Donald Trump Turns on His First Term’s Middle East Hawks
Conservative talk show host Tucker Carlson described former national security adviser John Bolton as a “bureaucratic tapeworm.” Bolton, a notorious war hawk, spent much of the first Trump administration trying to prevent diplomacy with North Korea and Iran exactly when Trump was interested in negotiating with those countries. During a June 2019 standoff with Iran that nearly led to war, Carlson complained that Bolton “seems to live forever in the bowels of the federal agencies, periodically reemerging to cause pain and suffering.”
But Bolton won’t be reemerging from any bowels now, at least not for the next four years. On his first day back in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order singling out Bolton for condemnation. Because Bolton’s decision to publish a tell-all memoir in 2020 “created a grave risk” to national security “for monetary gain,” the order says, the administration is revoking “any active or current security clearances” held by Bolton.
The next day, Trump publicly fired Brian Hook, who had been running the State Department transition team, because Hook was “not aligned with our vision to Make America Great Again.” During the first Trump administration, Hook helped purge the State Department of officials who were perceived as soft on Syria or insufficiently “friendly to Israel,” ran an obsessive campaign to overthrow the Iranian government, and got in the way of U.S.-Iranian hostage negotiations.
The first Trump administration took a highly aggressive line on the Middle East—hiring Bolton and Hook was part of that policy—but his second administration may turn things around. Even before taking office this week, Trump helped broker an Israeli-Palestinian ceasefire and hostage exchange. Although Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, had earlier called for a joint U.S.-Israeli military campaign to reshape the region, the Trump administration reportedly refused to commit to bombing Iran and warned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to “fuck this [ceasefire] up.”
“We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end. And, perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into. My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier,” Trump said during his inaugural address on Monday. “I’m pleased to say that, as of yesterday, one day before I assumed office, the hostages in the Middle East are coming back home to their families.”
Trump is not a principled dove, especially when it comes to the United States’ immediate neighbors. He wants to escalate the war on drugs in Mexico into a counterterrorism campaign and has threatened even U.S. treaty allies such as Canada, Denmark, and Panama over territory. Most ominously, his new national security adviser, Mike Waltz, is every bit th
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