John Bolton’s gung-ho approach risks nuclear escalation on three continents
On entering office as National Security Adviser John Bolton will face three major areas of crisis, which have altered radically in the few days since he was appointed.
First there is the fallout from the expulsion of 60 Russian diplomats cum spooks from American territory as part of the alliance response to the targeted assassination operation against the Skripals in Salisbury.
Second, the widening and deepening of the war in Yemen, with further Houthi missile strikes on Saudi Arabia, brings Iran to the top of the ‘to do’ tray.
Third, there is the outcome from the three day visit of the young leader Kim Jong-un to see his principal sponsor Xi Jinping. It suggests that the projected talks with President Trump and South Korea are going to be very tough and tortuous. An elaborate game plan is afoot, heavy on strategic subtlety, and it is being run from Beijing.
It’s not very clear that Mr Bolton does strategy, at least in a meaningful, effective, and contemporary way. He does do, however, historical reference and erudition, and bluster and bombast in the Fox News-style that so endeared him to Donald Trump.
He believes in aggressive war and pre-emptive strike – especially against North Korea and Iran. He doesn’t like alliances much, with the UN and Nato top candidates for his contempt. His view of America’s place in the world is a variation of the Trump ‘America First’ slogan. It seems anchored in the 19th century theories of military and maritime dominance championed by the likes of the naval strategist Alfred T Mahan and the aggressive brand of American isolationism propounded by President James Monroe.
Slogans and sloganizing don’t make for good strategy. Modern strategy requires a coherent and articulated plan backed by appropriate policies and resources – which includes the help and support of allies.
As recently as the end of February, Bolton was arguing in the Wall Street Journal of the desirability of a pre-emptive strike to eliminate the “imminent threat” from North Korea. He has frequently argued for a similar strike against Iran. It is virtually certain that he will urge President Trump to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal at the next deadline around the tenth of May.
Though stridently and articulately put, Bolton’s views on both military action and international diplomacy, like that of the six-power nuclear pact with Iran, seem dangerously askew.
His belief in pre-emptive bombing strikes seems based on the Israeli operation to knock out Iraq’s burgeoning Osirak nuclear facility in 1981 – which he has often cited. On July 7th 1981 a raid by Israeli Phantom aircraft knocked out the reactor, still under construction, at Osirak. The target was so confined that the operation bears no comparison with the complexity of an attempt to take out the nuclear assets as they are today in North Korea and Iran. Both would require an air campaign rather than a single devastating attack. In the case of Iran, it is doubtful that either the Americans or the Israelis could identify the more well-concealed sites. A pre-emptive operation in both theatres would start wars, which the Americans would not be able to control, and to which few allies would lend their support.
The lesson of the extended conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq at the beginning of this century is that early ‘preemptive strike’ style military action can unleash sequences of events that quickly spiral out of control.
The unforeseen consequences of precipitate action in South East Asia and the Middle East present a hideous prospect of continuous conflict. The foreseeable fallout is bad enough – and serve as a warning, not least to America’s principal allies. And, of course, there are always the unforeseen effects – the ‘unknown unknowns’ of Donald Rumsfeld.
We have all been warned that Russia intends to retaliate to the mass expulsion of diplomats and intelligence officers by Britain’s principal friends and allies across the world, in Europe, America and Australia. We may not fully realise what form the reaction takes. Putin’s Russia has been practising non-obvious confrontation since 2011 in the Baltic and Ukraine and Crimea since 2011.
‘Deniability’ has been the essence of the game – hence why Russia deployed soldiers into Crimea and the Donbass region of Ukraine without insignia or recognizable uniforms.
This is why the Skripal affair is a setback, as Russia and its operatives have been quickly revealed as the source of the deadly nerve agent Novichok 5 used in Salisbury. The agent was supposed not to leave a trace – yet our PM Theresa May has completely convinced policy-makers at a European and Nato level of the nature and provenance of the poison.
Whether Russian agents are embarking on an official or freelance campaign of murdering awkward dissidents – there are now 15 suspicious deaths of Russian expats in the UK alone under re-examination – remains to be seen. It is far more likely that there will now be an upping of the tempo of cyber attacks similar to the NotPetya malware used to attack parts of the NHS last year.
The standoff with Russia is now set to build in the run up to the Brussels Nato summit on July 11th – 12th, which will discuss the new array of state and non-state threats. Some alliance members would like to discuss further measures to support Ukraine, even with a view to start the process of admission to full Nato membership.
John Bolton likes to bang the table – it’s his signature negotiation ploy according to those who dealt with him during his brief sojourn as the unconfirmed US representative at the UN under George W Bush. That will get him nowhere in the next phase of negotiating with North Korea. The recent visit by the young leader Kim Jong-un to Beijing advertises one major development. Whatever the differences between the two regimes, and they remain significant, China and North Korea are working on a game plan led by Beijing. Trump may bluster that the fact that there are to be talks at all are down to the success of his “hard pressure” on Pyongyang but Bolton is on record saying that he has ‘no faith in extended negotiations’.
He believes that the US should just ask North Korea to deposit its entire nuclear arsenal at the facility at the Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
This is hubris. China will have a well-considered stratagem for the talks, which will be complex. Much of the substance may not become fully apparent for a long time. The main aims are obvious, but how they are achieved will be camouflaged. Trump’s immediate ‘condition’ is the abandonment of nuclear and ballistic missile programmes. Easy to sign up to, but fiendishly difficult to monitor and inspect – as Bill Clinton found out with his much trumpeted ‘nuclear pause.’
In return North Korea, and China, will want the US to agree to extensive demilitarisation of the Korean peninsula and its surrounding waters. This means a substantial reduction of the American forces stationed in South Korea and a scaling back of the regular American-led land and sea manoeuvres in the immediate vicinity. Not least, North and South will sign a full peace treaty, overdue since the Korean War armistice of 1953.
Both Pyongyang and Beijing will look to ease sanctions, allowing movement of labour, goods and fuel. China wants to insure against the risk of millions of North Korean refugees heading north into its territory in case of economic meltdown and social collapse.
The real talking is likely to be slow and tortuous, to which both the attention-deficit narcissism of Trump and Bolton’s gung-ho approach are not suited. Chances of a realistic encounter between Trump and Kim – let alone a fruitful outcome – must be rated at fifty-fifty or less.
Failure in engaging North Korea risks a boost to the nuclear arms race. This is already in prospect with the kind of militaristic posturing we saw from Vladimir Putin in the last days of his re-election campaign. It is also a very plausible outcome in the approach of the Trump-Bolton axis to Iran.
Bolton’s bid to ditch the six-power nuclear arrangement with Iran is alarming enough. More concerning is the deepening of the Saudi confrontation with Iran over Yemen, where the war continues apace – and at the price of humanitarian disaster. On the third anniversary of the war, the Shiite Houthis launched seven missiles at Saudi Arabian territory – three at Riyadh, and four at towns along the Yemen border. Arms and ammunition, and training teams are being supplied steadily to Houthi forces by both Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Quds Force and a similar but much smaller agency, Unit 3800, from their junior ally, Hezbollah.
Israel is flagging up the increased military professionalism and prowess of Hezbollah, which now operates as a formed army rather than a local Lebanese militia. A curious sign of jitteriness was shown both in Israel and Saudi Arabia when both countries fired off their anti-missile systems within 24 hours of each other this week. It was feared as a result that neither was functioning properly. One of the anti-missile missiles was seen to go astray, crash and blow up near houses during the Houthi ‘ground to ground’ missile bombardment near Riyadh. Israel’s ‘Iron Dome’ system fired off a fusillade of counter-battery missiles close to Gaza. It had been triggered by fire from Israeli tanks following a suspected, but unconfirmed, raid by Hamas guerrillas across the border fence. Israel’s mainstream press raised questions about a flaw in the IDF’s much vaunted missile defence system.
There is a growing suspicion that the new level of confrontation between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and the US ditching of the Iran nuclear deal, will lead to the Saudis pressing for their own nuclear weapons programme. This will mean Turkey, and very likely Egypt, will want to join the nuclear race. With no indigenous nuclear culture, civil or military, the Saudi Kingdom will look for supply from the United Sates at first. If this is not forthcoming, the Saudis may try to buy their weaponry and technology from murkier sources – such as the legacy network of AQ Khan, father of Pakistan’s ‘Islamic bomb.’
What is required most from the new era of Trump-Bolton American foreign and security policy is a sense of strategy based on careful planning, analysis and steady negotiating, and not posturing based on Twitter bluster and banging fists on the table. That could trigger a nuclear arms race across three continents.
Robert Fox is Defence Editor of the Evening Standard