Trump’s former adviser John Bolton accuses the president of lacking a strategy against the regime in Iran

According to sources cited by the Wall Street Journal, the Trump administration is reportedly preparing to send the aircraft carrier USS George Washington to the Middle East to replace the USS Abraham Lincoln, which has been at sea for almost nine months. Observers and members of Congress have claimed in recent days that living conditions on board the vessel had deteriorated. The Pentagon has responded that there is no emergency, that this is Iranian disinformation, and that the rotation had already been planned. Yet the situation with the Lincoln, which resembles that of the USS Gerald R. Ford in May, highlights this administration’s difficulties with military planning in the war against Iran. “I believe Trump has missed an opportunity to deal a truly heavy blow to the Iranian regime,” Ambassador John Bolton told Il Foglio. 

A diplomat and advocate of a hard line against Iran, North Korea, China and Russia, Bolton served at the highest levels of the US administration under Reagan, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, and ultimately served as National Security Adviser in the first Trump administration. Today, he has a clear view on the missed opportunity presented by this war: “It wasn’t well prepared,” Bolton tells Il Foglio. “The military execution, for what it was, was good, but there was no strategy.” For the ambassador, who after leaving the White House in 2019 became a highly critical voice regarding Trump, “it wasn’t five months of war, but six weeks. It stopped, then started again, then stopped again, then he made threats, then he negotiated. And the negotiations fell through. Then he made threats again. Now he’s negotiating. Now he’s focusing on the economy. There’s no plan.”

The reason, according to Bolton, is personal, and he explicitly refers to “short attention span”, Trump’s “poor attention span and the fact that he makes decisions solely on the basis of what is in front of him at that moment”. Of course, the damage inflicted on the Iranian military-industrial complex “has been immense. It is likely that a substantial part has survived, and this tells us just how extraordinarily extensive that military-industrial complex was”. For Bolton, the country’s economy is in tatters, “yet they have spent billions of dollars over the years digging tunnels in which to hide drones, missiles and launchers, and to pursue their nuclear programme. I truly believe that, with better preparation, closer ties with the opposition, and greater efforts to build a political coalition in the United States and internationally, alongside friends and allies, the regime could have found itself in a very difficult position. But with every day that passes and they are still in power, people say: ‘Well, they’ve won the war’. They haven’t won the war. The concept of a Pyrrhic victory originated in Italy. As the general said, ‘one more victory like this and we’re finished’.”

The US President seems particularly consistent when speaking about relations with the leaders of Russia and China, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, and has repeatedly said he believes them when they claim they are not helping Iran. Bolton, on the other hand, maintains that Putin and Xi “are lying shamelessly. I am certain they are helping Iran in every possible way. It is an issue I have been following since I worked in the George W. Bush administration. I’ve been to China, I’ve been to Moscow and I’ve spoken to people at Rosatom, their nuclear agency. I went to Roscosmos, their space agency. I went to the organisation responsible for arms exports, which was then called Rosoboronexport. I went to them and asked: ‘What are you doing in Iran and North Korea?’. And they replied: ‘No, we’re not doing anything. We’re not helping them at all.’ Clearly, they weren’t telling the truth back then, and I’m certain that the assistance has become even more extensive with the development of the Beijing–Moscow axis. I wouldn’t call Iran a satellite of the axis, but it is certainly one of its agents.”

Bolton is an advocate of interconnected theatres, of the view that it is impossible today to intervene in any crisis without looking at the bigger picture – an approach to foreign policy that we in Europe struggle to understand: “This is a serious matter. The world is interconnected,” says the ambassador. “China has provided Russia with enormous amounts of assistance in the war in Ukraine, as have other members of the axis, such as North Korea. Tens of thousands of North Korean soldiers have fought in Ukraine. It is essentially the first time that Asian troops have fought in Europe since the days of Genghis Khan.” America and Europe must look at “the implications of the Sino-Russian axis and consider the three fronts we really need to be concerned about: the war in Ukraine, the war with Iran, and the threat to Taiwan and East Asia in general”, explains Trump’s former adviser. “We need people all over the world to wake up to this situation and realise that these are not unrelated events. I’m not saying there’s some sort of grand conspiracy theory, but there are developments taking place in many parts of the world. It’s not like during the Cold War, when Europe remained frozen for 45 years. There are many evolving factors here, and to think strategically, we need to look at the bigger picture.”