Trump names Bolton security advisor
President boots out ‘friend’ McMaster
WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump has named hardline Fox News pundit and former UN ambassador John Bolton as his new national security advisor, ousting embattled army general HR McMaster.
Mr Trump took to Twitter to announce the latest in a cascade of staff changes, one which calls the future of a landmark deal to curb Iran’s nuclear programme into serious doubt.
“I am pleased to announce that, effective 4/9/18, @AmbJohnMr Bolton will be my new National Security Advisor,” Mr Trump said.
The announcement came just days after he moved to replace secretary of state Rex Tillerson with another Iran hawk, CIA director Mike Pompeo.
“I am very thankful for the service of General H.R. Mr McMaster who has done an outstanding job & will always remain my friend,” Mr Trump tweeted.
Mr McMaster had been expected to leave later this year, so his exit was no surprise. But Mr Bolton’s nomination has stunned much of Washington.
A vocal advocate of the Iraq war, he has also championed pre-emptive strikes against North Korea and regime change in Iran, making him an outlier even among Republicans.
His appointment had been fiercely opposed by many within Mr Trump’s inner circle, most notably the coterie of military officers who have experienced the brutality of war first hand.
Mr Bolton, a veteran of the George W Bush administration, will now have a central role in crafting US foreign policy, refereeing debates between America’s spooks, soldiers and diplomats.
But his most potent role will be framing the security decisions that make it to Mr Trump’s desk.
His ideological approach to American power matches neatly with Mr Trump’s tough-talking rhetoric, although the two have not always agreed on overseas wars.
One Republican operative, speaking on condition of anonymity, admitted to some concerns about the appointment.
“Some folks think he’s a little too hawkish,” the source said.
“But people who have worked with him think he’s a pro and will step into the job knowing the key players, processes and issues.”
For his part, Mr Bolton tried to ease fears he would steer Mr Trump by the nose and down the path of war.
“I have my views. I’m sure I’ll have a chance to articulate them to the president,” he told Fox News.
“If the government can’t have a free interchange of ideas among the president’s advisers, I think the president is not well-served.”
Unlike the secretaries of state or defense, the national security advisor works directly for the president and does not need to be confirmed by the Senate in order to take up his post.
Mr McMaster’s exit is the latest in a string of high-profile-departures from the White House that started with national security advisor Michael Flynn and has also included chief of staff Reince Priebus, chief strategist Steve Bannon, economic advisor Gary Cohn and Tillerson.
Mr McMaster, a three-star army general, had been expected to move out of the White House and into a four-star position. Instead, he will retire from public life. “After thirty-four years of service to our nation, I am requesting retirement from the US Army effective this summer after which I will leave public service,” he said in a statement.
“Throughout my career it has been my greatest privilege to serve alongside extraordinary service members and dedicated civilians.”
Mr McMaster had been brought in to replace Mr Flynn, Mr Trump’s first national security advisor, who has since admitted to lying to the special counsel Robert Mueller and has turned state’s witness.
Mr Bolton’s appointment brought sharply different reactions, which in public cut along predictable party lines.
Democratic Senator Edward Markey described the appointment as “a grave danger to the American people and a clear message from President Mr Trump that he is gearing up for military conflict”.
Congressman Lee Zeldin, a Mr Trump loyalist, applauded the appointment and described Mr Bolton as “ridiculously knowledgeable”.
“Leaks from NSC will end. Obama holdovers will be gone & team, chemistry & work product will all get ramped up. Very underrated, amazing American. Extraordinarily talented pick,” he tweeted.
The Eurasia Group, a risk consultancy, said Mr Bolton’s appointment makes US foreign policy “America First on Steroids”.
“This very hardline, strident figure will stoke President Donald Mr Trump’s hardest-line instincts. Mr Bolton will want to implement very tough policies, and limit Mr Trump’s use of them as negotiating tactics,” it said.
He has a firm understanding of the threats we face from North Korea, Iran and radical Islam. LINDSEY GRAHAM US REPUBLICAN SENATOR
John R Bolton is hardly known for sugarcoating his views. He once derided the United Nations by citing its 38-story headquarters in New York. “If it lost 10 stories,” he said, “it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.” As it happened, Mr Bolton went on to serve as the US ambassador to the United Nations, perhaps the most undiplomatic of diplomats. But if President Donald Trump wanted a national security adviser who would match his blunt, hard-edge, confrontational approach to the world, then Mr Bolton fits the bill.
With his trademark bushy grey moustache and his take-no-prisoners style, Mr Bolton positioned himself to the right even of the foreign policy veterans who emerged from President George W Bush’s administration, a hawk among hawks, a hard-liner who thrills conservatives and chills moderates and liberals. From his perch on Fox News, he has impressed Mr Trump with a muscular vision of US power and a dark assessment of America’s adversaries.
When he takes over as Mr Trump’s third national security adviser in 14 months, Mr Bolton will almost surely encourage Mr Trump’s instincts against diplomatic agreements that both consider weak and unwise.
He shares the president’s derisive opinion of the Iran nuclear deal and will presumably prod him to scrap it when a May deadline arrives. He likewise takes a dim view of international agreements like the Paris climate change accord, from which Mr Trump announced last year that he would withdraw the United States. He has called the “two-state solution” for Israel and the Palestinians dead.
But Mr Bolton is not always in step with a president who sometimes veers back and forth between threatening “fire and fury” and eagerly seeking talks with foreign leaders. Mr Bolton argues the virtues of preemptive military action against North Korea and scorns diplomacy of the sort Mr Trump has embarked on with Kim Jong-un. He promotes more punitive sanctions against Russia rather than the kind of hand-holding flattery of President Vladimir Putin that Mr Trump practised even this week. He supported the Iraq War, which Mr Trump calls a catastrophic mistake.
In an interview on Thursday evening on Fox, Mr Bolton said he recognised that his role would be to play the honest broker bringing different views to the president, and that it would be up to Mr Trump to make the decisions.
But he made clear that he also planned to be Mr Trump’s enforcer. When the president makes a decision, he said, part of his job will be “making sure the bureaucracies get the decision and implement it”.
Mr Bolton criticised the frequent leaks out of Mr Trump’s national security team, saying that a president cannot conduct diplomacy “if some munchkin in the White House” is leaking information to the news media. “Leaking of that sort is simply unacceptable,” he said.
Mr Bolton’s appointment elicited mixed reviews. “Selecting John Bolton as national security adviser is good news for America’s allies and bad news for America’s enemies,” said , R-SC. “He has a firm understanding of the threats we face from North Korea, Iran and radical Islam.”
Critics, however, expressed concern that a bomb thrower in words could become a bomb thrower in deeds. “Bolton played a key role in politicising the intel that misled us into the Iraq War,” Sen Edward J Markey, D-Mass, wrote on Twitter. “We cannot let this extreme war hawk blunder us into another terrible conflict.”
Clifford Kupchan, the chairman of the Eurasia Group, a consulting firm, sent a note to clients warning that Mr Bolton’s appointment “increases risk across the board,” adding that it “makes US foreign policy ‘America First on Steroids’.”
At one point, Mr Bolton toyed with running for president himself, only to back off. Instead, he created an organisation to support like-minded candidates. His super PAC was one of the earliest customers of Cambridge Analytica, which has found itself confronting a deepening crisis after reports this past weekend that the firm had harvested the data from more than 50 million Facebook profiles in its bid to develop techniques for predicting the behaviour of individual U.S. voters.
The firm was founded with a US$15 million (468 million baht) investment from Robert Mercer, the wealthy Republican donor who has backed both Mr Bolton’s PAC and Mr Trump. Cambridge’s so-called psychographic modeling techniques, which were built in part with the data harvested from Facebook, underpinned its work for the Trump campaign in 2016, setting off a furious debate about the merits of the firm’s methods. The same techniques were also the focus of its work for Mr Bolton’s PAC.
Using psychographic models, the company designed advertisements for candidates supported by Mr Bolton’s PAC, including the 2014 campaign of Thom Tillis, the Republican senator from North Carolina. One advertisement, a video that was posted on YouTube, was aimed at fearful and neurotic voters — it emphasised security and the idea that Mr Tillis could keep America safe.
Mr Bolton also recorded a video used by a Russian gun rights group in 2013 to encourage Moscow to loosen gun laws, according to a report by NPR. The report said that the video was part of an effort by Russian and US gun rights groups to collaborate in the years leading up to the 2016 election.
A native of Baltimore, Mr Bolton, 69, received undergraduate and law degrees from Yale University. Between stints in private practice, he took a series of increasingly important jobs in government, starting at the US Agency for International Development under President Ronald Reagan and later as an assistant attorney general.
After the 2000 election, Mr Bolton joined the Republican legal team in Florida during the recount battle between Mr Bush and Vice President Al Gore. After the Supreme Court halted the recount, resulting in Mr Bush’s victory, Dick Cheney, the new vice president, persuaded the incoming secretary of state, Colin L Powell, to make Mr Bolton an undersecretary in charge of arms control. In that role, he helped pull the United States out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty but negotiated a separate treaty with Russia paring nuclear arsenals.
When Condoleezza Rice succeeded Mr Powell, she rebuffed pressure from Mr Cheney to make Mr Bolton her deputy. Instead, Mr Bush nominated him for the UN post, but key Republicans opposed him, including a former assistant secretary of state who testified that Mr Bolton was a “kiss-up, kick-down sort of guy” who abused underlings.
After the Senate refused to confirm Mr Bolton, Mr Bush gave him a recess appointment instead — a decision he would later
live to regret. Mr Bolton clashed regularly with Ms Rice and, after leaving office, broke with Mr Bush over what he saw as weak-kneed policies on both North Korea and Iran.
After Mr Trump’s election in 2016, Ms Rice and other Bush administration veterans like former Defence Secretary Robert M Gates and Stephen J Hadley, the former national security adviser, privately warned against an appointment for Mr Bolton.
Mr Trump considered Mr Bolton for several posts but ultimately backed away each time. Unlike some of those positions, national security adviser does not require Senate confirmation. In the interim, Mr Bolton has repeatedly praised Mr Trump on television and in his Wall Street Journal columns even when the two disagree.