The Room Where It Happened

by John Bolton;

  During all this, Trump had a surprisingly good meeting with Mongolian President Khaltmaagiin Battulga, who was visiting Washington. Battulga’s son was fighting with US forces in Afghanistan, and Trump signed a photo of the young man that his father brought along. Battulga pulled no punches when Trump asked him what he thought Kim Jong Un really wanted. More than anything else, Kim feared a popular uprising because of the danger to Kim’s autocratic regime, said Battulga, stressing that the condition of people’s lives in North Korea was grave, and much worse after sanctions.

  Trump remained focused on Kim Jong Un, despite his repeated missile launches and the feud between our two main East Asia allies. On August 1, Trump tweeted three messages:

  Kim Jong Un and North Korea tested 3 short range missiles over the last number of days. These missiles tests are not a violation of our signed Singapore agreement, nor was there discussion of short range missiles when we shook hands. There may be a United Nations violation, but…

  …Chairman Kim does not want to disappoint me with a violation of trust, there is far too much for North Korea to gain – the potential as a Country, under Kim Jong Un’s leadership, is unlimited. Also, there is far too much to lose. I may be wrong, but I believe that…

  …Chairman Kim has a great and beautiful vision for his country, and only the United States, with me as President, can make that vision come true. He will do the right thing because he is far too smart not to, and he does not want to disappoint his friend, President Trump!

  That was our North Korea policy.

  * * *

  During the 2020 campaign, there is little doubt North Korea will remain a major White House focus. What we cannot predict is how Kim Jong Un will position himself. Taking advantage of US election-year politics, will he try to entice Trump into a bad deal, the kind of approach that led Trump’s predecessors into major mistakes? Or will he conclude that no deal with Trump is possible and that he would be better served waiting to see whether a pliant Democrat with even less foreign-policy experience than Trump emerges as President? Whatever the answer, North Korea’s trajectory toward being a fully capable nuclear-weapons state will continue. And for a fourth Administration in a row, spanning nearly three decades, the United States will have failed to stop the world’s most serious nuclear proliferation threat.

  That means inevitably that some future Administration will have to face a regime in Pyongyang that can cause incalculable damage to our country (absent a completely effective national missile-defense system we still lack the resolve to build). All this could have been avoided had we only steeled ourselves to act earlier. For nearly thirty years, North Korea’s progress toward deliverable nuclear weapons has only increased the threat. We can only hope we yet have a chance to stop it before it becomes imminent.

  CHAPTER 12 TRUMP LOSES HIS WAY, AND THEN HIS NERVE

  Whenever US attention to Iran faded, especially for Trump, I knew Tehran would help us return it to the top of his agenda. So it was no small matter when the Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, offered a helpful explanation of what Iran’s well-organized protesters intended when they shouted “Death to America,” along with “Death to Israel,” their favorites. “Death to America,” said Khamenei, meant “death to Trump and John Bolton and Pompeo.”1 These outbursts of inadvertent truth, like who Iran’s leaders were targeting for death, reminded us of the continuing need to exert “maximum pressure” on Tehran. It was due to not just Iran’s nuclear-weapons and ballistic-missile programs, but its continuing role as the world’s central banker for terrorism, and its aggressive conventional military presence across the Middle East.

  One very contentious issue was whether to designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, a statutory term carrying specified consequences for the organization so named. Trump wanted this designation, as did Pompeo and I, because dealing with a group so listed and its agents risked felony charges. Mnuchin worried that this designation for the elite wing of the Iranian military or even for the Quds Force, its expeditionary arm deployed abroad, currently in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen,2 would have widespread consequences, a concern I didn’t understand. I thought the whole point was to inflict as much pain as possible on these terrorists. Other agencies had varying positions, the general thrust of which was, couldn’t we just leave well enough alone without making more work for us?

  The real opposition came from the government’s permanent bureaucracy. Attorneys in the State Department’s Legal Advisor’s Office simply held the issue for months, not informing the Legal Advisor herself. Attorneys at Homeland Security did essentially the same thing, hoping the issue would just go away. And, during our efforts in March 2019 to move the process along, lawyer time in many key agencies was consumed by disputes over how to fund Trump’s Mexico border wall, which had long been the Administration’s very own La Brea tar pit. There were legal issues, such as whether the applicable statute permitted designating all or part of a government as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, or whether the statute only applied to “nonstate actors” like al-Qaeda. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel split that baby in March 2019, concluding that a government entity, such as the Revolutionary Guard, could receive the designation, but not an entire government. This Solomonic conclusion limited the potential impact of the decision, which I didn’t see as a plus, but we were only after the guard to begin with. Further conceptual debate seemed unproductive.

  There was a legitimate concern that action against Iran could increase the risk to US forces in Iraq and across the region. But this argument proved too much. As was too often the case, the Defense Department indiscriminately deployed this objection against numerous ideas to increase pressure on Iran. The answer to the Pentagon’s worries about pressuring Iran was to increase our force-protection capabilities in Iraq, assuming you believed US forces should stay there. It was not to ignore the larger strategic threat of Iran, the aspiring nuclear power, by inverting US policy priorities, elevating Iran’s threat inside Iraq above Iran’s worldwide nuclear and terrorist threats. This inversion increased daily as Iran gained greater influence in both the Baghdad government and through its organization of Iraqi Shia militia groups into surrogate arms of the Quds Force.3 I worried, as the old admonition said, that the generals were still fighting the last war rather than the current threat. Supporting a government in Baghdad, as we did after the Second Gulf War, hoping it would become representative and functional throughout Iraq, was one thing. Propping up a regime that did not control Iraq’s Kurdish territories, had minimal support among Sunni Arabs, and took its orders on truly critical issues from Tehran4 was something else entirely.

  Day after day of bureaucratic guerrilla warfare ensued during the second half of March, but by this time, I was confident the outcome was not in doubt, despite destructive leaks by opponents, predicting the direst of consequences from the terrorist designation. Finally, on April 8, Trump made the announcement, adding a powerful new tool to our “maximum pressure” effort.5 This “pressure” would have been more “maximum” if it had been applied six months or more earlier, but it demonstrated a seriousness of intention now added to the massive economic effects of the sanctions themselves on Iran. The squeeze was growing.

  * * *

  Commentators remarked periodically how often the Administration resorted to sanctions and tariffs as instruments of national power. This may be true compared to earlier Presidents, but there is no evidence these measures were truly effective, systematic, or well executed. The real story was much more complex, primarily because neither Trump nor Treasury Secretary Mnuchin was interested in or willing to pursue a sanctions policy with resolve and consistency.

  To the contrary, Mnuchin argued that the constant use of sanctions, and the pressure we put on the international financial system, would result over time in the tool’s being weakened, as states impacted by the sanctions sought to evade them. He argued further that using access to the
US financial system as one of our main tools would undermine the status of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency and encourage others, like Russia and China, to conduct transactions in euros or through countertrade and other techniques. It was a given that countries would try to evade sanctions. The real reason sanctions were not as successful as they could have been was not that they were used too frequently but that they were used ineffectively, in both the Trump and Obama Administrations. And while concern for losing the dollar as the reserve currency was legitimate abstractly, there was no real alternative in sight for miscreant nations until far into the future. Moreover, both Mnuchin’s arguments amounted to saying that the threat of sanctions was more effective than the application of sanctions, which was manifestly incorrect.

  The right way to impose sanctions is to do so swiftly and unexpectedly; make them broad and comprehensive, not piecemeal; and enforce them rigorously, using military assets to interdict illicit commerce if necessary. This was the formula the Bush 41 Administration used immediately after Saddam Hussein’s August 1990 invasion of Kuwait, with devastating effect. But even there, it was not sufficient. Although badly weakened, Iraq still smuggled out enough oil to survive, thus ultimately necessitating military force to oust it from Kuwait. But for a road map on imposing sanctions swiftly and comprehensively, UN Security Council Resolutions 661, enumerating the sanctions on Iraq, and 665, authorizing the use of military force to carry them out, remain key documents. Instead, especially under Obama, sanctions began to be applied as if they were individual judicial decisions against specific entities and individuals. This approach did exist under certain sanctions authorities in US law, intended for more limited purposes than dealing with massive threats like Iraq in 1990–91, but it was a mistake to expand the practice. Instead, legislation should have been amended where necessary to allow for sweeping sanctions without quasi-prosecutorial investigations and quasi-judicial determinations at the Treasury Department.

  Trump and Mnuchin did not reverse these Obama-era policies; ironically, they were expanded and institutionalized. The sanctions decision-making process came to resemble the Jarndyce v. Jarndyce litigation in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. Moreover, Mnuchin himself was so averse to negative press coverage that he approached every potentially controversial sanctions decision nervously. In the Administration’s early days, Mnuchin relished the publicity he received when imposing new sanctions, but when things got stickier and more complex, he became more and more jumpy. Returning to government after a dozen years, I was surprised to see how large a policy role the Treasury Department now played in sanctions decisions. Rather than being simply an operational enforcement mechanism, Treasury now aspired to do foreign policy, which was, to my mind, inappropriate. It also raised the issue of whether, as with other Treasury law-enforcement functions earlier moved to Homeland Security, the sanctions-enforcement process should go somewhere else: Justice, Commerce, or even Defense.

  The risk of undermining the US dollar as the global reserve currency was theoretically important, but that risk existed independent of the effects of US sanctions. Other currencies already had major roles in international financial matters, and the advent of the euro created an even more significant competitor. On the other hand, some countries pegged their currencies to the dollar, and economists spoke of national economies’ being “dollarized,” sometimes by official decision and sometimes just through real-world practice. Trends were hardly all in one direction. In fact, the “threat” to the dollar’s status turned into simply one more Mnuchin argument when he was anxious about imposing sanctions and risking media criticism. As Wilbur Ross said in the context of Venezuela, Mnuchin often seemed more protective of US firms that were sleeping with the enemy than of accomplishing the mission we were trying to achieve. It is rare indeed in the hard, chaotic world of international affairs when the threat of action is actually more powerful than the action itself. If America’s economic swords had been sharper during the Trump Administration, we would have accomplished much more.

  * * *

  One issue that should have been among the easiest to resolve, but which was actually one of the most exhausting, was how tightly to squeeze Iran’s oil industry. The common response to any proposal to tighten oil sanctions against Iran (or Venezuela, for that matter) was invariably that global oil prices would spike dramatically. Most of this noise came from Mnuchin and Treasury, an unexpected source of expertise on global oil markets. National Economic Council Chairman Larry Kudlow, Energy Department Secretary Rick Perry, and Council of Economic Advisors Chairman Kevin Hassett repeatedly argued that global supply and capacity levels would mitigate the price effects of tighter sanctions. Hassett stressed the interesting statistic that increases in domestic US oil production since Trump’s election dwarfed the decreases in Iran’s sales implied by eliminating waivers on purchasing Iranian oil granted to some countries, mistakenly in my view, when sanctions took effect in November 2018. Moreover, he pointed out, given America’s enhanced role as an oil producer, rising oil prices actually boosted US GDP, even if higher consumer prices had corresponding negative effects. Overall, for us, it was basically a wash economically.

  But Mnuchin’s arguments carried weight because Trump invariably believed our allies were not doing enough. This was certainly true on Iran. France, Germany, and the UK spent their time trying to save the Iran nuclear deal rather than pressuring the ayatollahs. Neither they nor Americans who supported Obama’s deal ever believed unilateral US sanctions could devastate Iran’s economy, although that was exactly their effect. They opposed proving the point more graphically by making the sanctions ever stricter. Accordingly, success in tightening sanctions was mixed. Had we hard-liners persuaded Trump to bear down on Mnuchin, we would have seen even more dramatic economic decline in Iran, but that was not to be. Trump could initiate policies, but his lack of consistency, steadfastness, and resolve invariably undercut them. So it was on Iran sanctions.

  One important loophole for Iran was the oil waivers granted to eight countries (Taiwan, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Italy, Greece, and Turkey) when renewed sanctions took effect in November 2018, six months after US withdrawal from the nuclear deal, noted above. Taiwan, Greece, and Italy quickly halted purchases of Iranian oil, so not renewing their waivers was a given. State’s bureaucrats found endless reasons to extend the other waivers, as “clientitis” took hold. “But India is so important,” or “Japan is so important,” said officials, arguing the interests of “their” countries rather than the US interests at stake.6 One of the worst cases involved India, which, like the others, was buying Iranian oil at prices well below the global market because Iran was so desperate to make sales.7 India complained it would be disadvantaged not only because of having to find new suppliers, but also because the new sources would insist on prevailing market prices! India’s making this argument was understandable, but it was incomprehensible that US bureaucrats echoed it sympathetically.

  Pompeo was wobbly, caught between conflicting pressures. He also doubted the Arab oil-producing states would really fulfill their promises to boost production to make up for the “loss” of Iranian oil under the waivers. And of course, global oil prices would spike. Trump, while oscillating on any given day on any given issue, had been vibrating increasingly on the “end the waivers” side of the scale. He said expressly in the Oval on March 25, “I’m ready to cut them off,” and on April 12 said, “Increase the sanctions. Max them out, do it right away, including on the oil,” and on April 18 said, “Go to zero.” In a phone call with Pompeo, Trump had not been sympathetic to India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, saying, “He’ll be okay.” I recall a similar conversation reflecting Trump’s indifference to notifying allies about waiver decisions. Considering one foreign leader’s trip to Washington, which also raised the ending of a waiver, Trump had a ready suggestion: “Do it before he gets here, and then I’ll say I didn’t know anything about it,” and “Do it early in the week. I don’
t want to be anywhere near it.”

  On April 22, after six months of endless, needless, time-consuming opposition by many within the Administration, but with widespread Republican congressional support for so doing, the White House announced the end of the waivers.8 Many in the media, who had listened to the bureaucracy’s leaks to the contrary, were surprised. US military and civilian personnel in the region were rightly on alert for an appropriate period, and we made it clear we would hold Iran responsible for any retaliation. This was an important step forward, although the waivers should never have been granted to begin with. The original sanctions were announced in May 2018, taking effect six months later. That was more than enough time for all concerned to make alternative arrangements. The real conclusion was that sanctions for any new transactions should have taken immediate effect upon the Iran nuclear deal’s termination. It may have been appropriate to grandfather existing transactions that had been “innocently” entered into, but six months to wind these deals down was far too generous. Ninety days was plenty. Giving Iran a full six months before either existing or potential transactions were brought under the ax was a gift from Allah Tehran didn’t deserve. The next Administration should fix Mnuchin’s approach immediately so everyone will be on notice that sanctions are an economic weapon we will use effectively, not something we feel guilty about deploying.

  * * *

  Another set of waivers causing endless controversy was the “nuclear waivers,” allowing for Western assistance or cooperation with elements of Iran’s purported “civil” nuclear program. Dating back to the re-initiation of sanctions in November 2018, the State Department, over NSC objections, originally issued seven such waivers. Not all the waivers were equally serious in promoting Iran’s nuclear work, but the political symbolism was bad. As the May 2019 sunset of the waivers approached, we sought internal Administration agreement to end at least some and reduce the waiver period to ninety days for others. Our efforts were not as productive as I had hoped, largely because the State Department waged trench warfare to save as many waivers as it could. Nonetheless, in early May, we terminated two waivers, bringing us down to five, and all those remaining were limited in both duration and scope. Before I left, the epicenter of resistance to killing the waivers had shifted to Mnuchin and Treasury. They argued that lifting the waivers would hurt significant Chinese and Russian interests, so we should therefore extend them. Mnuchin, Pompeo, and I argued this out in front of Trump in the Oval on July 25, and Mnuchin’s concerns for China and Russia prevailed over my effort to increase pressure on Iran; Pompeo was largely silent.