by John Bolton;
We worried about further attacks, especially against our embassies and consulates. I called Trump again shortly after noon, just to check in. By then, Trump was moving toward believing there had been no attack at all, so I tried to explain more fully all that we were hearing, although our fact-gathering and research was still ongoing. As time dragged along, new information was scarce. At about 4:45 p.m., Dunford passed on the Pentagon’s assessment that damage to the four tankers appeared light and that, at the United Arab Emirates’ invitation, we were sending teams to Fujairah the next day to go in the water and assess the damage. I called Trump one last time at 5:15, to update him on what we knew and were watching, as well as our view that we should not say anything publicly until we knew more. “Yes,” he said immediately, “low-key it, don’t say anything.” He wanted the Gulf Arabs to pay the costs of whatever operations we were undertaking, riffing again that we should have taken Iraq’s oil after invading in 2003. At the end of the call, he said, “Thanks, John, bye,” which indicated he was satisfied with where we were. I left for home around 5:30.
At Trump’s regular intel briefing near noon, he asked immediately, “Why aren’t they [the Iranians] talking?” He just couldn’t believe they didn’t want to talk and still harbored the idea that Pompeo and I were blocking their efforts to speak with him. Based on what we knew, however, there was simply no indication Tehran was interested in speaking with us. Trump was even more forceful than before that he wanted the Arab oil-producing countries to bear “the full cost” of whatever we were doing. After discussing the risks to our personnel in Iraq, Trump filibustered on Syria and why we should get out entirely, not to mention Afghanistan, and then Iraq, while we were at it. “Call Pompeo and tell him to remember Benghazi,” Trump concluded. On the other hand, Trump was clear, as I explained to Shanahan later, that he wanted a very robust response if Americans were killed, something significantly greater than a “tit-for-tat” retaliation.
One related and potentially important augmentation of Iran’s capabilities involved its ballistic-missile program. Testing continued apace in 2018 and 2019, although there were a fair number of test failures, at launch or shortly thereafter. Although we took comfort from the failures, I remembered, growing up in the 1950s and ’60s, American scientists’ describing Vanguard and Jupiter-C rockets’ blowing up on the launchpad as “90% successes.” They learned from failures as well as from impressive launches. Almost inevitably, as Iran’s launch testing continued and made progress, its threat in the region and ultimately globally would grow. But it was simply not something, despite repeated efforts, I could get Trump to focus on strategically. After a failed Iranian test launch of a Safir missile,20 however, he did tweet on August 30:
The United States of America was not involved in the catastrophic accident during final launch preparations for the Safir SLV Launch at Semnan Launch Site One in Iran. I wish Iran best wishes and good luck in determining what happened at Site One.
That set tongues wagging for some time, since he was implying exactly the opposite of what the tweet said. As Trump said later, “I like to fuck with them.” More grand strategy.
Early on Tuesday, May 14, we learned Iran had struck again overnight, hitting two pumping stations on Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline.21 Although Yemen’s Houthis claimed credit, there were those who believed the attack came from Shia militia groups in Iraq, in either case launched under Iran’s direction and control. This time, the Saudis quickly announced the attacks publicly, so I called Trump at about eight thirty. He reacted calmly but said of Iran, “If they hit us, we will hit them hard, I can tell you that.” As he left the White House for Louisiana to dedicate a new liquefied natural-gas export facility (somehow accompanied by Gordon Sondland and some random EU Commissioner Sondland had persuaded Mulvaney to allow onto Air Force One), reporters asked about news reports he was planning to send 120,000 new troops to the Middle East. Trump replied that it was “fake news,” adding, “And if we did that, we’d send a hell of a lot more troops than that.”22 By this time, even Democrats were starting to worry that the magnitude and tempo of Iran’s threat was growing unacceptably. Public awareness later that day of the “ordered departure” of over one hundred nonessential personnel from Embassy Baghdad added to the concern.
The next day, Trump chaired an NSC meeting at nine thirty a.m. to get a better sense of his thinking. Dunford and Shanahan, appropriately, urged Trump several times to look beyond simply the next immediate decision and consider moves farther down the road. Shanahan said they wanted to assess his tolerance for risk, to which Trump responded, “I have an unbelievable capacity for risk. Risk is good,” followed by a lecture on his views on Iraq; why he wanted to get out of Syria; why, as he had said elsewhere, such as in the case of Iraq, we should take the oil in Venezuela after ousting Maduro; and why he thought China was “the greatest cheater in the world,” as recently proven by their behavior in the trade negotiations, thus precipitating a riff on economic power as the basis of military power. That brought up the subject of aircraft carriers, and another discourse on how the steam systems for lifting planes to and from carrier flight decks were vastly superior to the electronic systems used on the incredibly expensive Gerald Ford—$16 billion to date, said Trump (finicky readers can look up the actual cost on their own; I don’t want facts slowing down the narrative flow)—despite the seamen themselves saying they could fix the steam systems by hitting them with a hammer but couldn’t begin to understand how to fix the electronic systems. That same logic applied to the steam catapults used to help launch planes, which Trump wanted to reinstall on all carriers that had moved to more advanced systems.
Suddenly, the CIA’s Haspel, to her credit, broke in and began her portion of the briefing, stopping the Trump train in its tracks. Of course, I can’t describe what she had to say, but the rest of us counted our blessings when she started to say it. John Sullivan, in Pompeo’s absence, described the drawdown in Embassy Baghdad personnel, which lit Trump off on Afghanistan. “Get the fuck out,” said Trump, which I took to mean both Iraq and Afghanistan, although before we could find out Trump was asking, “How long until we get out of Syria except for those four hundred [two hundred in At Tanf and ‘a couple hundred’ with the projected multilateral observer force]?”
“Just a few months,” Dunford replied.
“Iraq doesn’t give a shit about us,” Trump continued, referring to the Irbil consulate, saying, “Lock the door and leave,” then opining, “That aircraft carrier [the Lincoln] was a beautiful sight.” Perhaps thinking about the Navy reminded Trump of the Army and General Mark Milley, who would succeed Dunford on October 1. Trump asked if we should start inviting Milley to NSC meetings, saying he would leave the decision to Dunford. The notion was thoroughly wrong. Only one of us sat in these chairs at any given point, and there was a time to start and a time to finish. No one, including Milley, with whom I discussed this subject subsequently, thought it was a good idea to have both of them attend until the transition was imminent, if then. Dunford replied evenly, “I’ll leave any time you want, Mr. President,” which fortunately backed Trump off. (I told Dunford privately, after the meeting, there was no way he was leaving before his term ended, or that Milley would attend NSC meetings until the right time. Dunford remained impassive, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he had been an inch away from getting up and walking out of the Sit Room for good.)
After the Lincoln reverie, Trump moved to a short-form version of the soliloquy on John Kerry and the Logan Act: “The Iranians aren’t talking only because of John Kerry,” he mused, but Shanahan, seeing how successful Haspel had been by just ignoring Trump and interrupting, resumed talking about more boring things like risk, cost, and timing regarding the various options we might consider, including the use of force. “I don’t think they should start on building nuclear weapons,” Trump offered. When Dunford tried to get more specific on what we might do and when in response to an Iranian attack, Trump said the Gulf Arabs
could pay. Dunford kept trying to get Trump to focus on specific options along a graduated ladder of possible responses, but, somehow, we veered off to South Africa and what Trump was hearing about the treatment of white farmers, asserting he wanted to grant them asylum and citizenship.23 The discussion on targets then resumed, much of it to my satisfaction. Unfortunately, the mention of our remaining troop presence in Iraq led Trump to inquire, “Why don’t we take them out? In Syria, we got rid of ISIS.” What I heard next was shocking, but I distinctly remember hearing him say “I don’t care if ISIS comes back into Iraq.” On Iran, discussion of possible US actions continued, but we then zoomed to Afghanistan, as Trump complained about how much we were paying soldiers in the Afghan government army, undissuaded when Shanahan said the average was only about $10 a day.
One week after the attack on the four tankers, on May 19, the Sit Room called me in the early afternoon to relay a report of an explosion, perhaps a Katyusha rocket landing in Zawraa Park a kilometer from our embassy in Baghdad.24 I called Dunford and then Pompeo, neither having heard anything, but we all agreed that a Katyusha launch in Baghdad was hardly news. At about five p.m., Trump tweeted:
If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran. Never threaten the United States again!
The next day, Trump complained at the intelligence briefing about “news” stories that we were asking to speak to Iran’s leaders. He tweeted later:
The Fake News put out a typically false statement, without any knowledge that the United States was trying to set up a negotiation with Iran. This is a false report… Iran will call us if and when they are ever ready. In the meantime, their economy continues to collapse—very sad for the Iranian people!
Rouhani himself said publicly, “Today’s situation is not suitable for talks.”25
I thought Iran was doing a better job trolling Trump than he was doing in return. They said publicly they knew Trump wanted to talk but was being frustrated by advisors like me, or that Trump wanted peace but his advisors wanted war.26 Much like Kim Jong Un’s efforts to separate Trump from others and deal with him alone, this was all a head game. It did bother me that the US media credulously reported these foreign assertions as if they were perfectly logical, thus amplifying Pyongyang and Tehran propaganda efforts. Much worse was that Trump also appeared to take the stories seriously. Prior Presidents would have rejected characterizations by foreign adversaries of their own advisors, but Trump seemed to have the opposite reaction. It was difficult to explain this to outsiders but perfectly normal in the Trump White House. The next day for example, he said to me in an accusatory tone, “I don’t want people to be asking Iran to talk.” I replied, “Well, I sure as hell am not!” Trump acknowledged, “No, you wouldn’t be.”
While I flew to Japan to help prepare for Trump’s state visit with the Emperor, Shanahan and Dunford met with him to discuss increasing the defensive preparations for our forces already in the Gulf, which Pompeo and Kupperman also attended. Before the discussion got too far, however, Trump asked, “When are we going to get out of fucking Afghanistan? Can you use some of them here [meaning the Middle East]?” Dunford explained that the forces in Afghanistan had different skills. “That fucking Mattis,” said Trump, and off he went about how he had given Mattis the rules of engagement he wanted in Afghanistan, and we still hadn’t won. “When are we going to get out of Syria?” Trump rolled on. “All we did was save Assad.” Dunford tried to explain that, in Syria, we were continuing to do what Trump had agreed to months before, which prompted Trump to ask which of two of our Arab friends produced better soldiers. Somewhat startled, Dunford recovered to say which ones he thought were better soldiers, but Trump then asked, “Aren’t they all the same size?” Composure now restored, Dunford said there were differences in culture. Somehow, the discussion reverted to the subject at hand, and Trump accepted the Pentagon’s deployment recommendations and agreed they should be announced promptly.
* * *
Although Trump hadn’t told me at the time, he had asked Abe to get involved between Iran and the US, and Abe had taken the request seriously. Given the growing threats to US and allied interests in the Persian Gulf, this was a particularly inopportune time for this latest misdirection, especially since it was clear to me that Trump was pushing Abe into a public role that could only end in failure (which it ultimately did). Abe was thinking of visiting Iran in mid-June, before the Osaka G20 meeting, which made it even more high-profile. When I met with Abe himself while in Japan just before Trump’s state visit to meet the Emperor, Abe stressed that he would undertake the trip to Iran only if Trump wanted him to and there was some prospect of being helpful. I obviously couldn’t say that I thought the entire initiative was a terrible idea, but I suggested Abe speak to Trump about it privately and form his own judgment on how to proceed.
During Trump’s state visit, Abe and Trump got down to business on Monday, May 27, at eleven a.m. in the Akasaka Palace’s Asahi-No-Ma room, with just the two leaders, Yachi and myself, and the interpreters. Abe summarized the previous evening’s dinner with Trump, reaffirming his visit to Iran on June 12 and 13. By this point, Trump was seriously falling asleep. He never fell out of his chair and didn’t seem to miss anything important, but he was, in the immortal words of one of my Fort Polk drill sergeants, “checking his eyelids for pinholes.” Zarif had been in Tokyo the week before, and Abe said he had deduced that Iran was suffering, and had a sense of crisis. He said he thought Trump’s decision to send the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln was very effective. He was ready to decide about going to Iran but had recently spoken to some of our Arab friends who were very critical of the idea. Trump interjected that Abe shouldn’t be bothered, because the United States was defending them, we were calling our own shots, and that nobody told us what to do. After further exchanges, Trump said inflation was one million percent in Iran, the GDP was minus 10 percent, and the country was hurting badly. Then, somehow, he said that Moon was begging him to come to South Korea on this trip, but he had declined.
Trump thought Iran was dying and had to make a deal. He wanted to meet with them immediately, halfway in between (geographically, I think he meant). Although he didn’t want to humiliate Iran, and indeed hoped they would be successful, it was clear they couldn’t have nuclear weapons, which were already too prevalent worldwide, a point he repeated twice, urging Abe to call the Iranians and tell them that after he left Japan. Trump especially wanted the Iranians to know they shouldn’t listen to John Kerry. He believed he could do the negotiations in one day, not stretched out over nine to twelve months. Of course, Trump was also totally prepared to go to war if he had to, and Iran should understand that; if they didn’t, they would never make a deal. Trump had around him large numbers of people who wanted to go to war now, but it would never happen because of him. Vintage Trump, moving from a deal in one day to all-out war in mere seconds. Abe said he would convey Trump’s message, concluding by suggesting that, as he prepared for his Iran visit, Yachi and I should finalize our proposal to deliver in Iran. That was the best news all morning. Trump said Abe should proceed as fast as he could. At this point, shortly before noon, the participants in the larger meeting came in, and Abe started off the second meeting by saying he and Trump had had a very productive meeting with their national security advisors, which was one way to look at it.
While traveling onward from Tokyo to London for the UK state visit, I overnighted for refueling and crew rest in Abu Dhabi, where I had a chance on May 29 to meet with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed of the United Arab Emirates, whom I had known for many years, along with my Emirati counterpart, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed, and others. The Crown Prince repeated several times that he couldn’t tell me how important it was that I had come there, and the signal it sent all around the Gulf. He and the Emiratis were very worried about our nonresponse to Iran’s recent provocations, and the accelerating buildup of missiles and drones in the hands of the Houthis and the Shia militia in Iraq, and Ira
n’s aid to the Taliban and ISIS in Afghanistan. They also couldn’t understand, having heard from Abe,27 why Trump wanted to talk to Iran; I tried, unsuccessfully, to explain Trump’s idea that talking didn’t really mean or imply anything other than talking. The Crown Prince and the Gulf Arabs didn’t agree with that, and more important, Iran didn’t either; they all saw it as weakness. (In fact, after I arrived in London, Saudi national security advisor Musaid bin Mohammed al-Aiban, whom I had not previously met, reached me to say that his Crown Prince, Mohammad bin Salman, wanted me to know how unhappy they were that Abe was going to Iran.28 I urged that the Crown Prince call Trump directly, thinking he might have better luck than I.) I left for London as discouraged as during the Obama years when one Middle East leader after another would ask why Obama thought the ayatollahs would ever voluntarily give up terrorism or nuclear weapons.
