarter, where the U.S. Embassy is located. Fortunately, the mortars landed in an open field and caused minimal damage. For Bolton, however, this relatively common incident in the Iraqi capital was enough to warrant at least the consideration of a U.S. military response.
As the Wall Street Journal reported, officials in the Pentagon were concerned about Bolton’s request. “It definitely rattled people,” a former senior U.S. administration official said. “People were shocked. It was mind-boggling how cavalier they were about hitting Iran.”
The request is mind-boggling less not for who made it, but for why it was made in the first place.
Bolton has spent more than a decade outside of government obsessively campaigning for military action against Iran, the overthrow of the government in Tehran, and its replacement with a regime more sympathetic to U.S. preferences. Before taking the job as President Trump’s national security adviser, Bolton devoted a considerable portion of his time on the airways of Fox News and in the pages of the Wall Street Journal vocally advocating for regime change, guided perhaps by the stupendously naive belief that a Washington-imposed toppling of a government in Iran would be any more successful than it was in Baghdad, Tripoli, or Damascus. When he wasn’t in Paris addressing fringe Iranian dissident groups and boisterously predicting the Islamic Republic’s demise, he was writing editorials in America’s paper-of-record lecturing U.S. officials that the only reliable way for Washington to prevent Tehran from attaining a nuclear weapons capability was by pre-emptively bombing their facilities — damn the consequences or the retaliation.
In Bolton’s dogmatic worldview, diplomacy is for suckers; negotiating with adversaries in general is not only a waste of precious time, but a sign of fecklessness.
A shoot-first, ask-questions-later mentality is totally outside the bounds of rational statecraft and one that should have been discredited by the foreign policy establishment the moment it was uttered. Diplomacy is not some throwaway option or a box to be checked en route to the use of military force, but rather a prime tool to promote and defend the U.S. national security interest in the most peaceful and least harmful way.
There is some evidence available that Trump realizes the lasting benefits of talking with your adversary and believes that discarding diplomacy in favor of regime change has been a total and complete loser for the U.S. As a presidential candidate, Trump based much of his platform on getting better deals for the U.S., whether this involved disputes about trade, infrastructure, burden-sharing, or foreign policy.
Trump has largely stuck with his guns, most prevalently illustrated in his eagerness to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un despite strong doubts and likely opposition from his more establishment advisers. Whereas many on Capitol Hill view any reproach towards Russian President Vladimir Putin with a kind of extreme aversion to diplomacy, Trump sees it as the cost of doing business.
In Trump’s mind, no country is so unreasonable as to render diplomacy completely useless — even if that country is Iran. At the same time the president has lambasted Tehran for a long list of grievances and asked his military advisers if they possessed contingency plans to sink Iran’s fast-boats in the Persian Gulf, Trump has also publicly expressed his willingness to hold a dialogue with Iranian officials about any number of issues that pit the two countries together. Trump has even suggested that he would be open to meeting with Iran unconditionally, an idea he later walked back but one that likely continues to be intriguing to a man who considers himself a wily and effective negotiator.
The notion of U.S. and Iranian officials talking to one another will surely cause panic and disgust in the minds of those, like Bolton, who have spent their entire careers in Washington dangerously and inartfully casting diplomacy with America’s adversaries as a pitiless weakness. Yet mankind has not discovered a better way of peacefully addressing problems in international relations. Oftentimes, the most sober way of getting to the core of the issue (defending American national security) and preserving America’s geopolitical flexibility is by sitting down for a tough and principled negotiation — no matter how much you may despise the other side.
Any negotiation with Iran is likely a long way off. There is no evidence, at least publicly, that Iranian officials are interested in a dialogue with Washington about anything, let alone big issues like Tehran’s nuclear and missile programs. Indeed, Iran has reportedly rejected U.S. diplomatic overtures numerous times in the past, most recently last month when a close national security aide to the Supreme Leader visited Afghanistan.
It would be highly premature and self-defeating, however, for the Trump administration to shut the door completely and deprive itself of one of the sharpest tools in the toolbox. John Bolton may be unable to understand this concept, but his boss certainly does.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a fellow at Defense Priorities.
