John bolton

Here’s a vexing question for Republicans. Does Donald Trump know why he won the presidency in 2016? As the chances of war with Iran – war by design or war by miscalculation – appear to increase, this question grows ever more pressing.In 2016, Trump ran on such an anti-interventionist platform that you half expected to wake up and find that he’d received all-important endorsements from Noam Chomsky, Angela Davis and the ghost of Susan Sontag. This was Trump at his best. He launched an astonishing broadside against the Bush family in South Carolina: ‘We should’ve never been in Iraq. We’ve destabilised the Middle East… they lied.

Remember when the GOP used to pride itself on being the party of family values? Well, they still do, at least on their official platform: ‘When American families flourish, so too does our country. And every honest American knows that a strong, traditional marriage lies at the heart of each great family.’ But it’s hard to present yourself as the party of marriage and familial stability when the Republican president and so many of his entourage have had such complicated love lives. And it gets even harder when several figures in the Trump orbit have had a penchant for having other men make love to their wives, while they watch. This is a practice well-established among in seedier worlds than Spectator USA readers inhabit.

Donald Trump continues to show that he is one of the boldest presidents in modern American history. He may also be the nuttiest. His decision to remove waivers on the purchase of oil from Iran has set America on an unwavering course for war with the Middle Eastern state. Like Franklin Roosevelt, who tried to starve Japan into submission by halting its imports of oil, Trump seems intent on trying to bludgeon Iran into submission by preventing it from exporting any crude. The problem is that the Iranians aren’t cracking. Instead, they are likely to double-down. Already they are threatening to shut down the Strait of Hormuz. Trump will be in dire straits if Iran does that. A fifth of the world’s crude oil flows through it.

If Donald Trump secures an encore in 2020 and if the clerical regime in Tehran doesn’t fall of its own volition – action could be taken to tackle Iran. That’s the state of play, I can say, based on countless discussions with dozens of current and former administration officials over the last two years of this presidency. A former senior administration told me last year that war with Iran remained  ‘very’ possible. Today the State Department formally designated the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC), including its vaunted Quds Force, a terrorist organization.

It is no mere coincidence that Donald Trump turned his attention to Venezuela straight after announcing the withdrawal of US troops from Syria. Nicolás Maduro, fighting for his survival on so many fronts at home and abroad, probably hasn't had much time to think about the man who thus inadvertently created the political quagmire engulfing him: Syrian leader Bashar Al Assad. Maduro would do well, though, to brush up on how Assad survived against all the odds, as would Trump. The knowledge could prove invaluable for averting another reckless US push for regime change abroad. Trump's decision last month to accept Assad remaining in power in Syria enraged many Middle East hawks, who long saw Assad's removal as the springboard for war against Iran.

Will the Trump administration embrace the Bolton doctrine? John Bolton, whom Donald Trump appointed in April to replace the stolid H.R. McMaster, has been trying to tailor administration foreign policy to match his hawkish views. Among his initiatives, the Wall Street Journal reported, is to make a move to do what he has long wanted done, which is to wage war against the mullahs in Tehran. The result is a schism in the administration.With the resignation of Defense Secretary James N. Mattis, Pentagon officials are now starting to fight back publicly against the National Security Council, especially as Bolton tries to install his former deputy Mira Ricardel, who was fired from the National Security Council, after Melania Trump denounced her, at the Pentagon.

Donald Trump has many faults. So does John Bolton. But their unwillingness to listen to a recording of Jamal Khashoggi being butchered is not wrong. In fact, it’s cheeringly sane. For starters, Bolton and Trump don’t speak Arabic, so there is no point. As Tom Rogan notes, they have the CIA to analyze such things. Why are reporters and endless Twitterers so eager to know whether Trump and Bolton are listening to the snuff tape? Trump and Bolton, they say, are ducking responsibility. America’s government doesn’t want to be accountable for its policy of standing by the Crown Prince, Mohammed Bin Salman, who is believed to have ordered the killing. But there is something perverted about this strong wish for leaders to listen to a murder.