In President Donald Trump’s Washington, matters of war and peace are decided in 280-character bursts. It’s up to John Bolton to massage them into a foreign policy.
The mustachioed national security adviser developed a reputation as a bureaucratic bulldozer through more than three decades in and out of government. But the wrangling over Trump’s decision to pull troops out of Syria demanded a new skill — the ability to dramatically redraft the president’s policy without provoking a hint of protest from the commander in chief.
Bolton was always an unlikely pick to be Trump’s third national security adviser, with a world view seemingly ill-fit to the president’s isolationist “America First” pronouncements. He’s espoused hawkish foreign policy views dating back to the Reagan administration and became a household name over his vociferous support for the Iraq War as the US ambassador to the UN under George W. Bush. Bolton even briefly considered running for president in 2016, in part to make the case against the isolationism that Trump would come to embody.
Yet he earned Trump’s ear in part through his frequent appearances on Fox News, the president’s favored network. And despite the president’s aversion to his bushy mustache, the two have formed a close relationship since Bolton took over at the National Security Council in April.
“Frankly, what I have said in private now is behind me,” Bolton told Fox News last year just after joining the White House. “The important thing is what the president says and the advice I give him.”
Longtime associates credit Bolton with a keen ability to manage-up to the president — a key differentiator between Bolton and his predecessor, H.R. McMaster, an Army general whose professorial tones grated on Trump.
He and Trump have harshly pushed back on any notion of a policy reversal. White House aides cast Bolton’s role as merely “elucidating” or “clarifying” the president’s initial order.
“No different from my original statements,” Trump tweeted on January 7.
In reality, there were key changes. One month in, materiel has been removed from northeastern Syria, but troops remain. In the war-torn country’s south, 200 US service members serving in al-Tanf are now remaining in place indefinitely as a check against Iran — a step sought by Israel. And in a trip to the Middle East this month, Bolton announced new “conditions” on the withdrawal, including demanding assurances from Turkey it won’t attack Kurdish fighters in Syria.
The pace of the planned withdrawal was dramatically slowed, first, after Trump’s three-hour December visit to Iraq to meet with US commanders in which they argued that they, not allies, were best positioned to destroy the last vestiges of the Islamic State’s territorial caliphate in Syria. Then came concerns about the fate of the Kurds, who face assault from Turkey, which considers them a terrorist group, and Iranian regional influence.
According to seven administration officials, Bolton’s influence was central to the “reinterpretation” of Trump’s initial order and convincing the stubborn commander in chief to go along with it. White House aides maintained that the two have a strong relationship in part because Bolton has tried not to draw attention to the changes. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe Bolton’s role and the administration’s policy thinking.
It was a sign of Bolton’s outsized role in foreign policy that when he traveled to Israel and Turkey earlier this month to clarify the policy, he brought along a contingent of press aboard a modified Boeing 757 of the type typically used by the vice president and secretary of state. It was the first trip by a national security adviser to include reporters in recent memory.