A major international crisis is “much more likely” in Donald Trump’s second term given the president-elect’s “inability to focus” on foreign policy, a former US ambassador to the United Nations has warned.
John Bolton, who at 17 months was Trump’s longest-serving national security adviser, delivered a scathing critique of his lack of knowledge, interest in facts or coherent strategy. He described Trump’s decision-making as driven by personal relationships and “neuron flashes” rather than a deep understanding of national interests.
Bolton also dismissed Trump’s claims during this year’s election campaign that only he could prevent a third world war while bringing a swift end to the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine.
“It’s typical Trump: it’s all braggadocio,” Bolton told the Guardian. “The world is more dangerous than when he was president before. The only real crisis we had was Covid, which is a long-term crisis and not against a particular foreign power but against a pandemic.
“But the risk of an international crisis of the 19th-century variety is much more likely in a second Trump term. Given Trump’s inability to focus on coherent decision making, I’m very worried about how that might look.”
Bolton, 76, is a longtime foreign policy hardliner who supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq and has called for US military action against Iran, North Korea and other countries over their attempts to build or procure nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.
He was President George W Bush’s UN ambassador for 16 months after serving as a state department arms negotiator and in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush. Bolton was Trump’s national security adviser from April 2018 to September 2019.
Bolton recalled: “What I believed was that, like every American president before him, the weight of the responsibilities, certainly in national security, the gravity of the issues that he was confronting, the consequences of his decisions, would discipline his thinking in a way that would produce serious outcomes.
“It turned out I was wrong. By the time I got there a lot of patterns of behaviour had already been set that were never changed and it could well be, even if I had been there earlier, I couldn’t have affected it. But it was clear pretty soon after I got there that intellectual discipline wasn’t in the Trump vocabulary.”
In a sharp departure from traditional US foreign policy, Trump has campaigned under an “America first” banner advocating isolationism, non-interventionism and trade protectionism, including significant tariffs.
Bolton agreed with “a lot” of Trump’s decisions during his first term but found they had all the coherence of “a series of neuron flashes”, he said. “He doesn’t have a philosophy, doesn’t do policy as we understand that, he doesn’t have a national security strategy.
“I said in my book his decisions are like an archipelago of dots. You can try and draw lines between them but even he can’t draw lines between them. You try and incrementally get one right decision after another. At least that’s what his advisers thought: that we could string enough decisions together. But that’s not the way he looked at it.”
The 45th president “could be charming”, Bolton acknowledged, and placed an emphasis on personal relations with autocrats such as Xi Jinping of China, Kim Jong-un of North Korea and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. But he lacked the competence required for the job and showed a blatant disregard for the national security briefing that presidents receive daily.
“He doesn’t know much about foreign policy. He’s not a big reader. He reads newspapers from time to time but briefing papers are almost never read because he doesn’t think they’re important. He doesn’t think these facts are important. He thinks he looks the other guy across the table in the eye and they make a deal and that’s what’s important.”
Trump believes he has a friendship with Putin, Bolton added. “I don’t know what Putin thinks his relationship is with Trump but he believes he knows how to play Trump, that Trump’s an easy mark. Trump doesn’t see that at all.
“If you put everything on the basis of personal relations and you don’t understand how the person you’re talking about on the other side views you, that’s a real lack of situational awareness that can only cause trouble.”
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Trump has repeatedly praised authoritarians such as Putin and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and not ruled out withdrawing from Nato. Asked about Trump’s now notorious affinity with strongmen, the former national security adviser replied: “I suppose a shrink would have a better grasp of it but I think Trump likes being a big guy, likes other big guys.
“These other big guys don’t have pesky independent legislatures and judiciaries and they do big guy things that Trump can’t do and he just wishes he could do. It’s a lot more fun if you don’t have the kinds of constraints that constitutional governments impose.”
In recent days, Trump has again rattled diplomats by threatening to take back the Panama Canal, calling for the US to buy Greenland and suggesting that Canada become the 51st state. Kim Darroch, who was Britain’s ambassador to Washington for four years from 2016, told Sky News that Trump’s second term would be “like a 24/7 bar-room brawl”.
Bolton agrees that it could be even more erratic and disruptive than the first: “He now feels more confident in his judgment having been re-elected, which will make it even harder to impose any kind of intellectual decision-making discipline.”
Trump has said he would end Russia’s war on Ukraine within a day, prompting fears of a compromise that halts US military aid and obliges Ukraine to surrender territory. Bolton commented: “I’m very concerned that he wants this off the table. He thinks this is Biden’s war.
“He said in the campaign, if he had been president, it never would have happened which, of course, is not provable or disprovable. He wants it behind him, which strongly implies he doesn’t care on what terms and I suspect he doesn’t care. And that’s very dangerous for Ukraine.”
He praised Trump’s picks of Senator Marco Rubio and Congressman Mike Waltz for the positions of secretary of state and national security adviser respectively. But he described the nominations of Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence and Kash Patel for director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as “really dangerous”, arguing that Gabbard’s opinions belong on “a different planet”.
Gabbard is a longtime critic of the hawkish foreign policy and national security establishment, memorably dubbed “the blob” in 2016 by Ben Rhodes, then Barack Obama’s deputy national security adviser. Bolton, however, rejects the characterisation.
“I don’t think there’s a foreign policy blob,” he said. “There’s a liberal Democratic blob that’s pretty problematic but the Republican party remains essentially Reaganite in its outlook. Trump is an aberration and, when he leaves the political scene, the party will snap back. We’re in the grips, though, of Trump for four more years and a lot of damage could take place during that period.”
