58 pages • 1 hour read
John BoltonThe Room Where It Happened
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Trump’s Inability to Distinguish Between the National Interest and His Personal Interests
To Bolton, this is the guiding principle behind virtually every decision Trump makes as president. Near the end of the book, Bolton says, “I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my tenure that wasn’t driven by reelection calculations” (485). It is an incendiary claim, but one that is supported throughout the book and, to some extent, in the public record.
It takes some time before Bolton realizes this about Trump. Very early on, Bolton works well with Trump as they successfully withdraw from the Iran deal, a decision Bolton believes is driven by their shared belief that the deal validates a terrorism-sponsoring regime while hastening Iran’s acquisition of nuclear arms. Yet as Bolton comes to understand the extent to which Trump is motivated by personal resentments, the president’s withdrawal looks more and more like a personal rebuke to Obama—a big part of the president’s electoral brand—rather than a sincere effort to halt Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
This trend becomes even more glaring during Trump’s first summit with Kim Jong Un. Despite the threat of losing credibility—or much more—by taking a meeting with North Korea, Trump is happy to schedule the summit for sheer publicity. In his mind, either he will reach a historic deal that lands him in the history books—and more importantly to Trump, in the White House for a second term—or he rejects a deal and appears tough to his electoral base. These are Trump’s chief considerations as he meets with a murderous autocratic dictator with nuclear weapons.
Trump’s other dealings with authoritarian leaders are even more transparently geared toward Trump’s electoral ambitions rather than the national interest or the rule of law. In an effort to convince Erdogan to release a Christian pastor—which would be seen as a major win by Trump’s evangelical base—the president offers to interfere with the Southern District of New York’s investigation into Halkbank, a Turkish state financial institution. In his boundless zeal to strike a politically attractive deal with China, Trump makes similar concessions pertaining to investigations into the Chinese telecom companies Huawei and ZTE.
As the book progresses, Trump grows more confident in his conflation of personal and national interests. When debating a troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, for example, his chief concern is, “How does it look politically?” (435). To Bolton, this pattern culminates during the Ukraine affair, when Trump withholds security aid to an important Eastern European ally unless it launches an investigation into the president’s political rivals.
Given the contentious nature of these observations, it is important to compare Bolton’s view of Trump with the president’s own public statements. In this respect, the two square disturbingly well. One need not read a White House tell-all to know that Trump habitually asks foreign adversaries to help him win elections. After Russian-sponsored operatives hacked the Democratic National Committee’s servers, Trump publicly asked Russia to find 30,000 “missing emails” belonging to his rival in the 2016 presidential race, Hillary Clinton. (Parker, Ashley, and David E. Sanger. “Donald Trump Calls on Russia to Find Hillary Clinton’s Missing Emails.” The New York Times, 27 July 2016.) As cited earlier, this pattern continued into Trump’s presidency when he said in a 2019 interview that he wouldn’t contact the FBI if a foreign adversary offered dirt on a political opponent. And even as Trump sat at the center of a political firestorm after the infamous July 15 Ukraine call, Trump publicly called on China to investigate the Bidens. (Baker, Peter, and Eileen Sullivan. “Trump Publicly Urges China to Investigate the Bidens.” The New York Times, 3 Oct. 2019.)
How Trump’s Foreign Policy Efforts Threaten US National Security
While Bolton acknowledges Trump’s inability to separate his personal interests from the national interest, he also admits that sometimes these two objectives are aligned. In Bolton’s view at least, this is true of Trump’s desire to withdraw from the Iran deal and his support of Juan Guaidó during the Venezuelan presidential crisis.
Yet more often than not, Bolton believes that Trump’s impulsive, self-obsessed approach to foreign policy threatens America’s interests and thus its national security. This phenomenon first rears its head during the initial negotiations with North Korea. Despite receiving nothing in return, Trump ends US-South Korea military exercises on the Korean Peninsula, at least in part at Kim’s urging. To Bolton, this significantly diminishes the US and South Korea’s military readiness should war break out on the Peninsula—hardly an implausible scenario.
The same is true of Trump’s impulsive yet very real threat to leave NATO, a desire motivated by Trump’s political branding as a president who is tough on the European Union. The proposed withdrawal is also motivated by Trump’s consistent need to make big, legacy-establishing moves that dominate US domestic headlines. Before announcing his plans to Bolton, Trump flippantly says, “Do you want to do something historic?” (143). While this would no doubt make headlines—many of them negative—leaving NATO would also leave Europe exposed to expansionist efforts by Russia or even China. In Bolton’s mind, preserving European power and sovereignty is a bulwark against Russian and Chinese encroachment that would in turn threaten US sovereignty. Such is the extent to which Trump’s impulsivity threatens national security.
On that same trip to Europe, Trump sides with Putin over his own intelligence agencies. While Bolton does not know precisely what motivates this stunning public admission, he knows it bolsters Russia’s reputation by showing how Putin can effectively browbeat the president of the United States into accepting the Kremlin’s false narrative of 2016 election-meddling. More than that, it undermines America’s efforts to fight Russian election interference in 2018 and beyond. Finally, it undermines the US intelligence community at large, which long ago concluded that Russian-sponsored operatives were responsible for the meddling in 2016.
This pattern also emerges during the Ukraine affair. To Bolton, it is in the US’s best interest to protect Ukraine from further encroachment by Russia, which only emboldens Putin’s efforts to continue spreading his influence West toward the rest of Europe. Yet Trump withholds invaluable security assistance to Ukraine unless it opens an investigation into the president’s chief political rival Joe Biden based on thoroughly discredited allegations.
To be fair, what Bolton believes is in the national interest is not what every American believes is in the national interest. For example, there is an argument to be made that Trump’s last-minute decision to cancel a retaliatory strike in Iran—impulsive though it may be—makes Americans safer by helping to avoid war in Iran. The same might be said of Trump’s desire to withdraw troops from Syria and Afghanistan, though none of these are agreed-upon conclusions in national security circles. Regardless, Bolton contends that many of Trump’s foreign policy moves threaten US national security and sovereignty, and his argument is a compelling one.
Bolton’s Slow Initiation into the “Axis of Adults”
Early on, Bolton rejects the conventional wisdom that in the first year of Trump’s presidency, the president was successfully reined in by cooler heads surrounding him. These individuals—often referred to as “the adults in the room” or “the axis of adults”—are best exemplified by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster, and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis. In Politico Magazine, Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay write of these men,
[N]one of them had embraced the America First ideas Trump had expounded on the campaign trail. They instead all held mainstream views on foreign policy. They believed in the importance of American leadership in the world—and what it could accomplish. They stressed the value of alliances, the importance of diplomacy, the benefits of free trade and the need to find common ground with others. (Daalder, Ivo, and James Lindsay. “RIP, Axis of Adults.” Politico Magazine, 21 Dec. 2018.)
That doesn’t sound much like Bolton, and so it makes sense that the author distances himself from these men upon his arrival in the White House. First and foremost, Bolton believes that it is a subversion of executive power to push an agenda contrary to the president’s from within the cabinet. Moreover, when dealing with a president like Trump, such acts of subversion “fed Trump’s already-suspicious mind-set, making it harder for those who came later to have legitimate policy exchanges with the president” (2). It is almost as if Bolton blames Mattis, McMaster, and Tillerson for Trump’s refusal to listen to him rather than Trump’s innate impetuousness—a contention that makes little sense in context with the rest of the narrative.
Yet setting aside the ideological differences between Bolton and the axis of adults, from a tactical standpoint there is very little daylight separating the author from Mattis and the rest, at least by the end of the book. On North Korea, NATO, Syria, Afghanistan, Turkey, Ukraine, and Iran—the nuclear deal notwithstanding—Bolton constantly works against the president’s agenda, thus positioning himself as a full-fledged member of the axis of adults. Moreover, his justifications for doing so are no different than Mattis’s. He truly believes that his ultimate duty is to the national interest, not the president’s personal interests. In an administration where those two concepts are so frequently at odds, Bolton sees no choice but to work against the president.
