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John Bolton's knife-fighting skills alarm his critics

‘He knows how to work around bureaucratic barriers,’ said a former top Obama official of Trump’s incoming national security adviser.

By ELIANA JOHNSON

John Bolton’s critics have called him a warmonger, an Islamophobe and a quasher of dissent. But one label alarms them most about President Donald Trump’s incoming national security adviser: savvy bureaucrat.

While policy knife fights don’t provoke the same gut fear as talk of a pre-emptive strike on North Korea, foreign policy insiders who consider Bolton’s views dangerously hawkish say his long track record in government will make him all too effective.

“If you disagree with Bolton's policy preferences, he is dangerous for three reasons: He is unafraid to start a policy fight in public, he knows how to pull bureaucratic levers when convenient, and he knows how to work around bureaucratic barriers when not,” said Loren DeJonge Schulman, a top aide to former Obama White House national security adviser Susan Rice.

Conservatives who share Bolton’s views say those qualities are an asset, arguing that he will empower a president who has long complained that his instincts on issues from the Iran nuclear deal to the war in Afghanistan get watered down by dissenting subordinates.

“He really knows how to make the system work,” said Elliott Abrams, who served as deputy national security adviser under George W. Bush. “One of the critical jobs of the national security adviser is making sure the bureaucracy implements the president’s decisions, and John knows exactly how to do that.”

Bolton has told President Donald Trump that he needs a national security adviser with more internal power. His outgoing predecessor, H.R. McMaster, believed in a well-organized policy process. But the three-star Army general and former tank commander came to the job with little background in bureaucratic politics and never established a strong reputation for effectiveness.

While McMaster was more sympathetic to the president than, say, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, he failed to crack down on leaks and exert his will over career officials opposed to Trump’s agenda. Bolton’s success in the job may hinge on his ability to bend a largely hostile bureaucracy to his — and the president’s — will.

An appointee under three Republican presidents who has served at the departments of Justice and State ts and as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Bolton has decades of experience dueling with colleagues who considered his views too harsh — and often outsmarting them. At one 2005 hearing, then-Sen. Joe Biden told Bolton he was “too competent.”

“I would rather you be stupid and not very effective,” Biden added.

Bolton also considers himself a protégé of one of Washington’s most famous master bureaucrats: former Secretary of State James A. Baker, under whom Bolton served in the George H.W. Bush administration. Valuing his legal acumen, Baker also took Bolton with him to Florida to assist with the contentious 2000 election recount there. (“I can still draw a floor plan of the Emergency Operations Center in West Palm,” Bolton recalled in 2016.)

“John’s an extraordinarily bright guy,” Baker told MSNBC on Wednesday, calling him “an extraordinarily capable public servant.”

Bolton has publicly boasted about his internal battles against bureaucrats he considers squishy internationalists. His 2007 book, “Surrender Is Not an Option,” is peppered with contemptuous references to the State Department’s “High Minded Accomodationists” and “Crusaders of Compromise” with whom he did battle on global hot spots from North Korea to Iran during the George W. Bush administration.

A case study in his effectiveness is his crusade against the International Criminal Court.

Bolton, then Undersecretary of International Organizations, struck bilateral agreements with over 100 countries to ensure Americans would not be handed over to the court, established in a treaty signed by President Bill Clinton.

His efforts culminated in the American Servicemembers Protection Act, signed into law by George W. Bush in 2002. Nicknamed the “Hague Invasion Act,” the law authorizes the president to use any means to secure the release of Americans detained by the ICC, headquartered in The Hague, on the coast of the Netherlands.

As Bolton later put it, his goal was to apply “a bottle of Wite-Out” to Clinton’s signature on the treaty.

“This was an issue he owned and really drove U.S. policy on, and not just in a hawkishly blunt way but in a really sophisticated way,” said Matthew Waxman, chairman of the national security law program at Columbia University and a State Department and NSC veteran.

Waxman said Bolton had steamrolled regional State Department officials who might normally have defended the bilateral agreements that Bolton killed. “Bolton just dominated the bureaucratic process,” Waxman said.

Former colleagues also cite his victories at the United Nations on North Korea, against which the Security Council levied trade and travel sanctions in October 2006, as an example of his strategic savvy.

The Bush administration, which had initiated the Six Party talks, was initially skeptical of trying to crack down on North Korea through the Security Council because of China’s veto power.

A former colleague said Bolton “fought like crazy to lower expectations to just get it on the agenda,” scheduling briefings for the Security Council and then ensuring that the briefings were alarming enough to raise concern.

“He first convinced everybody this was just a briefing, then he made sure that the briefing was hard-hitting, showing the U.N. Security Council what we were up against, and then he moved the Security Council to issue a statement that [North Korea’s behavior] was unacceptable,” the former colleague said.

Even Bolton’s own appointment as national security adviser — which Trump made against the advice of White House chief of staff John Kelly and Secretary of Defense James Mattis — required some of this wily maneuvering, including his sharp media instincts.

Before Kelly’s arrival at the White House last July, Bolton had enjoyed regular access to Trump and former chief strategist Steve Bannon, and, at Bannon’s request, wrote up a plan for a possible U.S. withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal. After Bannon’s dismissal, Bolton’s request to deliver the memo to Trump was declined — so he went public with it, publishing it in National Review and writing that “staff changes” at the White House prevented him from seeing the president.

“The idea was, I would go see him and, you know, the timing of the certification decision and Reince Priebus’ firing were not far apart,” Bolton told POLITICO last August, after Trump certified Iran’s compliance with the nuclear deal for the second time, before ultimately refusing to certify 90 days later.

Rattling Kelly’s cage through the news media was enough to restore his access to the president — and ultimately, seven months later, for the president to bring him into the White House.

It’s that sort of relentlessness that Bolton told Trump, in subsequent conversations, was needed to whip his National Security Council into shape.

Though Bolton’s appointment to the post had been rumored for weeks, it was precipitated 24 hours beforehand by a damaging White House leak: a Washington Post report that Trump had ignored an explicit warning on briefing cards not to congratulate Russian President Vladimir Putin on his recent reelection victory during a phone call between the men. The leak seemed highly likely to have come from his national security team.

A second former Bolton colleague predicted his success in the job for another reason that Bolton has come to be loathed by his adversaries: his former job as a Fox News analyst, where he has for years now dished out pithy statements and bombastic rhetoric on a range of national security issues.

Said the former colleague: “At these NSC meetings, he is very smart and very articulate and he won’t bore Trump — because he knows how to do sound bites for TV.”