The Room Where It Happened

by John Bolton;

  Although the working lunch started twenty minutes late, Trump said, five minutes before its scheduled ending at 1:00 p.m., that he wanted to leave right then.

  By this point, I had decided to go straight to Mongolia rather than the DMZ, although I had informed only NSC staff. I waited near the Beast so I could tell Trump what I was doing. I understood what conclusions might be drawn from my not being at the DMZ, but I was past caring at that point.

  I left South Korea for Ulan Bator in the early afternoon, watching reports of the events in the DMZ as we flew. As foreshadowed by his earlier comments and the irresistible photo op presented, Trump walked into North Korea, with Kushner and Ivanka nearby. Kim looked delighted in the pictures, as he should have. What an incredible gift Trump had given him, coming to the DMZ for the personal publicity. The whole thing made me ill. It didn’t get better later when the media reported Trump had invited Kim to the White House. The Kim-Trump meeting itself lasted about fifty minutes, and the two leaders agreed working-level talks should resume again quickly. Of course, Biegun did not yet have a new counterpart; his former one was now likely lying somewhere in an unmarked grave, but no matter.

  After a day of meetings in Ulan Bator on July 1, I left for Washington, reviewing news coverage on the DMZ meeting. Most of it was what I expected, but one story in the New York Times stood out as particularly bad.18 Our policy had not changed at the DMZ, but the briefing the Times reported, discussing a “nuclear freeze,” closely resembled exactly the road to trouble Biegun had followed before Hanoi. I thought we had buried that approach when Trump walked out, but here it was again, as bad or worse than before. There were other media stories where I thought I detected Biegun’s fingerprints,19 but this one was beyond the pale, in my view, both substantively and in process terms. I asked Matt Pottinger what could have justified this media offensive, concluding Trump hadn’t authorized a “nuclear freeze” after the Kim Jong Un meeting, although he was obviously excited about resuming working-level negotiations. Trump wrote Kim yet another letter, which was essentially fluff, but at least it didn’t give anything away or provide any basis for what had been briefed to reporters.20 Biegun had taken Trump’s enthusiasm as a license to shape the next talks with North Korea in ways that had consistently failed for thirty years.

  Biegun initially denied to Hooker and Pottinger that he was the source for the Times story, although the “denial” was carefully phrased, and was in any event discredited when we received from a friendly reporter a transcript of his briefing. So much for interagency coordination. He was out of line, whether with Pompeo’s blessing or not. I thought it important to correct the impression we were on the road back to prior Administrations’ failed policies before things got out of hand. I knew it was risky to say anything publicly, but it was time to take risks. Besides, if I had to resign, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. After some careful drafting, I tweeted the following just before wheels up in Tokyo, where we refueled:

  I read this NYT story with curiosity. Neither the NSC staff nor I have discussed or heard of any desire to ‘settle for a nuclear freeze by NK.’ This was a reprehensible attempt by someone to box in the President. There should be consequences.

  I never heard word one from Trump about this tweet. And I was happy to see Lindsey Graham retweeted it soon after I sent it out:

  Glad to see National Security Advisor Bolton push back hard against the NY Times narrative stating the Administration would accept a nuclear freeze as an acceptable outcome by North Korea.

  On July 3, I spoke with Pompeo on several subjects, and he raised the Times story and my tweet, complaining bitterly. “Why didn’t you call me?” he asked. “What Biegun said”—so much for Biegun’s denials—“is a lot closer to the President than you are.” This was chilling, if true. I replied that I could ask the same question about him and Biegun: Why hadn’t they called me? My tweet still represented official Administration policy, while Biegun’s briefing did not, which Pompeo did not dispute. I said I wasn’t aiming at him and that we would both be more effective if we stuck together on substance, which he agreed with. He said, laughing, “Our teams like this stuff, but we’ll do our best if we grow up, which I at least am still struggling to do.”

  It was a good clearing of the air, but I thought Pompeo mostly worried I had criticized him publicly from the right, which Graham’s tweet had reinforced. More seriously, Pompeo said he feared Trump was back to leaving the Peninsula entirely, which was what fundamentally concerned me about the whole base costs issue, and which echoed what Trump said randomly about Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Africa, and sundry other locations. Nonetheless, Pompeo believed “we didn’t let anything out of the bag with Kim,” meaning nothing would emerge publicly to compromise our position. On the other hand, Pompeo said he had tried to walk Trump back after the DMZ, urging, “We don’t want to do what John Kerry would do.” Trump answered, “I don’t give a shit, we need a victory on this,” although he also repeated he was “in no rush.” Despite our conversation, however, within days Pompeo was telling Biegun not to participate in NSC meetings on North Korea, as before, exhibiting the same proprietary behavior over North Korea he had done repeatedly on Afghanistan. I understood the imperatives of turf in government affairs, but I could never understand why Pompeo didn’t seek allies on these issues. When his policies went off the rails, not only would it be bad for the country, but Pompeo, along with Trump, would be solely identified with them. But, I figured, ultimately that was Pompeo’s problem.

  How did Trump see the DMZ party? “Nobody else could do what I did. Obama called eleven times and never got an answer,” he said later that day.

  * * *

  In my remaining White House days, I worried about unforced concessions to North Korea. Ironically, however, the North mostly stonewalled, except when it was launching ballistic missiles or attacking Administration officials other than Trump. I also worried about the harmful potential of the basing-costs issue in both South Korea and Japan, and the growing rift between those two countries, which threatened America’s overall strategic position in East Asia.

  Back in Washington, on July 16, Pompeo and I spoke about yet another Trump demand to stop a joint US–South Korea military exercise that agitated the ever-sensitive Kim Jong Un. This exercise was mostly a “tabletop” affair, which would once have meant a lot of paper shuffling and moving troop markers around in sandboxes. Today, it was almost all done by computer. Despite repeated assurances that there were no Marines hitting the beaches with B-52s flying overhead, Trump wanted them canceled. I pleaded with Trump to let me make my planned visit to Japan and South Korea to talk about base costs before he made a decision, to which he agreed. More logical arguments, like the need for these and more exercises involving field maneuvers in order to ensure that our troops were at full readiness, able to “fight tonight” if need be, had long since lost their appeal to Trump. Pompeo also told me North Korea was projecting no working-level discussions until mid- to late August, a far cry from the mid-July predictions made by Biegun and others right after the DMZ meeting.

  A few days later, I was off to Japan and South Korea to work on the base-costs issue. Stopping first in Tokyo, I raised the question even though the current arrangements expired after South Korea’s. The Defense Department, like the State Department, could barely contemplate asking for more funding from the host country, and an underling on the Pentagon’s civilian side told Lieutenant General Kevin Schneider, commander of US Forces Japan, which occupied the bases, he could not participate in my meetings, hoping to keep the Defense Department’s fingernails clean. The reason I wanted both State and Defense personnel with me was precisely to show that, for a change, the US government actually had one position on an issue. After ascertaining just which civilian underling had caused the problem, I called Dunford and told him. The nation’s top military officer had not even heard that civilian policy types were giving orders to his uniformed subordinates about what meetings to attend. Dun
ford didn’t need persuasion, saying he had attended similar meetings when he was US commander in Afghanistan. All of this consumed needless time and energy. Your government at work.

  I met first with Yachi to explain why Trump wanted $8 billion annually, starting in a year, compared to the roughly $2.5 billion Japan now paid.21 I didn’t expect him to be happy, and he wasn’t, but we were at the beginning of a negotiation; they could prepare themselves, which was more advance notice than South Korea received. Ultimately, only Trump knew what payment would satisfy him, so there was no point now trying to guess what the “real” number was. Trump himself didn’t know yet. But at least by alerting Japan and South Korea that they had a real issue, I gave them a chance to figure out a response.

  The bulk of the Yachi meeting involved the Japanese explaining their position in the accelerating dispute with South Korea.22 They believed Moon was undermining a critical 1965 treaty between the two countries, a treaty that, in Japan’s view, had two purposes. One was to normalize bilateral relations during the Cold War. The second was to provide final compensation for South Korea’s claims for forced labor and other abuses (including the World War II comfort women) during Japanese colonial rule. Japan saw this treaty, which had taken fourteen years to negotiate, as entirely closing the record of the past. From America’s perspective, normalizing relations between Tokyo and Seoul, two key allies, was crucial to our efforts in East Asia to deter Russian, North Korean, and Chinese belligerence. We had no NATO counterpart in the Pacific, only a series of “hub and spoke” bilateral alliances, so we always worked for greater South Korean–Japanese cooperation, and to expand it with others like Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand. Even in our otherwise indifferent Administration, the “free and open Indo-Pacific” concept was a way to enhance horizontal ties among like-minded countries. Moreover, high on Trump’s priority list for a successful North Korea nuclear deal was his insistence that Japan and South Korea pay a big part of the economic costs; Trump wasn’t giving the North any “foreign aid,” only the prospect of large, profitable private investment. At that point, Japan was ready to write a substantial check, in my view, but only on the assumption that North Korea would sign an analog to the 1965 South Korea–Japan treaty, resolving all outstanding or potential claims.23 If the 1965 treaty hadn’t really turned the page for Seoul, how could Tokyo expect something comparable from Pyongyang?

  Japan had invoked the 1965 treaty’s arbitration clause, which South Korea refused to accept. The parties were gridlocked, but Abe wasn’t sitting still. South Korea’s hard-line position had inflamed Japan’s public opinion, so Abe, as shrewd and tough as they come, turned to their export-control laws, based on four international agreements designed to prevent the proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and materials, and certain conventional weapons. Seoul was on Tokyo’s “white list” for these purposes, making trade permissible in commodities otherwise barred by the four arrangements, because neither considered the other a proliferation threat. The US also participates actively in these arrangements and has scores of trading relationships similar to those with South Korea and Japan. However, because Seoul and Tokyo had not previously formalized their bilateral relations under the conventional-weapons group (the Wassenaar Arrangement), and under accusations that illicit transshipments under the other three groupings were taking place, perhaps even to North Korea, Japan threatened to remove South Korea from the white list. That would, as a result, require individual licenses for many items traded between the two countries, particularly regarding three sensitive items required to manufacture semiconductors, threatening the South’s computer and other high-tech industries.

  As if all this were not bad enough, in further response, South Korea was threatening to cancel a bilateral Japan agreement called the General Security of Military Information Agreement. Under this deal, the two countries shared vital military intelligence and other sensitive information, thereby allowing greater bilateral military-to-military cooperation. This was not just a bilateral issue between Japan and South Korea, but directly affected US national security interests as well.24 As Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said later, the agreement was “critical to sharing intelligence, particularly in a timely manner, with regard to any kind of North Korean actions.”25 If Seoul gave notice and the agreement collapsed, there would be a material negative impact on trilateral defense arrangements in the region, at what was hardly a propitious moment. Timing was critical. The agreement was automatically renewable every year, unless one of the parties gave ninety days’ notice to cancel it, the date for which in 2019 was the fast-approaching August 24.

  Trump had already told Moon he didn’t want to get involved in the dispute, so I didn’t see much we could do. But this smoldering issue, about to go big, was bad news. In South Korea the next day, July 24, Ambassador Harris hosted breakfast at his residence with General Robert Abrams, commander of US Forces Korea, and me, just the three of us, to discuss base costs candidly. Harris, former commander of the US Pacific Command before he retired from the military, understood how sensitive this issue was for Trump, having sat through the June 30 meetings where Trump belabored Moon with it. I wanted to be sure I left this breakfast with both of them understanding that simply stonewalling the question, especially as the end of the year approached, was a mistake. I also needed to explain Trump’s angst over the upcoming tabletop military exercise, so they could help those of us in Washington to resolve the problem, rather than simply fighting it. Neither Abrams nor Harris could believe what they were hearing, which proved how far removed chatter in the Oval Office with Trump was from the dangerous real world these men inhabited.

  We eventually motorcaded to the Blue House to meet with Chung and an interagency team to go over the base-costs issue. It was just as much fun as it had been in Japan, maybe even more so, because the December 31 deadline to renew South Korea’s bilateral cost-sharing agreement with the United States was bearing down on all of us. After extensive discussions of the base-costs issue, we turned to the unfolding South Korea–Japan dispute. Needless to say, the South Koreans didn’t think they were ripping up the 1965 treaty and claimed they had to act as they did because of decisions by South Korea’s Supreme Court.26 South Korea thought Tokyo’s threat to remove Seoul from its white list amounted to “breaching the relationship of trust” between the two countries. Japan’s foreign ministry had apparently also deleted from its website a reference to South Korea as a “strategic ally,” and that didn’t sit well either. That’s why the military-intelligence-sharing deal was at risk, and, Chung added, Japan should be aware that without South Korean cooperation, Japan cannot achieve its diplomatic goals. Besides, South Korea was rapidly catching up to Japan; whereas just a few years ago, Japan’s economy had been five times the size of South Korea’s, now it was only 2.7 times larger, and per capita GDP was almost equal.

  When I got back to Washington, I debriefed Trump on the base negotiations (Pompeo and Mnuchin were also with me in the Oval on other issues), and he said, as he did more and more frequently, that the way to get the $8 and $5 billion annual payments, respectively, was to threaten to withdraw all US forces. “That puts you in a very strong bargaining position,” said Trump. Fortunately, he was mollified enough by my report to agree the joint tabletop military exercises with South Korea could proceed, although he wasn’t happy about it. He repeated his view the next day after hearing more about North Korea’s most recent missile launches, saying, “This is a good time to be asking for the money,” meaning the increased base payments. Trump went on to tell the others in the Oval, “John got it to one billion dollars this year. You’ll get the five billion dollars because of the missiles.” How encouraging.

  Everything pointed to the Japan–South Korea dispute’s taking on a life of its own, expanding without much conscious thought on either side. Despite Trump’s disinterest, I proposed to Chung the two countries consider a “standstill agreement” for a month, during which neither coun
try would take any steps to make things worse. That might at least buy time for creative thinking to break the cycle we were in. Chung was willing to consider it, and I said I would talk with the Japanese. They were pessimistic but willing to consider anything that might get us out of the hole they and the South Koreans were busy digging. After several days of intense back-and-forth, we made progress on a standstill. North Korea, in the meantime, had continued firing salvos of short-range missiles, including on July 30, launching two short-range ballistic missiles into the Sea of Japan. We still did not respond. I briefed Trump, but he responded, “What the hell are we doing there to begin with?” That didn’t augur well for help from the top if Abe or Moon decided to call Trump again. Japan and South Korea made no progress, and Japan’s Cabinet formally decided to remove South Korea from the white list. In response to this, South Korea gave notice it was terminating its military intelligence-sharing deal and removed Japan from its own white list. At that point, having crashed into the ocean floor, the Japan–South Korea crisis rested.27