There are no heroes in the John Bolton v Donald
Trump story
Andrew
Gawthorpe
Neither Bolton nor Trump provided a blueprint for US
foreign policy – and now the Republican party is out of ideas
‘The split between Trump and Bolton ... also tells us
something about the hollowness of today’s Republican party as a governing
force.’
Published
onThu 18 Jun 2020 16.39 BST
John
Bolton’s memoir of his time in the Trump administration tells us many things
that we already know. The president understands very little about how the world
works, treats his office as an extension of his personal and family interests,
and is obsequious to foreign dictators.
According
to Bolton’s new book, Donald Trump asked China to increase purchases of
American farm products not to help US voters, but to bolster his own re-election
chances. He is so enamored of foreign dictators that he praised Xi Jinping for
China’s mass imprisonment of Muslim Uighurs. Bolton also claims he publicly
defended Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman after Jamal Khashoggi’s killing,
because he wanted to create a distraction from unfavorable news coverage of his
daughter Ivanka.
To any
objective observer, this subordination of American foreign policy to the
immediate political needs of one man has been a disaster, shredding
Washington’s credibility and goodwill around the world. Bolton, likewise, seems
to have found it intolerable. But this is a disaster in which his own vision is
implicated, and from which it is unlikely to recover. Only the sheer vacuity of
Republican foreign policy enabled Trump to persuade so much of the party’s base
to embrace his own selfish, incoherent leadership.
Republicans
are keen to rip up the solutions to hard problems offered by others, without
offering any of their own
There are
no heroes in this story. Bolton is a figure with dangerous views who failed to
reveal what he knew about Trump during the impeachment trial earlier this year,
when it might have mattered. But the split between Trump and Bolton – and the
two brands of nationalism they represent – also tells us something about the
hollowness of today’s Republican party as a governing force. Neither the
unreconstructed hawkishness of Bolton nor the intellectual vacuum of Trumpism
provide a blueprint for American foreign policy, and the party has run out of
other ideas.
Bolton’s
nationalism consists of a fierce skepticism of diplomacy, at least when not
combined with threats of force, and a willingness for America to act
unilaterally to get its way. Although he has always been more in favor of what
is euphemistically called “regime change” than most elected Republicans, his
aggressive rhetoric, scapegoating of foreigners, and dismissal of constraints
on American action overseas is embraced by his party’s mainstream – including
rising figures such as Senators Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton.
During his
capture of the Republican party, Trump synthesized his own version of
nationalism. He combined Bolton’s aggressive flag-waving with a conviction that
foreign wars were an elite indulgence which harmed lower-income and lesser-educated
white voters, the chief audience for Trump’s nationalist vision.
But an even
stronger component of Trumpian nationalism is the president’s belief that his
own interests are identical to those of the US. To his supporters, he
personally embodies American interests, allowing him to perform dizzying policy
U-turns according to the needs of the moment. Trump ultimately has no use for
ideologues, whose firm beliefs get in the way of his desire to bend every
institution and relationship to his own personal ends.
For a long
time, conservative foreign policy has been based not on ideas but on what
Lionel Trilling famously called “irritable mental gestures which seek to
resemble ideas”. Foremost among these gestures has been a knee-jerk opposition
to multilateral cooperation and constructive diplomacy, even as the world has
become more globalized and power has diffused away from the United States.
Republicans are keen to rip up the solutions to hard problems offered by others
without being able to offer any of their own – just as they did by destroying
the Iran nuclear deal without offering any alternative way of preventing Iran
from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
As a
result, the party has been left without any credible vision of America’s place
in the world. Such a hollow shell was easy prey for a corrupt, immoral
demagogue. The party and the country have been left in the hands of a president
who does not try to advance the country’s interests, or even to seriously
understand what those interests are separate from his own re-election campaign.
But simply
getting rid of Trump won’t solve the problem, which is rooted in the Republican
party’s dismissal of both the facts of the modern, globalized world and the
responsibilities of governance. Bolton might know where Finland is, but in his
own way he is just as detached from reality as the president. And in the
silence he shared with so many Republican colleagues during the impeachment
trial, he has also shown how little he regards the safety, institutions and
values of the nation.
Whatever
their differences, Bolton and Trump ultimately have a lot more in common than
they seem to think. They represent two faces of a Republican party which has
completely lost any right to the public’s trust in its handling of American
government, at home or abroad. It is hard to see at this point how it could
ever win it back.
Andrew
Gawthorpe is a historian of the United States at Leiden University
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