The Room Where It Happened

by John Bolton;

  Trump’s first bilateral was with Merkel, who said lightly, “We are not yet completely controlled by Russia.”7 She asked about Putin, but Trump ducked, saying he had no agenda. Instead, he wanted to talk yet again about the higher tariffs he was considering applying to US imports of cars and trucks, which would hit Germany hard, complaining, as he did frequently, that Germany’s existing tariffs on US cars were four times higher than our tariffs on theirs. Then it was Macron, whom Trump accused of always leaking their conversations, which Macron denied, smiling broadly. Trump smiled too, looking at Mattis as if to imply he knew whence came the leaks on the US side. Macron wanted to know Trump’s endgame in the trade wars with China and the EU, but Trump said it didn’t matter. For the EU, he thought it would come down to the car and truck tariffs, likely to be 25 percent, and then went off on Jean-Claude Juncker, who, he believed, hated America. Macron still wanted a “broad deal” with Iran, as the two of them had discussed in April, but Trump seemed uninterested. With that, we motorcaded back to downtown Brussels. I gave my seat at the leaders’ dinner to Hutchison that night, as a gesture for what she had been through. Besides, I had had enough, and things seemed to be settling down.

  Wrong. I left the hotel at seven forty-five Thursday morning to meet with Trump, but he called me in the car first to ask, “Are you ready to play in the big leagues today? This is what I want to say,” and he proceeded to dictate the following: “We have great respect for NATO, but we’re being treated unfairly. By January one, all nations must commit to two percent, and we will forgive arrears, or we will walk out, and not defend those who have not. So long as we are not getting along with Russia, we will not go into a NATO where NATO countries are paying billions to Russia. We’re out if they make the pipeline deal.” This was not finely polished, but the direction was clear. As I wondered whether I would be resigning by the end of the day, the call cut off. I thought to myself I had ten minutes until I saw Trump to figure out what to do. I called Kelly, explained the situation, and told him that, contrary to his plans, he had to come out to NATO headquarters. All hands on deck. When I arrived at the embassy residence, I located the President’s military aide (who carries the famous “football,” which contains the nuclear launch codes) and asked him to find Mattis, whom I had been unable to raise (good thing we weren’t at war) immediately. Mattis, it turned out, was meeting with Trudeau at NATO headquarters. Already engaging in gallows humor, I wondered if Mattis was defecting. Pompeo was waiting at the residence, and I explained Trump’s mood: “He’s going to threaten to withdraw today.” Fortunately, Trump was typically late, so we considered what to do, concluding that the Kavanaugh play was still our best argument. We also thought about reducing the US contribution to NATO’s operating budget, the Common Fund, to equal Germany’s, reducing the current US share from 22 percent to 15 percent.

  Trump entered at eight thirty a.m.; asked, “Do you want to do something historic?”; and then repeated what he had said earlier: “We’re out. We’re not going to fight someone they’re paying.” Then he mentioned that he hadn’t wanted Hutchison at dinner with him. “You should have been at the dinner last night,” he said to me. “I want to say we’re leaving because we’re very unhappy,” Trump continued, and turned to Pompeo, saying, “I want you to get it.”

  Then out of nowhere, Trump said, “Keith Kellogg [Pence’s National Security Advisor] knows all about NATO. You know I wanted him as National Security Advisor after McMaster. He never offers his opinions unless I ask. And he’s not famous because he was never on TV. But I like John, so I picked him.” (As Pompeo and I reflected later, this statement told us exactly who my likely replacement would be if I resigned soon. I said, “Of course, if you resign, maybe Keith would be Secretary of State.” We laughed. Pompeo paused for a moment and said, “Or if we both resign, Keith could become Henry Kissinger and have both jobs.” We roared. It was the high point of the day.)

  With Trump, we made our Kavanaugh pitch as forcefully as possible and then departed for our respective vehicles in the motorcade. I reached Mattis on the way to NATO headquarters, extricating him from the plenary meeting ostensibly on Ukraine and Georgia that had already begun in Trump’s absence, and briefed him.

  When we arrived, Trump went to his seat between Stoltenberg and Theresa May (leaders were seated around the huge North Atlantic Council table in alphabetical order by country). Trump motioned me up and asked, “Are we going to do it?” I urged him not to, saying he should slam delinquent members for not spending adequately on defense but not threaten withdrawal or cutting US funding. “So, go up to the line, but don’t cross it,” was how I finished. Trump nodded but didn’t say anything. I returned to my seat not knowing what he was going to do. It felt like the whole room was looking at us. Trump spoke at about 9:25 for fifteen minutes, saying nothing whatever about Ukraine and Georgia, but starting off by commenting he wanted to register something of a complaint. He observed that it was difficult, because many people in the United States felt European countries were not paying their fair share, which should be 4 percent (as opposed to the existing 2014 Cardiff agreement of 2 percent). For years, Trump said, US Presidents would come and complain, but then leave and nothing would happen, even though we paid 90 percent. We were being slow-walked, and nothing much was really being done. The US considered NATO important, said Trump, but it was more important for Europe, which was far away. He had great respect for Chancellor Merkel, noting that his father was German, and his mother Scottish. Germany, he complained, was paying only 1.2 percent of GDP, and rising only to 1.5 percent by 2025. Only five of twenty-nine NATO members currently paid 2 percent. If countries were not rich, Trump acknowledged that he could understand it, but these are rich countries. The US wanted to continue to protect Europe, he said, but he then veered into an extended riff on trade and the EU, which he thought should be tied together with NATO for analysis purposes. The EU wouldn’t accept US products, and this was something the US couldn’t allow to continue, but only Albania had addressed this point at dinner the evening before. This all left us in the same position we’d been in for four years. Trump disagreed with the Europeans on some things, like immigration and the EU’s lack of control over its borders. Europe was letting people into its countries who could be enemy combatants, especially since most were young men coming in.

  On it went. Trump said again that he had great respect for NATO and for Secretary General Stoltenberg. He complained that NATO members wanted to sanction Russia, but Germany would pay Russia billions of dollars for Nord Stream II, thereby feeding the beast, which was a big story in the United States. Russia was playing us all for fools, he believed, as we paid billions because of the new pipeline, which we shouldn’t let happen.8 The US wanted to be good partners with Europe, but the allies had to pay their share; Germany, for example, could meet the 2 percent target right now, not waiting until 2030, he said, calling Merkel by name across the huge chamber. The US was thousands of miles away, he said, noting for example that Germany was not helping with Ukraine. In any case, Ukraine didn’t help the United States, it helped Europe, serving as Europe’s border with Russia. Returning to the burden-sharing point, Trump said he wanted all the allies to meet the 2 percent target now, which only five of the twenty-nine were doing, even among the wealthiest countries, even friends like France. Trump said he didn’t want to see press reports coming from this NATO summit that said everyone was happy. He wasn’t happy, because the United States was being played. Then there was more, and then more.

  Then, coming to a close, Trump said he was with NATO one hundred percent, a thousand million percent. But allies had to pay the 2 percent by January 1, or the United States was just going to do its own thing. Then he was back on why he didn’t like the headquarters building where we were all sitting, repeating that a single tank shell could destroy it. Trump ended by saying he was very committed to NATO, but he was not committed to the current situation. He wanted members to pay what they could, and not in four o
r six years, because the current situation was not acceptable to the United States. He wanted that registered.

  Trump had done what I hoped, although his toe was over that line several times. Still, despite the stunned reaction in the vast NAC chamber, Trump had said he supported NATO, making it hard to construe his remarks as an outright threat to leave. Perhaps the fever had broken. When people ask why I stayed in the job as long as I did, this was one of the reasons.

  A few minutes later, Merkel came over to speak with Trump at his seat, suggesting that Stoltenberg convene an informal “roundtable” where everyone would have a chance to react to what Trump had said. At the meeting, various governments described their domestic political woes, as if we should feel sorry for them or didn’t have any domestic political woes ourselves. Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte made the most telling point, stressing that he had consistently said that Trump was right, and that he had instilled a sense of urgency since he took office. By contrast, as the Europeans now understood, said Rutte, with Obama the 2 percent target it had been entirely pro forma. Times had changed. He had clearly gotten the message. The most inane comment came from the Czech Prime Minister, who said he was making every effort to get to 2 percent by 2024, but their GDP was rising so fast, he was unsure defense spending could keep up. In effect, this was saying they were getting rich too fast to defend themselves adequately. Trump jumped on it, saying he had a similar, actually much bigger, problem because of US economic growth. He said the situation was unfair and unsustainable, and needed to be brought to a conclusion, where the allies stepped up to their responsibilities, or there would be problems. Trump explained that the Nord Stream story was the biggest story in Washington. People were saying Germany had surrendered to Russia (and certainly that’s what he had, in effect, said). How could we defend ourselves from the Russians, Trump wondered, if the allies wouldn’t pay for it? Trump said he liked Hungary and Italy, but it wasn’t fair to the United States that they weren’t paying their allocated share. The US was protecting countries it wasn’t allowed to trade with. He had no more to say, but he underlined again that there had to be a satisfactory conclusion, after which the US would be a great partner. Trump said he didn’t want to hurt his country by saying how stupid we had been, such as by spending to protect Nord Stream.

  Trump was bargaining in real time with the other leaders, trapped in a room without their prepared scripts. It was something to see. Some leaders said they couldn’t accept what Trump asked for on defense expenditures because it contradicted the earlier-adopted communiqué, which I communicated to Stoltenberg would be a real mistake. He agreed and helped head off that problem, but it was clear things were in dire straits. Canada’s Trudeau asked, “Well, John, is this one going to blow up too?” I answered, “Plenty of time left, what could go wrong?” and we both laughed. I gave Trump a note about reducing US Common Fund spending, which he passed to Stoltenberg, who blanched when he saw it. But at least that was now also on the table. With a few more comments from the crowd, the meeting ended, and we went off to prepare for Trump’s closing press conference, which was restful compared to Singapore. Trump gave a positive spin to the day’s events. The outcome was unmistakable: the United States expected its NATO allies to live up to the commitments they had made on defense spending. How unremarkable that should have been, but how much effort it had taken to get to something so banal. Indeed, this was definitely not the Obama presidency. Trump stopped off at the resumed leaders’ conference on Afghanistan to give some prepared remarks, noting as well the great spirit he thought was developing at NATO. However, we then had to press him to head for the airport more or less as scheduled, to prevent Brussels’s traffic from being even more gridlocked than it had already become. As we left, Merkel was speaking. Trump went up to her to say goodbye, and she rose to shake hands. Instead, he kissed her on both cheeks, saying, “I love Angela.” The room broke into applause, and we left to a standing ovation. That night, Trump tweeted:

  Great success today at NATO! Billions of additional dollars paid by members since my election. Great spirit!

  It was a wild ride, but NATO had sent Trump off to meet Putin in Helsinki with a publicly united alliance behind him, rather than exacerbating our already incredibly difficult position involving the very future of NATO itself.

  London

  Air Force One flew to London’s Stansted Airport, where we took Marine One to Winfield House, our Ambassador’s residence. We then motorcaded to our hotel to change into formal wear, raced back to Winfield House, and helicoptered to Blenheim Palace, where Prime Minister May was hosting dinner. Built to reward John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, for his 1704 victory over Louis XIV’s armies in the War of the Spanish Succession, marking Britain unarguably as one of the great world powers of the day, Blenheim was spectacular. We were told it was the only British building styled a “palace” not owned by the royal family. Winston Churchill was born there, a direct descendant of the first Duke. The arrival ceremony with red-coated troops and military band at sundown was most impressive, as was the interior of the huge palace. Sedwill and I sat at the head table with the leaders and their spouses, the current Duke of Marlborough, and the UK and US Ambassadors and their spouses. I could have hung around for a while, but bad weather was closing in. We either choppered back to London at ten thirty p.m., or there was no telling when we would get back. Time to go! Ta-ta!

  The next day, Friday the thirteenth, opened with press stories about an interview Trump gave in Brussels to the Sun newspaper, basically trashing May’s Brexit strategy. I thought the strategy was in free fall anyway, but it was, as they say in London, a spot of bother for this to happen as the leaders met, supposedly to demonstrate the special relationship at work. Brexit was an existential issue for the UK, but it was also critically important to the US. Brexit’s fundamental impetus was the accelerating loss of citizen control over the Brussels-based mechanisms of the European Union. Bureaucracies were making rules that national parliaments had to accept as binding, and the loss of democratic sovereignty was increasingly palpable. For the Brits, ironically, Brussels was the new George III: a remote (politically if not physically), unaccountable, oppressive machine that a majority of British voters rejected in 2016, reversing forty-three years of EU membership. Yet implementing the vote had been disastrously mishandled, thereby threatening political stability in Britain itself. We should have been doing far more to help the Brexiteers, and I certainly tried. Unfortunately, apart from Trump and myself, almost no one in the Administration seemed to care. What a potential tragedy.

  The US delegation helicoptered to Sandhurst, Britain’s military academy, where the Ministry of Defence held a joint exercise for US and UK special forces to take down a terrorist camp. Trump apologized as he greeted May, and she brushed the press incident away. The exercise was loud and impressive, clearly getting Trump’s attention. I kicked myself over the fact that someone in the last eighteen months hadn’t taken Trump to a US exercise. Had he seen such things before, perhaps we could have saved the war games on the Korean Peninsula. From Sandhurst, we helicoptered to Chequers, the British Prime Minister’s weekend retreat, for the main business meetings of the visit.

  Jeremy Hunt and others joined May and Sedwill, and we began the meeting in front of a fireplace in the two-story central living room. After starting with Yemen, a British obsession, May turned to Syria, particularly how to deal with Russia’s presence there, stressing that Putin only valued strength, obviously hoping Trump would pay attention. I explained what Putin had told me a few weeks before (see above) on working to get Iran out of Syria, about which the Brits were rightly skeptical. I said, “I’m not vouching for Putin’s credibility,” to which May replied, “Well, we especially didn’t expect it from you, John!” to general laughter.

  That led to Russia’s hit job on the Skripals (a defecting former Russian intelligence officer and his daughter),9 described by Sedwill as a chemical-weapons attack on a nuclear power. Trump asked,
oh, are you a nuclear power?, which I knew was not intended as a joke.

  I asked May why the Russians did it, and Trump said he had asked the same question the night before at Blenheim, thinking it might be intended as a message. May thought the attack was intended to prove Russia could act with impunity against dissidents and defectors, to intimidate them and like-minded others. She stressed to Trump that, in Helsinki, he should go into the meeting from a position of strength, and Trump agreed, claiming that Putin asked for the meeting (the opposite of the truth), and assured her he would not give anything away. (I had learned earlier that the Justice Department was making public Mueller’s indictments against twelve Russian GRU officers for election interference,10 which I thought better announced before the summit, for Putin to contemplate.)

  Over the working lunch that followed, we discussed the travails of Brexit, Trump’s view of the North Korea negotiations, and then China and Trump’s November 2017 visit. He said he was greeted by a hundred thousand soldiers and said, “There’s never been anything like it before in the history of the world.” In the concluding press conference, Trump went out of his way to tamp down the firestorm caused by his Sun interview, leading the UK press to label it “a complete reversal,” which it certainly seemed to be. Trump called the US-UK relationship “the highest level of special,” a new category.11 After taking Marine One back to Winfield House, we helicoptered out to Windsor Castle for the Trumps to meet Queen Elizabeth, which brought another display of pageantry, and lots more red coats and military bands. Trump and the Queen reviewed the honor guard, and they (and FLOTUS) met for almost an hour. The rest of us had tea and finger sandwiches with members of the royal household, which was very elegant but hard on some of us ill-schooled colonials. Then it was back on Marine One, heading to Stansted and boarding Air Force One for Scotland, to stay at the Trump Turnberry golf resort.