4 The Nation. October 7, 2019
REUTERS / RONEN ZVULUNMaking the World Safe
for Brand Trump
What is the president’s foreign policy vision? With
Bolton gone, we’re about to find out.I
t was only a matter of time. By all accounts,
national security adviser John Bolton had long
alienated many of the key players in the Trump
White House. The flap over the Afghanistan
peace agreement, with Secretary of State Mike
Pompeo favoring a deal with the Taliban and Bolton
opposing one, was merely the final straw, leading to his
abrupt dismissal on the evening of September 9. While52
Years Israel has
occupied the
Jordan Valley in
the West Bank
8,
Number of Pal-
estinians living in
the areas of the
Jordan Valley
that Israeli Prime
Minister Benja-
min Netanyahu
has promised
to annex
22–
Percentage of
the West Bank
that will be
annexed if Net-
anyahu proceeds
85
Percentage of
land in the Jor-
dan Valley that
Palestinians are
already barred
from using or
entering
20
Average avail-
able liters of
water per day
per person for
Palestinians
in the Jordan
Valley
50–
Minimum liters
of water per day
per person rec-
ommended by
the World Health
Organization
—Alice Markham-
Cantor
personal antipathy—Bolton was widely reviled for his
brash manner and self-serving ways—and discord over Af-
ghanistan were the immediate causes of his ouster, it was a
deeper rift over US foreign policy that doomed his tenure
at the White House. Though aligned on certain issues,
Bolton and Donald Trump possess very different visions
of America’s role in the world, and with Bolton out of the
picture, it is Trump’s worldview that will now prevail.
Considered an extremist by many for his staunch op-
position to international agreements and his advocacy for
the use of military force against perceived enemies, Bolton
is nevertheless an exemplar of the security-driven brand
of politics that has dominated Republican policy-making
since Ronald Reagan’s day. From this perspective, an “evil
empire” still exists—now Russian rather than Soviet but
still governed by Moscow—as well as a constellation of
anti-American states (Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Venezue-
la) that must be crushed by any means necessary.
As Trump’s security adviser and director of the National
Security Council (NSC), Bolton labored assiduously to
promote these objectives. His first target was the nuclear
deal with Iran, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive
Plan of Action. Viewing the agreement as a boon to
Iran’s clerical leadership, since it allowed that re-
gime to remain in power, even if deprived of nuclear
weapons, Bolton convinced Trump he could get a
better deal by bringing Tehran to its knees through
harsh economic sanctions. When the Iranians failed
to knuckle under and instead responded with prov-
ocations of their own—such as shooting down an
unarmed US drone over what they claimed was Iranian
territory—Bolton advocated military action against them.
Bolton’s next target was the Intermediate-Range Nu-
clear Forces (INF) Treaty with Russia, a 1987 agreement
that bans the possession of ground-launched missiles
with a range of 500 to 5,500 kilometers. This agree-
ment, negotiated and signed by Reagan and Mikhail
Gorbachev, was one of the last great achievements of
Cold War détente but has come to be seen by Republi-
can hard-liners as a lamentable constraint on America’s
ability to deploy missiles aimed at Russia’s and China’s
critical military infrastructure. Bolton succeeded in win-
ning Trump’s approval for a US withdrawal from the
treaty—which became final in August.
Bolton’s traditional Republican views are also evident
in his ongoing hostility toward Cuba and North Korea.
For him and his conservative cohort, the survival of those
communist regimes represents unfinished business from
the Cold War that needs to be corrected as vigorously and
expeditiously as possible. Hence the reversal of the Obama
administration’s relaxed travel and trade restrictions on
Cuba and Bolton’s repeated threats to use force against
North Korea for its nuclear and missile programs.
Although the president went along with many of Bol-
ton’s initiatives, Trump harbors a very different world view.
He was never a member of the GOP foreign policy estab-
lishment, nor does he share its ingrained hostility toward
Russia or its readiness to employ military force. Rather,
he has forged his own foreign policy outlook, one packed
with very different grievances and priorities.COMMENT(continued on page 8)BY THE
NUMBERSSnowden Speaks
Why his new memoir is essential reading.T
o earlier generations of Nation readers, the
phrase “Speak for yourself, John,” was what
we’d now call a meme. In Long fellow’s
“The Courtship of Miles Standish,” it’s
Mayflower passenger Priscilla Mullins’s
retort to John Alden, who courts her on behalf of his
friend Standish (while secretly in love with her him-
self). Though the story is likely apocryphal, Mullins
and Alden did marry, producing a host of descendants,
including Longfellow himself and, according to his
new memoir—The Nation’s exclusive excerpt begins on
page 12—Edward Snowden.
Even for those of us who’ve followed the Snowden
revelations closely, Permanent Record is full of surpris-
es. Far from the low-level IT drone depicted in most
early press accounts (and even further from the naive,
possibly traitorous Putin pawn trashed by his critics),
the narrator of this book is a thoughtful, painfully
self-aware intelligence professional who found himself
forced to confront and expose the reality of mass surveil-
lance—and the immense powers of coercion it gave to
authorities who, thanks to technology he helped to cre-
ate, are now able to strip the personal privacy of anyone
connected to the Internet.
A deeply reluctant whistleblower, Snow den also
emerges as a peculiarly American patriot, with roots
that go back to Plymouth Rock on his mother’s side
and some of the earliest Quaker settlers on his father’s.
The Snowdens, who arrived in Maryland in 1658, once
owned all of Anne Arundel County—including the land
on which Fort Meade, home of the National Security
Agency, stands today.
The elaborate security surrounding the release of this
book is a reminder that, despite his relaxed demeanor
and normal-seeming life in Moscow, Snowden is still not
safe. But then, neither are we: As his memoir makes clear,
all the techniques he exposed in 2013 remain in place.
For that renewed warning—and for finally speaking for
himself—he deserves our thanks. D.D. GUTTENPLAN