The Trump administration as seen by John Bolton, a self-confessed Reaganite (1)

In late November, John Bolton, a Republican politician who served as National Security Advisor to President Donald Trump from April 2018 to September 2019, among many other positions, was interviewed by David Rennie, editor of The Economist. The following text is an excerpt from that interview (John Bolton on American foreign policy), obtained through automatic voice recognition and therefore subject to errors, which includes parts that are most significant for drawing a portrait of Donald Trump's administration.

David Rennie

(...) is Donald Trump finally getting the foreign policy that he always wanted. 

John Bolton

Well, I think in the second term, Trump has implemented a lesson he learned in the first term, which is that he should surround himself with men and women who just say yes, sir, when he says something. And that what some people called guard rails in the first term have disappeared, they weren't really guardrails. They were efforts at least in the national security space to help the president make well informed decisions.(…) 

Ultimately, the president will make all the big decisions. The question is, will they be? Well-thought-out, or will they be neuron flashes? 

David Rennie

Out of Ukraine is so urgent that I want to begin with that. Our allies right to be concerned that a bad deal could be imposed on Ukraine. 

John Bolton

At least as of what we know now, this is a terrible deal for Ukraine and it stems from the reality that Trump sees International Relations through the prism of his personal relations with foreign heads of government. So he has long thought he and Vladimir Putin were friends. I'll guarantee it that's not how.(…)

Putin sees it, but Trump has been disappointed for 10 months that he hasn't been able to make a peace deal now. He's trying again and from what we can see. The terms of this are entirely favourable to the Kremlin would be a disaster for Ukraine.(…) 

Well, I think I think he wants to be a big guy to deal with other big guys, and do what big guys do, and he did have that kind of fascination with air to one of Turkey and others, I'll leave it to the psychiatrist to tell us why? But it plays into their hands, and particularly in the case of Vladimir Putin trained KGB agent, trained to assess weaknesses and opportunities and the people he's dealing with and to exploit them, and I think I think that's what he has consistently done with Trump.(…) 

Well, in part, but he knows so little, it almost doesn't matter before I arrived at the White House he asked John Kelly, then the chiefs of staff is Finland's still part of Russia. He's heard from people at the Mar-a-Lago club that basically, Ukraine is Russian. They speak Russian.(…)

It's all the same thing, and he doesn't understand the Ukrainians have decided they actually want to be independent.(…)

(To be continued)