The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In Bolton, allies see unnerving throwback
BRUSSELS — President Donald Trump’s decision to make John Bolton his new national security adviser ricocheted around the globe on Friday, unsettling allies and raising alarm that a hawk who advocates military action against North Korea and Iran will have the president’s ear.
From Berlin and Jerusalem to Seoul and Tokyo, U.S. allies who have long felt that Trump’s unconventional rhetoric on foreign policy often did not translate to concrete policy are bracing for a shift. After the nomination last week of the hawkish Mike Pompeo to become secretary of state, Bolton’s elevation means that Defense Secretary Jim Mattis is the lone survivor among a trifecta of advisers who pushed Trump to hew closer to conventional foreign policy positions.
Now, Bolton’s regimechange rhetoric toward North Korea and Iran may lead to a hardening of policy, allies believe. Europeans, who widely support a 2015 deal to restrict Iran’s nuclear program, fear its imminent demise. Some Israelis — even those who criticized the pact — are also concerned. And in South Korea and Japan, there are fears that Trump is preparing for war if talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, scheduled for May, fail to yield breakthroughs.
More broadly, the appointment has fueled worries that the Trump administration is turning its back on Washington’s decades-long role as the preeminent guarantor of global stability.
“We would desperately wish to see the United States in a constructive leading role as a steward of the international system,” said Norbert Röttgen, chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the
lower house of the German Parliament. He said he fears Washington is moving in the opposite direction.
“We are concerned that the policy is coming closer to the rhetoric,” he said. Trump “has now surrounded himself with people who share his intuitions and his general views.”
Some leaders braced themselves for more turmoil.
“We are at the greatest risk of real conflict than we have been for many years, perhaps decades,” said Xenia Wickett, head of the Americas program at Chatham House, a London think tank.
The appointment enflamed concerns about the prospects of a conflict with North Korea. H.R. McMaster, the outgoing national security adviser, was no dove on Pyongyang, repeatedly talking about military options to make it give
up its nuclear weapons program. But Bolton’s move into the president’s inner circle comes at a particularly sensitive time: The South Korean president is preparing to hold a summit with Kim Jong Un at the end of April, and Trump plans to follow suit in May.
“By tapping Bolton, who has called for preemptive strikes against North Korea, Trump is sending a message to the regime, telling them that they should come out to talks in order to avoid such drastic military backlash,” said Kim Sung-han, a former South Korean vice foreign minister who is now dean of Korea University’s Graduate School of International Studies.
Bolton has advocated a hard line against North Korea since he served as undersecretary of state for arms control and ambassador to the United Nations during the George W. Bush administration.
At that time, the North’s state-run Korean Central News Agency regularly denounced Bolton, calling him “human scum and a bloodsucker.”
The hostility is mutual. “There’s an all-purpose joke here,” Bolton said this month when asked about North Korea’s conciliatory moves toward South Korea and, by extension, the United States. “Question: How do you know that the North Korean regime is lying? Answer: Their lips are moving.”
Japan has also been increasingly worried about becoming collateral damage, as North Korea last year fired several missiles over Japanese territory and threatened to strike American military bases in Japan.
Bolton’s ascent lends even higher states to the diplomatic effort underway.
“I am particularly worried that if the Trump-Kim summit fails, Bolton will take that as proof that we must hit North Korea,” said Robert Kelly, an American who teaches international relations at Pusan National University in South Korea.
In Europe, even before the Bolton move, leaders were gathered for a two-day summit in Brussels that was dominated by concerns about Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum, another area that threatens the transatlantic relationship that has underpinned Western stability since the end of the Cold War.
For Europeans, Bolton himself is a throwback to the era of clashes with Washington at the outset of the war in Iraq in 2003. This time, though, he will have far more power than in his Bush-era role.
“A nightmare comes true,” Reinhard Bütikofer, a German member of the European Parliament, wrote on Twitter.