President Donald Trump lacks a coherent strategy in foreign policy and risks international confidence in the U.S., according to John Bolton, a former U.S. National Security adviser and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
“When people talk about a Trump doctrine in international affairs, it’s a complete fantasy to think that there’s any coherence to it all,” Bolton said while speaking at The Texas Tribune Festival. “It’s all through the prism of what benefits Donald Trump.”
Bolton, who served as a national security adviser during Trump’s first presidential term, has become a notable adversary of Trump since writing a highly critical book about his time in the Trump administration.
The Trump administration claimed it contained classified information but failed to stop its release. Bolton has continued to come under fire for his handling of classified information and was indicted on federal charges in October.
Federal prosecutors alleged Bolton put the country at risk by improperly retaining and transmitting classified national defense information to family members via email. According to the indictment, an Iranian hacker gained access to Bolton’s email account where documents were stored. Bolton alerted the FBI of the hack in 2021, prompting an investigation which reportedly produced his recent indictment.
Bolton, who pleaded not guilty to all charges, did not talk about his indictment during TribFest. He previously said his indictment was politically motivated and that he was the “latest target” in a string of legal challenges against Trump’s critics.
Bolton decided to work for Trump, believing the president would “be disciplined by the weight of the responsibilities he had” and make informed decisions. Instead, Bolton said Trump wanted “yes men and yes women.”
“He doesn’t want information. He wants to do what he wants to do. And he has people around him who are prepared to say ‘yes sir’,” Bolton said of Trump’s second term.
Bolton, who also worked for presidents George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, said he doesn’t believe the GOP is now Trump’s party. But he added that Republicans, including members of Congress, have failed to stand up to Trump “when he does things that are manifestly not conservative,” such as deploying the Texas National Guard to protests in Chicago.
“Conservatives believe in the division of powers between the states and the federal government,” he said. “We believe that power is best exercised by the government’s closest to the peoples, the cities and the counties, first, the states, second, the federal government, only at the last resort.”
Still, Bolton thinks “as Trump is increasingly seen as a lame duck president in his second term, that the party will snap back at some point to being the Reaganite party.”
Bolton, a controversial figure who has historically advocated for a more militaristic approach in U.S. foreign relations and defended the U.S.’s decision to invade Iraq, criticized Trump on foreign policy, tariffs and his attitude to the war in Ukraine.
When asked about the U.S.-Mexico border, Bolton said he thinks illegal immigration can be contained and doesn’t require militarization of the border. He also believes illegal drugs could be “handled through law enforcement and cooperation with the government of Mexico.”
“But treating it as a national security threat, threatening the use of force without coordinating with the government of Mexico is going to further destabilise the government of Mexico, which the drug cartels have already been doing,” he said. “It wouldn’t work out.”
Bolton said he agreed that the U.S. needed to defend itself from China’s “predatory practices”, but he said Trump’s tariffs are not a “conservative approach” that Republicans like Reagan would have implemented.
And by Trump calling the war in Ukraine “senseless”, Bolton said Trump risks the U.S.’s interests in preserving peace with some of “our closest friends and biggest trading partners”.
“And if unprovoked aggression can be seen to succeed on the continent of Europe, anywhere else in the world is in jeopardy, particularly Taiwan,” he said. “The conclusion that’s drawn around the world is the US isn’t going to come to the defense of a democracy in Central Europe, where it has so much at stake … it’s not going to come to anybody else’s anywhere else in the world.”
