With threat of force, Trump's reshaped team wants the world to bend

The two generals celebrated by President Donald Trump for their reputations for toughness are now considered the moderates — and at risk of falling out of favor.

Not since the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, have key national security leaders so publicly raised the threat of military confrontation if foreign adversaries do not meet the United States’ demands.

But George W. Bush’s war Cabinet was responding to the biggest direct attack on the United States since Pearl Harbor. The current moment of peril arises from Trump’s conviction that the United States is being pushed around by adversaries who need to understand that “America First” means they have a brief window to negotiate a deal, or force may follow.

Now, the members of Trump’s newly constituted team are about to face multiple, simultaneous tests of their past proclamations and sometimes conflicting instincts. North Korea and Iran pose the most immediate challenge, with Trump setting negotiation deadlines that are only months away.

Over the longer term, they must straighten out the strategic incoherence surrounding Trump’s approach to Russia and China, defining the meaning of the administration’s policy declaration earlier this year that “great power competition — not terrorism — is now the primary focus of U.S. national security.”

Washington is now consumed by a debate over whether Trump’s new team plans to govern as far to the right as it talks.

So far, the incoming national security adviser, John R. Bolton, has declared that his past comments are “behind me.” Hours after his selection was announced, Bolton vowed that he would find ways to execute the policies that Trump was elected on, but that he would not tolerate slow-walking and leaks from bureaucrats he dismissed as “munchkins.”

Some who know Bolton and his operating style predict titanic clashes.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, the retired general who has argued for keeping the Iran deal intact and warned that military confrontation with North Korea would result in “the worst kind of fighting in most people’s lifetimes,” told colleagues Friday that he did not know if he could work with Bolton. The White House chief of staff, John F. Kelly, another retired four-star general, was also unenthusiastic about Bolton’s hiring.

Bolton’s harshest critics — mostly Democrats, but their ranks include some members of the Bush administration — argue that the odds of taking military action will rise dramatically when he becomes the last person a volatile U.S. president consults.

“John Bolton is not some gray bureaucrat whose views are unknown to us,” said Michael McFaul, U.S. ambassador to Moscow under President Barack Obama, and now a Stanford professor and director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

“He’s very clear that there should be regime change in Iran and North Korea, and military force should be used to achieve those goals,” McFaul said. “If you hire him, you’re making a clear signal that’s what you want.”

But others who have worked for years with Bolton argue that Trump knows exactly what he is getting: leverage, not conflict.

“I think this notion everybody talks about, that the risks of war have gone up, is wrong,” said Stephen J. Hadley, who was Bush’s national security adviser and a major architect of the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. “This is the peace-through-strength crowd who want to make clear to people that they’re tough and that no one should cross them. But the reason for that is to deter war.”

Dov Zakheim, a former senior Defense Department official who has known Bolton for 35 years, wrote Friday that Bolton “may be a fire breather, but he is a man who cares deeply about his country,” in comparison to his boss, who “cares deeply about Donald Trump.”

Whatever Trump’s motives, his selection of this team would have been hard to imagine when he first came to office declaring that the continued U.S. presence in Iraq was a “disaster,” that he was comfortable with Japan and South Korea getting their own nuclear weapons so the United States would not have to defend them, and that America would no longer be the world’s policeman.

Bolton has come to the opposite conclusion.

Bolton not only fervently advocated the attack on Saddam Hussein from his post at the State Department during the Bush administration, but he also defended its aftermath, and has said he remains convinced it was the right decision. Over the past three years, Bolton has advocated bombing Iran, attacking North Korea, and carving a new state out of Iraq and Syria.

Mike Pompeo, nominee for secretary of state, said at the Aspen Security Conference in July that the most dangerous thing about North Korea was the fact that its young, moody and reportedly ruthless leader, Kim Jong Un, controls its weapons.

“So from the administration’s perspective, the most important thing we can do is separate those two. Right?” said Pompeo, who at the time was months into his current job as CIA director. “Separate capacity and someone who might well have intent, and break those two apart.”

Assuming that Pompeo is confirmed, he and Bolton, the two most forceful, aggressive new members of the policy team, will have to decide in what order they can risk those confrontations. The Trump administration has said it is open to direct talks with Kim by May — the same month by which the president has said he will scrap the Iran nuclear accord.

“Even if you are going to be a superhawk, you can’t do all these at once,” said Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former CIA station chief in Moscow who later hunted down Pakistani nuclear technology as the Energy Department’s chief intelligence officer. “And if you want to go to war with Iran and North Korea, you have to expect to alienate your allies and run headlong into the Russians.”

William J. Burns, a longtime U.S. diplomat who was Bush’s ambassador to Russia and Obama’s deputy secretary of state, predicted that if the new team exits the Iran deal and confronts North Korea, the first beneficiary is likely to be President Vladimir Putin of Russia.

“He looks for splits,” Burns said of Putin. “He knows he will benefit if we walk away from the Iran deal, because it will put a wedge between us and our European allies.”

On North Korea, Burns said, Putin is seeking “splits between the U.S. and China. We are doing his work for him.”

In fact, it is in dealing with Putin that the new team is likely to run headlong into Trump’s reluctance to ever say a critical word about the Russian president. As CIA chief, Pompeo has embraced the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia meddled in the election, though he changes the subject quickly when asked about it.

Bolton, by contrast, has ranked among Putin’s harshest critics. Last July, days after Trump met Putin for the first time at a summit meeting in Germany, Bolton wrote that the Russian interference in the 2016 election was “a casus belli, a true act of war, and one Washington will never tolerate.”

Trump did not view it that way.

He emerged from the meeting in Germany repeating Putin’s observation that the Russians were too skilled at cyberoperations to be caught if involved. Last week, Trump called Putin to congratulate him on winning a Russian election widely viewed as a sham, making no mention of the recent nerve-agent attack that Britain concluded, with U.S. agreement, was a covert action by Moscow.

If it was, it was being planned out as Pompeo was acting as the host to the directors of the three major Russian intelligence services in Washington earlier this month.

The unknown factor in the new mix is Gina Haspel, the career intelligence officer who has been nominated to be the first woman to run the CIA. Since she has spent much of her career undercover — details of which the agency is just beginning to release, in an effort to lobby for her confirmation — her foreign policy views are largely unknown.

But her record in the terrorist detentions and interrogations following 9/11 is well documented. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who was tortured as a prisoner of war, this past week pointedly asked in a letter to Haspel, “Do you believe actions like these were justified, and do you believe they produced actionable intelligence?”

At a moment when Trump has sided with the economic nationalists in his administration and ordered the imposition of tariffs on China to counter its restrictions on U.S. companies and the forced transfer of U.S. intellectual property, Bolton has gone one further.

He has questioned whether the United States should abandon the “One China” policy that has been the underpinning of relations since the two countries resumed diplomatic relations.

In 2016, Bolton wrote that confronting China “may involve modifying or even jettisoning the ambiguous ‘One China’ mantra, along with even more far-reaching initiatives to counter Beijing’s rapidly accelerating political and military aggressiveness in the South and East China Seas.”

It is unclear how that squares with Trump’s campaign argument that the United States should pull its forces back from Asia unless South Korea and Japan pay more of the cost of keeping them there.

But the most immediate decision facing the new team will be the benefits and costs of exiting the Iran deal. Trump cited his differences with Rex Tillerson on Iran in firing the secretary of state.

Bolton and Pompeo have been among the harshest critics of the nuclear accord, but they have not said how they would manage the international backlash if Trump decides, by a May 12 legislative deadline, to resume the sanctions that the United States suspended when the deal was reached.

If Washington breaches the deal, Iran may declare it is now free to resume producing nuclear fuel in unlimited quantities — limits it agreed to, for 15 years, in return for economic normalization. If so, that could put the United States and Israel back where they were in the years before the accord was reached: threatening military action to destroy Iran’s facilities, even at the risk of another Middle East war. That was the path Bolton advocated.

In August, when Tillerson and Mattis wrote a joint op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal describing the merits of building economic pressure on North Korea in a policy of “strategic accountability,” Bolton said he was “appalled.”

“Time is not a neutral factor here,” he said on Fox News, where he was a contributor. “More negotiation with North Korea? I think they’d say ‘bring it on.’ More time to increase the size and scope of their ballistic missile and nuclear capabilities.” He will now be preparing Trump for that negotiation.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

With threat of force, Trump's reshaped team wants the world to bend

WASHINGTON — The incoming national security adviser has called for the “swift takeover” of North Korea by the South.

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