John Bolton a moderating influence?

Graeme Wood writes in the Atlantic about Trump national security adviser John Bolton.

...“I would describe myself as pro-American,” Bolton said. “The greatest hope for freedom for mankind in history is the United States, and therefore protecting American national interest is the single best strategy for the world.” He said that America has slowly constrained its range of action, through foolhardy entanglements with international institutions such as the United Nations, and naive bilateral agreements that promised too much to America’s enemies in exchange for too little. He saw bad deals all around: The INF Treaty, which even Barack Obama’s administration said Russia had violated with impunity, was one. The Iran nuclear agreement, which Bolton has labored tirelessly to scrap, was another.

...With a president not only prone to bold gestures but incapable of any other kind, Bolton’s role as national security adviser is becoming one for which no one ever thought him suited: a moderating influence.

...Bolton said these early years in government were his education. “Ever since I was at USAID, I studied how the bureaucracy works,” he told me. “Every department has a different culture. Working the interagency process successfully means knowing everything about all those cultures.” It means knowing who will produce a memo undermining your plan, what that memo will say, and how to make sure its author will fail. “You have to judge what you want, where the opposition to it is going to be, where the support for it will be. You mobilize the support and overcome the opposition,” he said. “That may sound straightforward. But the number of people who go into government and realize that is depressingly low.”

...I asked Bolton whether the U.S. should leave the UN, which seems both a logical conclusion of his contempt and a policy that Trump himself might consider. He replied by quoting Jeane Kirkpatrick, who served as Reagan’s UN ambassador: “No,” she said. “It’s not worth the trouble.”

"Bolton is a sovereigntist,” John Yoo told me. “He thinks the U.S. should not be bound by international organizations, and we should not be ceding our authority to the United Nations or NAFTA.” After the Cold War, “the U.S. tied itself down with multilateral institutions, primarily run by Europeans, to constrain our freedom of action—to tie down Gulliver.” Every time the United States joins an alliance, or consents to arbitration on equal terms with, say, Latvia or Guinea, one more rope is lashed over Gulliver’s limbs.

...“Within the United States, we’re fully capable of deciding what our policies should be,” Bolton told me. “That includes environmental issues, the death penalty, gun control, abortion—all of which are hotly debated in America, and on all of which the majority position is different from the overwhelming majority in Europe.” Here his view on international law intersects with the Trumpian notion of a deep state: a corps of unelected monitors who obstruct the democratically chosen sovereign.

...If the nsc under McMaster was a consultative body, under Bolton it has become the opposite. The “National Security Strategy,” the document that was the fruit of McMaster’s allegedly interminable meetings, is written and filed away, Bolton told me, and consulted by no one. “I don’t view writing strategy papers as big accomplishments,” he said. The measure of an NSC, he said, is what it does: exiting the Iran nuclear deal, exiting the INF Treaty, managing an end to the Syrian civil war, preparing countermeasures to cyberattacks. “The NSC is not a think tank.”

...Another example is the American exit, or non-exit, from Syria. In December, Trump announced, “Our boys, our young women, our men—they’re all coming back, and they’re coming back now.” That action would concede Syria to Bashar al-Assad, and to Iran and Russia, and it would all but guarantee the defeat and possible slaughter of U.S.-backed Kurdish and Arab forces. Mattis resigned in principled dudgeon, and wrote an open letter to Trump. Bolton moved more slyly. After a brief delay, he stressed the “consistent U.S. position on standing by the Kurds and those who fought with the U.S.” He added, “There is no change to the U.S. position against the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime. Any further use will be met by a swift, strong response.”

Read more here.