AMB. BOLTON: Glad to be with you. Thanks for having me.
MR. SCHERER: So I just want to ask a table-setting introductory question here. We’re concluding a three-day meeting of NATO here in Washington, D.C. Do you think something has been accomplished here? Is there something coming out of this meeting that is meaningful for America’s role in the world, for the ongoing conflicts in Europe?
AMB. BOLTON: Well, I think there are two things that merit attention. The first is, I think, further steps were taken to help Ukraine in combating Russia’s unprovoked aggression, and I think, longer term, even more important, was a very strong statement against China’s role in supporting Russia’s efforts in its aggression.
Now, that’s a long way from our European friends fully acknowledging just how much of a threat the government of China is to the Global West and not just militarily but politically and economically as well. But I think this does represent progress with the Europeans to understand that there can be a problem in the North Atlantic area caused by an adversary far from the North Atlantic area. So hopefully, that’s something that will continue to grow on the European side of the ocean.
MR. SCHERER: So President Biden has been facing quite a crisis since his underwhelming debate performance, and one of the things he said is “You have to look at my accomplishments when it comes to foreign policy.” He has taken credit for expanding NATO, for building an alliance to support Ukraine, for U.S. funding of armaments for Ukraine. Do you give him credit for how he has handled NATO and the conflict against Russia and Ukraine?
AMB. BOLTON: Not much. Look, it’s a frivolous argument that the president and his supporters make to say, well, he had a bad night, but look at three and a half years of accomplishments, which I don’t particularly support in substantive policy terms. But in any event, it’s a non-sequitur. You’re not talking about the performance in office; you’re talking about the competence to hold office. And that’s what was called into question by the debate, and that wasn’t new news either.
I think the most damaging aspect of the president’s performance was that it confirmed in the minds of many viewers, in an irrefutable way, what they already suspected.
MR. SCHERER: But if we go back to the foreign policy, what should Biden have done on the foreign policy stage with regard to Ukraine that he hasn’t done? I mean, my understanding is that you are closer to Biden when it comes to this issue, only this issue, than you are to the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald Trump. So do you have a critique of how he’s led the United States in supporting Ukraine and pushing back against Russian aggression?
AMB. BOLTON: Well, first, let me say on my behalf and behalf of anybody else who comments on Ukraine, I think it’s a mistake to measure against the metric of either Joe Biden or Donald Trump. So just taking this on the merits, Biden’s first mistake was before the Russian invasion. He did not make a serious, sustained effort to deter the attack. In fact, he said, at least on two occasions publicly, he didn’t think he could deter the Russians. He could punish them after the aggression took place, but he didn’t think he could deter them.
Now, I think there were a number of steps that the U.S. and the West as a whole could have taken to try and deter the Kremlin from going forward. They may have failed, but they weren’t tried.
Second, we suffered from an enormous intelligence failure at the beginning and in the early weeks of the war. Congress was briefed in closed session, which, of course, immediately leaked, that our intelligence said that Ukraine was likely to collapse, that Kyiv would fall in a matter of days, and the country would fall in a matter of weeks. Turned out not to be true, fortunately. But that’s a massive intelligence failure that somebody’s going to have to answer for at some point.
And then, third, during the course of now almost two and a half years of war, having failed to deter the Russians from invading, we have been repeatedly deterred by the Russians and their threat of a wider war in Europe, occasional nuclear saber-rattling, from providing assistance and advice to the Ukrainians on a really strategic way to defeat the Russians.
I think the Biden administration has shown they don’t want Ukraine to lose, but they’re very worried about doing what’s necessary to allow Ukraine to win. And the message to Russia and to our other adversaries around the world is that this administration, at least, is very subject to threats of a wider war. I don’t know where Russia would get the wherewithal to fight a wider war if they had that capability. You’d think they’d have it in Ukraine to make up for the abysmal performance of their military so far.
But in my judgment across more than three years now, before and during the conflict in Ukraine, which is a serious matter of American national security interest, the Biden administration has not performed well.
MR. SCHERER: Well, so–and you can correct me if I’m wrong, but I think your position with regards to the war in Ukraine is closer still to Biden than Trump. Trump said that he’s not confident–or he wouldn’t necessarily support countries who aren’t paying their fair share, even if they’re in NATO. He’s, as you’ve said, expressed ending the alliance in the past. He’s talked about ending the conflict in Ukraine very quickly if he’s elected, and his advisors have talked about dividing up the country and giving Russia some piece of it. Could you present for the average American voter now–NATO is not going to be a top voting issue for a lot of people, but if they are interested in this decision they have before them between voting for Joe Biden and Donald Trump, how should they think about weighing those two candidates? And what are the pluses or minuses of choosing between that binary?
AMB. BOLTON: Well, look, I don’t think either one of them is competent to be president. I didn’t vote for either one of them in 2020, and I’m not going to vote for either one of them in 2024. It’s a difference between a policy that is irretrievably wrong, which I think is what Trump’s is, on the one hand, and a policy that even if it’s quasi-directionally correct, on the other, in the form of Joe Biden, has been handled very poorly.
MR. SCHERER: I guess what I’m hearing you say, and I want to just press you a little more, is that you can’t give advice to voters, that they’re both such terrible choices that it’s not really worth using NATO or Ukraine or Russia or American foreign policy as a deciding factor given the choices we have.
AMB. BOLTON: Well, I think it should be a deciding factor. I wish we had political leaders who understood and were capable of articulating the threats that the United States faces in an increasingly challenging world and the steps we need to take to protect ourselves and our friends and allies against them. I don’t think we’re going to get that from either candidate.
MR. SCHERER: I’m interested because a lot of Americans are in the same boat you are, probably for different reasons. We call them “double haters” in the polls now. They don’t want to choose between these two guys. I think you’ve said you’re voting for–you’re going to write in Dick Cheney again if you vote. Are you comfortable not weighing in on such a momentous–I mean, you’re explaining the enormous stakes here–not weighing in on this decision?
AMB. BOLTON: Well, look, you know, you’re a political reporter. My world doesn’t revolve around Donald Trump. It doesn’t revolve around Joe Biden. It revolves around American national security. I’m going to write in Dick Cheney again because I want to vote for a Republican conservative, there aren’t any on the ballot this time, and there weren’t in 2020. The stakes internationally are getting higher, and yet for over 30 years, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, most American political figures have chosen not to try and address the wider threat that America faces around the world.
I think Americans, when they’re given knowledge about the threats they face, have–throughout our history have stepped up to do what was necessary. But we’ve got politicians on the stage today in both parties for somewhat different reasons that just don’t want to face up to an increasingly very difficult reality, and that’s a problem for the country.
MR. SCHERER: All right. Fair enough. I’ll move on.
There has been discussion for a while now about Trump-proofing NATO in the event that he wins, about the countries in Europe right now taking steps at the moment to prepare themselves for a less robust American ally. What do you make of that? Is that a realistic thing? Are there things they can do now that will matter, that mean something, or is this sort of, you know, window dressing on a coming disaster?
AMB. BOLTON: Well, I think, certainly, the way it’s been presented is really very unfortunate. I mean, do they think Trump is not going to be aware of what they’re doing and the steps they’re taking to insulate NATO from Trump’s influence? They think he and his people are going to miss that? They think they can get away with hiding it from him? And when they go out and tell the waiting press that they’re about the serious business of Trump-proofing NATO, do you think that’s going to make him feel more benignly, more kindly toward NATO? I just think it’s going to add fuel to the fire of what I’m very much afraid will be a decision by a new President Trump to withdraw from NATO.
MR. SCHERER: And just explain. What would the consequences of that be, do you think?
AMB. BOLTON: Well, I think American withdrawal from NATO would be a catastrophic mistake by the United States. It would introduce instability, even into the North Atlantic area. It would call into question American alliance commitments around the world. It would undo the most successful politico-military alliance in human history, all for no purpose whatsoever.
But I think that’s the direction Trump is moving in. He almost did it in 2018, and I don’t see anything in any of the comments he’s made since he left the White House to indicate that he isn’t prepared to actually carry through with it in a second term.
MR. SCHERER: You just made reference to you working with him in the White House during his term. One of the things I’ve heard you express and others express is a concern that the people who will surround him in a second term if he wins office may not be as successful or as interested in pushing back against his decisions that you’re arguing could be harmful here. Can you just explain those concerns? And if I could just add there, I wonder if you could weigh in on the vice presidential selection, which we’re going to have coming in just a few days here, whether you have concerns about the kind of person he is looking for, for vice president now, in comparison to the person, Mike Pence, he had as vice president last time.
AMB. BOLTON: Well, I think Trump has learned a few things in the course of his first term, and the most important thing he’s learned is he wants people who are personally loyal to him, notwithstanding whatever their actual convictions may be, and that he’s going to surround himself by people who are more likely to say, “Yes, sir,” than to say, “Well, Mr. President, here are three or four things you ought to consider before you make that decision.”
I think there was a mythology about how the Trump White House worked in the first term about people putting up guardrails. Look, most of it just reflects the same discussions that happen in other administrations to try and find the right way to achieve an objective, and there was nothing systemic or with bad motive that was part of it. So I don’t think it was that much different than, as I say, than prior administrations.
But in a second term, if the president says “I want to do X” and the staff just says, “Yes, sir,” then you’re going to get, I think, pretty negative consequences from that. And I think the decision over picking the vice president is simply the first, the most important of lots of personnel decisions we’re going to see as a second Trump administration fills out the political appointments in the executive branch.
I really think that people don’t appreciate how much Mike Pence did during the course of his vice presidency to prevent Trump from making bad decisions. It happened over and over again. The vice president has been very reluctant to talk about it. I understand that. But I was there for 17 months, and the country is a lot better off because Mike Pence was vice president.
Given that loyalty is Donald Trump’s–personal loyalty to Donald Trump–fealty is what he wants. I’m very much afraid that what’s top of mind for him as he looks at his vice presidential candidates is whether they share his view–and I think it’s a cynically held view–that the election in 2020 was stolen and will they say that publicly? And if he gave an order to them like he tried to give to Mike Pence regarding what was going to happen in Congress on January the 6th, would they obey the order? And I think anybody who answers yes to those two questions is sacrificing their integrity. So I’m very worried for the person who becomes vice president who has to answer those questions and very worried about what that suggests for the rest of Trump appointments in a second term.
MR. SCHERER: You made reference to him almost leaving NATO, and you’ve talked about your being there and having conversations at the time. Are there any other moments, incidents when you were working at the White House where Donald Trump was trying to do something that you considered very alarming that voters may want to weigh as they decide what to do this November?
AMB. BOLTON: Well, other than wade through 500 pages in my book–
MR. SCHERER: I should have mentioned your book.
AMB. BOLTON: –which I tried to lay out as much as I could–look, let’s consider his disastrous negotiations with the Taliban with respect to Afghanistan. I might say a viewpoint that was almost exactly the same as Joe Biden’s. If you look at histories of the Obama administration, Biden is frequently mentioned as the person who says it’s time to get out. I don’t think he said end the endless wars, which is the mantra of some in the Republican Party. But his position about abandoning Afghanistan is functionally the same as Trump’s.
Trump negotiated a disastrous deal with the Taliban, acting as if they would abide by the commitments they made, which is really nothing short of laughable. And then Biden implemented Trump’s deal and yet operationalized it in an even more catastrophic way. So that is the sort of thing I think that people ought to ask themselves if they want to see repeated in whichever of these candidates they vote for.
But for Trump, I think the real nadir of his Afghan decision was that at one point he contemplated bringing the Taliban to Camp David to work out the final details. Now, for a variety of reasons, that didn’t happen, and indeed, the entire deal with the Taliban got pushed back five or six months after it was initially expected to take place. But this is the kind of judgment that Donald Trump displays again and again and again. He doesn’t have a philosophy. He doesn’t follow policies as we understand the policy formulation process in Washington. He reacts on an ad hoc, anecdotal, transactional basis based on what he thinks is in Donald Trump’s best interest.
MR. SCHERER: Just to explicitly plug your book there, it’s called “The Room Where It Happened,” available still on Amazon and fine bookstores.
I wonder if you know enough to weigh in on something Democrats are considering right now, which is pushing for Biden to leave this race and handing the nomination to his vice president, Kamala Harris. She’s had some foreign policy experience as vice president, not a lot before then. She served on the Intelligence Committee in the Senate. Do you feel like you have a read of Vice President Harris and what kind of president she could be if she wins in November?
AMB. BOLTON: Well, I don’t have any more confidence in her capability to run American foreign policy than I do in Biden or in Trump.
Look, if Biden has to leave his pursuit of a second term, that will be a small plus for the American people who, by margins of over 70 percent in polling, said they didn’t want a rematch of 2020, and yet that, at least as of now, is what they’re going to get.
If Biden had announced he would not seek a second term last year or a year ago, let’s say, the Democrats could have had a wide-open primary process, and I think that might have helped the Republicans break free of our cult of personality, with a very strong bench of potential presidential candidates. And we could have nominated somebody other than Donald Trump, and maybe the country could have had a real debate between two candidates not approaching retirement.
MR. SCHERER: Let me move out of electoral politics. There is a real ongoing debate that’s been going on for a couple of years now within Republican foreign policy circles about whether U.S. investing significant treasure and armament in Ukraine is a distraction from the greater threat in China, which you referenced at the beginning of this. The idea that if we’re fighting on a front or supporting a war in Europe, we’re maybe not doing what we need to deter an invasion of Taiwan and to reassure our partners in Asia. And my experience of that is it’s been a pretty divisive fight among your colleagues. I wonder if you could just weigh in on that question of whether Ukraine is a distraction from the central priorities of U.S. foreign policy or is essential and then how you deal with that tradeoff.
AMB. BOLTON: Well, look, I think as a political matter within the Republican Party, there’s still overwhelming support for aiding Ukraine. I think the position that we should cut Ukraine off is a minority position and reflects, in part, the opposition opposing Biden who, as I said earlier, has not done a good job.
But this idea that we’re not able to handle the wider world, we can only–we have a one-track mind and can only deal with one subject at a time, you know, all I can say to that is it’s a good thing in World War II that we only had a one-front war to fight. I mean, what would we have done in World War II if we had had to fight in both Europe and the Pacific?
AMB. BOLTON: The point is that American political leaders, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, have failed to understand that the world is still a dangerous place. Remember when the Soviet Union collapsed, people told us it was the end of history, that globalization would solve all of our problems, it’s the economy, stupid, international political risks and threats are diminished and are going to disappear, in effect. That was never true. It’s perfectly obvious it’s not true now.
But we are suffering the consequences of this illusion that many people felt after the Soviet Union dissolved, that we didn’t need larger defense budgets, we didn’t need a defense production base, and we’re now in the process of trying to get it back. But the idea that the United States can’t walk and chew gum at the same time is simply wrong.
And the final point I’d make on that is it turns out the globe is round and a Chinese threat toward Taiwan, let’s say, is simply part of a growing series of threats we face because of what is really very widely acknowledged as an emerging China-Russia axis. Like the Sino-Soviet alliance of the Cold War, but with a big difference that this time China is the senior partner, this emerging access is not perfectly formed yet. There’s still considerable tensions between the two parties, but they are growing closer and closer together. They have their outriders like North Korea, Iran, Syria, Belarus, Cuba, Venezuela, and they’re aiding each other in existing conflicts. That’s what NATO’s response to China this week–that’s why it was so important, because China has provided very material economic and political assistance to Russia. They’re both involved with Iran in the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, and if China decides to take belligerent action against Taiwan or in the South China Sea or elsewhere, they expect Russia will have China’s back. So the idea that if we just worry about China, that that’s the only threat we have to contain, ask them in Ukraine what it’s like to fight the Russia-China axis. Ask what it means in the Middle East when you have joint Russian-Chinese naval maneuvers in the Arabian Sea.
MR. SCHERER: Let me just try and squeeze in one more question. We’re running out of time. Could you just give your assessment about how the Ukraine war is going? You mentioned the defense industrial base of the United States. I’ve seen numbers that suggest Russia has so pivoted now that given more time–and obviously, they’re a larger country; they have more people they can throw at the front–the long range prospects of Ukraine are not very good, that the U.S. industrial base is not going to be able to keep up with the allies. So how do you see that conflict at the moment?
AMB. BOLTON: I think if Trump is elected president, the conflict was likely to end very quickly, to Ukraine’s disadvantage.
But this is part of the Biden administration’s failure. When you have one country that’s roughly three and a half times bigger than the other country in the conflict fighting a war of attrition, it’s just a matter of arithmetic before we decide who wins. This is a reflection of the failure to provide assistance on a strategic basis, having an objective in mind. We say it’s the complete restoration of Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity, and yet it’s now, only now, two and a half years into the war, that we’ve made a decision to provide F-16s to the Ukrainians. At the beginning of the war, we wouldn’t even let Poland transfer their aging MiG’s to the Ukraine. So it’s been a large measure of our incompetence in assisting the Ukrainians that has led to this gridlock.
MR. SCHERER: Not a very optimistic note to end on. Thank you very much, Ambassador Bolton, for joining us. That’s all the time we have today.
For more information, please go to WashingtonPost.com/live, get a subscription, find out about more of these talks that will be coming up, WashingtonPost.com/live. I’m Michael Scherer. See you next time.
