John Bolton
Subject: Bolton on Gaza and Ukraine
Bio: Trump’s former National Security Advisor
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, politics, and international relations.
Today’s topic is Bolton on Gaza and Ukraine. Our speaker is John Bolton who is Trump’s former national security advisor. This podcast was taped at a conference that I hosted in DC. So, you are going to hear questions from my friends as well as me.
I want to learn about whether the events in Gaza will lead to peace. In addition, I want to hear about what will happen next in Ukraine.
It’s been a difficult week, I’m sure. John, take us through the world and then we’ll talk about you.
John Bolton:
Thanks. Well, we won’t talk much about me, but we can talk about the world.
Larry Bernstein:
Israel’s been resolved.
John Bolton:
Israel’s been resolved. 3000 years of war are now over with. Everybody should be happy that the remaining Israeli hostages are released. Trump deserves a lot of credit for it. I will say it. Bibi Netanyahu teed it up for him by attacking the Hamas leadership in Doha. If he had wiped out what was left of the top civilian Hamas leadership, that would’ve been one thing. But his big mistake was he didn’t tell Trump long enough before the attack was launched. And that’s unforgivable. So out of dissatisfaction with that, and I’m sure Trump heard a lot from the Qataris with whom he’s become very close discussing 747s.
He basically told Bibi; this is what we’re going to do. Bibi accepted a two-month ceasefire. Hostages were released and at the end of the two months ceasefire ended and there was no phase two. So, we’re in Phase one. Phase two and three through infinity are still out there.
The immediate objective that was a flashpoint in Israeli politics for the last two years has now been resolved. The hostages are all back. But in return, Israel has released 1,950 prisoners, 250 of which are serving life sentences for terrorist activity. They are now free to go back to the battlefield and that’s not a good sign.
All kinds of world leaders went to Sharn el-Sheikh to sign this agreement that led to the hostage release. Lots of Europeans, Arab leaders, Donald Trump, almost everybody was there. There were only three that weren’t: Hamas, Israel and Iran. What could go wrong? And for all the bluster that Trump used to get the deal done, and I do think pushing BiBi around was probably the most important part.
The Qataris, Egyptians and Turks pushed Hamas around. It is rumored that Erdogan of Turkey said, if Netanyahu shows up in Sharn el-Sheiki, I’m turning my plane around and going back. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
What comes next? Trump has got a 20-point plan, and I was reminded of the plan of Woodrow Wilson at the end of World War 1 with 14 points. The old joke that George Clemenceau, the Prime Minister of France at the time said 14 points. Well, that’s a little strong. The Good Lord only had 10.
The 20-point plan is in trouble already. The next big step is the requirement that Hamas demilitarize and that its weapons be placed beyond use, which is a euphemism they took from the British plan with the IRA in Northern Ireland to say our weapons will be destroyed.
I don’t see any signs of Hamas prepared to disarm. Just give up your arms, accept the political process. It’s never happened in Lebanon. I’m doubtful it’s going to happen in Gaza, but that is the next test. Then for all the other aspirational points in the plan, we’ll just have to see how it goes.
Gaza’s been one battlefield. And until you resolve the main problem, which is the Ayatollahs in Iran, the threat to peace and security that the Ring of Fire strategy poses is going to continue.
Turning from the good news to the bad news. In Ukraine, every indication is that the Russians still believe that through this war of attrition, grind down the Ukrainian military. And the theory in the Kremlin is that the Ukraine military will crack sometime next year. I don’t buy that. But what’s important is what the Russians think, and they continue to make slow progress at an enormous human cost.
This is not about land swaps. This is about Vladimir Putin recreating the Russian Empire. He’s told us this for 20 years. He first said it in 2005 in an address to the Duma when he said the breakup of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century. Now, most of us thought the breakup of the Soviet Union was a good way to end the 20th century, but that’s not how they feel in the Kremlin.
You don’t have a Russian Empire unless you have Ukraine. He’s already functionally in control of Belarus. He’s got mixed results in the Caucuses, and the question of the five Central Asian republics is unclear because there’s going to be a contest there between China and Russia. But in Ukraine, Putin believes that he’s got the full backing of China.
I have never believed China was a potential mediator. I haven’t believed China when they said they’re not supplying weapons to Russia. Maybe they’re not assembled, but you put the two pieces together and then you’ve got a weapon. They’ve certainly gone out of their way to help finance the war by buying additional Russian oil and gas.
I’d say six weeks or so, there’s been since the Anchored Summit, there’s been talk about how Trump is becoming more favorable to Ukraine. And he certainly has said and done things that are favorable to Ukraine from a political and military perspective, and I’m glad he’s doing it. He said, for example, that we would continue to sell weapons systems to European NATO members who could then in turn pass them along, whether at cost or for nothing to Ukraine. He has intimated and said that we will continue to supply military intelligence to Ukraine. That’s very important. It’s critical for the Ukrainians. And that doesn’t mean that Trump has shifted his position about what’s best for America’s interest. What he’s realized is that his dear friend Vladimir Putin didn’t deliver what a friend should, which is he wanted a peace deal. He’s after the Nobel Peace Prize.
We all know that Vladimir wouldn’t make concessions. You’ll notice that there have been no additional US sanctions of Russia. Trump has sanctioned India with a 25% tariff for the purchase of Russian oil and gas, but has not sanctioned China, which is a much larger purchaser of that oil and gas and hasn’t sanctioned Russia itself.
The war grinds on. I don’t see either side making a big breakthrough. The Kremlin is counting on the West’s short attention span, and if the Ukrainians do begin to crack by the spring or summer of next year, it may pay off for them.
This has ramifications for the Europeans who are now increasingly worried about the Russian threat. And it’s in the Nordic, in Germany and Eastern European countries that they’re worried about how this is developing. I don’t see any optimism.
I do hope Trump decides to provide Tomahawks to the Ukrainians. It sounds like he’s moving in that direction. Russia has made some threats about it. Maybe Trump will back off. We just don’t know at this point.
That’s enough sweetness to start off.
Larry Bernstein:
What did you make of the Indians joining Xi and Putin on the podium?
John Bolton:
This 80th anniversary of the end of the war in the Pacific celebration, which is what China had cooked up, there was I think one of their best propaganda exercises to date. It had several objectives. The first was to legitimize the Chinese Communist Party story of how World War 2 in the Pacific was won. It won’t surprise you that it was won by the Chinese Communist Party.
These Chinese nationalists were nothing but bandits and gorillas and inconsequential. The US may have had some small role on some distant islands somewhere, but basically it was Mao who put it all together to win World War 2. So, it was a legitimization of their version of history and then it was also a projection of Chinese power that allowed Xi Jinping to tell the assembled leaders that we are a stable country that you can deal without surprises. Putin and Kim Jong-Un were there as well that showed the growing axis between Beijing and Moscow. Kim Jong-Un has achieved what his uncle had done at the time of the founding of the country, putting them in a position to leverage both Moscow and Beijing to help North Korea, which given North Korea’s nuclear capabilities makes them even more dangerous than before.
For Modi to join this celebration, he didn’t stay for the military part, which is a small plus, but it was saying to Trump, other people are willing to talk to me if you’re going to treat India this way.
It wasn’t just a 25% tariff on oil and gas; it was the Indian feeling that they had been in negotiation on the underlying economic tariffs. And Trump just cut them off and said, flat 25% on everything and further requested the Nobel Peace Prize Trump’s saying, I deescalated the last conflict between Pakistan and India, which A, I don’t think is true, and B, you never say it to the Indians. So, it was a clear sign of Modi’s displeasure. There is, in my view, zero chance India gets closer to China. The young people are dissatisfied. The demographic crisis is having significant effects and other areas of dissension inside China are there. This was an opportunity for the Communist Party to retell their story, rebuild their brand and was quite successful.
Bill Wang:
It is not saying that Chinese contribution to the allies won World War 2. The Chinese Communist Party didn’t do anything. Their strategy tried to keep their troops, and they even negotiated with the Japanese to make peace with Japanese in the Chinese Theater of the war. So, this is total communist propaganda saying they fought the war, they made the contribution to World War 2. So, this is a big lie even in China. Some people understand that it’s a lie.
John Bolton:
Exactly correct. If you look at the total casualties, the Chinese Nationalist Party, Chiang Kai-shek killed and wounded in fighting Japanese incomparably greater numbers than the Chinese communists did. They let the Chinese Nationalists take the brunt of it, and it was significant in tying down large numbers of Japanese troops and inflicting lots of casualties. But it also essentially destroyed the effectiveness of the Chinese Nationalists. And the Chinese Communists were thinking of what to do after the war, and they were much more strategic than Chiang Kai-shek.
Kieran Claffey:
Why would the US not take out the oil infrastructure in Iran? It’s all concentrated in a very small area. It wouldn’t take much to do that. Let the Israelis do it on our behalf and let the Ukrainians do the exact same thing on the infrastructure and on the oil refineries wouldn’t take more than a hundred Tomahawks probably to do it, and you’d solve boat problems tomorrow morning. I know what caused a short-term spike in all prices, but that would normalize over time but would be a simple solution.
John Bolton:
When people talk about what Israel could have done in strikes against Iran to try to disrupt the entire Ring of Fire strategy, there are three general categories of targets. One, the nuclear weapons and ballistic missile program. Second, top leadership, meaning getting the supreme leader or the entire top cadres of leadership. And three, the oil infrastructure. The advice given, and this has been true over time, is don’t attack the Ayatollah because although we don’t have any principled objection to that, we think it may be politically counterproductive inside Iran that they are religious figures, even though they’re lunatics. And said the Gulf Arabs don’t attack Kharg Island and the oil infrastructure because the Iranians then may attack us.
So don’t do something that will give any incentive for Tehran to come after us, go after the nuclear program, which is what they did. The fear of retaliation on the Arab side of the Arabian Gulf is a compelling argument. The strategic threat to the United States and the world is the nuclear program. And that’s why it was right to go after it and wrong to stop when we did.
Rory MacFarquhar:
Venezuela, how do you evaluate the current efforts to pressure for regime change? Do you believe that the United States has a military option, not a coup, but an invasion option that would overturn Maduro, not replace him with one of his friends, but change the regime in Venezuela?
John Bolton:
Venezuela is one of the greatest failures that we had in my tenure in the Trump administration. We weren’t able to overthrow the Maduro government. I’m happy to help the Venezuelan people in any way we can because it’s in our interest to replace the Chavez-Maduro regime. It’s overrun with Russian, Chinese and Cuban advisors, and it is a strategic threat to us. It’s a disaster for the people of Venezuela.
I’m not sure we’ve got the military capability to do it even if we wanted to. What we thought was that if we squeezed the regime hard enough, the people could figure out a way to cause dissension within the top ranks of the Maduro regime that could crack the military and it would come apart. It was very close right up until the afternoon of the day they tried to pull it off.
So, would I rather do it without American troops? The answer is yes. It may be that the opposition thinks there’s no other option at this point, but I still think we ought to think about it because the consequences if we fail could be catastrophic. You can’t do it by blowing drug shipments out of the water like we’ve done apparently four times.
Larry Bernstein:
Why are we blowing up those boats?
John Bolton:
Because we can. It makes good film for the evening news. It’s acts of braggadocio that don’t achieve that much. If you can’t bring the drugs in by water in small boats through the Caribbean, you’ll bring them in some other way, may raise your transportation costs, but it’s not going to stop the drug shipment.
Jay Greene:
I wanted to ask you about the expansion of the Abraham Accords to Saudi Arabia, and there are reports that Hamas might’ve been motivated to launch October 7th to scuttle that. Now that perhaps that’s winding down, maybe there’s a door that opens there again, but it occurs to me that there’s a problem that what’s the motivation for the Saudis to do it if their concern is threats from Iran?
John Bolton:
I don’t think that the Iranian threat is removed. And that remains the central feature that unites the Gulf Arab with Israel’s strategic view that it’s Iran that’s the main threat across the region. And as nervous as the Gulf Arabs are about military conflict that involves them, they also understand that the terrorist threat that’s been directed against Israel could easily be directed against them.
The Houthis in Yemen have fired rockets and drones that have attacked the Abu Dhabi international airport, attacked oil infrastructure in Saudi, and the same capabilities that were applied against Israel could be applied against all the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council. Not to mention that we can see that Iran is trying to revive its nuclear weapons program.
The Saudis understand that the Iranian threat isn’t going away. The Saudis want to be the leaders in the region. They’ve allowed Bahrain to sign an Abraham Accord. UAE did it on its own. I don’t think Gaza is going to be solved and therefore that problem remains. That’s always been one of the hardest things for the Saudis to overcome because they’re so committed to a two-state solution, which I don’t think is ever going to happen.
I don’t think the two-state solution was ever going to be viable because what you’re trying to do is take bits and pieces of land and say they constitute a state and they’re going to be economically viable. And I don’t think it was ever going to work. This is not medieval Europe where a prince would rule a thing over here and over there. They weren’t states either. At the State Department you learn in your opening classes at the Foreign Service School, the two-state solution is the only viable alternative.
But what’s happening shows one reason why it wasn’t viable. And that is Gaza is not the same as the West Bank. Gaza was a high-rise refugee camp, and it was never intended to grow the way that it did. It was the consequence of the way the radical Arab states of the 50s, 60s, and 70s viewed the conflict against Israel as they wanted to keep the refugees up close to help drive Israel into the sea. Well, that isn’t going to happen.
There were opportunities earlier to resolve this. In 1957, after the Suez Canal crisis, the year before, there were 300,000 people in the Gaza Strip. Now there are 2,300,000. There was a UN plan to resettle the refugees in Egypt in farms that would be created on the East Bank of the Suez Canal. It was all set. And Nassar blew it up because as the leader of the radical Arabs, he wanted the refugees up close against Israel.
I’ve been in the region many times since 10/7, and the most recent view in the Gulf countries is that of the 2 million people estimated to be in Gaza, 10% or more have already left it, bought their way out. Most of them are in Egypt. Resettlement is the most humanitarian thing to do to give people and their children some chance of being in an economically viable society where they have a future.
They do not have a future in Gaza. They didn’t have a future in Gaza when it was still whole. Now it’s a heap of rubble and you can blame whoever you want for it. But the fact is even the buildings you see standing, most are going to have to come down because they are structurally unstable.
Trump made a joke of this, but you must bulldoze the Gaza strip and start over. What is the point of that? If you’re just saying, go back to your high-rise refugee camp.
It allows you to split the problem of Gaza from the West Bank. And if you can solve the Gaza problem, the argument for a two-state solution based on this archipelago of dots on the West Bank disappears too. And people say, but forced resettlement is so terrible. These people are the only refugee population since World War 2 that’s been hereditary. Every other major refugee population has been returned to their country of origin or been resettled except the Palestinians. They’re the ones who have lost out. So, the answer that I would say to get the process going is you eliminate UNRWA which was built to help the Palestinian refugees and replace it with the high commissioner for refugees.
People say, but forced repatriation is so bad. I’ll just tell you two things about UNHCR. It has never engaged in forced repatriation, meaning either return to your home country or resettlement somewhere else. If that’s not possible, they’ve never done that, number one. And number two, there are no permanent UNHCR refugee camps. So, what does that tell you? There’s a way to do this if people are willing to try it. If you could demonstrate that process was underway, some countries like Egypt are going to say, we want dehamasification. I understand why Egypt wants that. They had their own run in with the Muslim Brotherhood, and it didn’t end well. So, they’re not eager to reimport the problem and the Gulf Arab don’t want it either.
Alan Scholnick:
The real reason for the refusal is to have a perpetual conflict more than anything else.
John Bolton:
I agree. Even in Trump’s 20 points, you get the notion of a two-state solution reappears, I mean you can put a stake through its heart, and it just gets back up again. But as a practical matter, resettlement is the humanitarian thing to do for the people of Gaza. How could it be anything else?
Natan Milgram:
I want to go back to Venezuela. You think that the attacking of these boats is bluster, but I want to get to the specifics here about the amount of military hardware, ships and so on that’s been amassed in the Caribbean as well as Dutch military ships that are protecting their assets in the Dutch Antilles. And what odds would you put on an incursion? And since we don’t have infantry there for proper land incursion, how effective do you think targeted aerial attacks would be in toppling the regime? And if so, replacing it with what?
John Bolton:
The regime would be able to protect itself. And I don’t see a president who said he was elected to end to endless wars getting into a war in Venezuela. It’s frustrating. And if we had more clandestine capabilities, there might be other ways to do it too.
We put a lot of pressure on the regime in 2019 but not enough. We referred to it as maximum pressure. That was our brand name -- maximum pressure against Iran, against North Korea, against Venezuela. It was never maximum pressure. Our ability to enforce sanctions is pathetic. Today the regime is in an even more difficult position economically. But at some point, you’ve got to have the people of Venezuela show something. In 2019, the day after the coup failed, we thought, okay, well the people may now come out into the streets and a couple thousand of them did and that was it.
Many of them would love us to make the revolution for them, but the military, the Cubans, the Russians, the Chinese, and the Iranians know that keeping Maduro in power is very much in their interest. And until you fragment the leadership in Venezuela, I’m not sure that we’re going to be in position to put military pressure on that would make a difference. And the Dutch Navy’s not going to join us anyway. And neither’s anybody else. The Latin American countries don’t have the capability. Under Bolsonaro, Brazil might’ve helped us. We were certainly working on it, but not under Lula, that’s for sure.
Howard Shainer:
Can you talk about Trump’s decision to both stop US bombing and Israel’s military efforts in Iran?
John Bolton:
Netanyahu forced Trump’s hand because he only had two decisions, either let the Israelis do it by themselves and get all the credit or jump in and allow him to take part of the credit. And he took the decision which was correct to get involved. And it was true that the strikes by the B2s and the Bunker-busters were enormously successful. But then he stopped it all because you could declare victory, declare a ceasefire. That’s another route to the Nobel Peace Prize by proclaiming that the 12-day war is over. Well, the 12-day war is part of the two-year war beginning with 10/7.
You can’t see these things as discreet events that happen by coincidence. It’s all part of the same thing. My impression from listening to reports from inside Iran is that there’s a feeling that the raid was successful in what it wanted to do. People recognized that the targets had been very carefully selected. Nobody wants to see their country bombed, but it undercuts the regime substantially because people say this is their most valuable asset, and they can’t protect it. It doesn’t necessarily tell you therefore the regime will fall tomorrow. But it says the regime cannot do what a successful regime ultimately has to do and defend its major assets. If we had continued bombing the political effect inside would’ve been even more destabilizing. That’s the way the regime is going to come down from internal dissension, maybe provoked at the time the Ayatollah dies and he’s in his mid-80s and he’s sick and he’s only the second supreme leader. It’s not like the path of succession is at all clear. They are nervous. The regime is very unpopular inside the country.
With the opportunity that the Israelis gave us, we didn’t take it and follow through on it. And the evidence is that the raid was very successful. The facility under the mountain, the uranium enrichment facility primarily of advanced centrifuge capabilities, I’m not sure the Iranians will ever reopen that. The damage was that bad. The other enrichment facility was very badly damaged at Isfahan. We didn’t participate in the Israeli attacks there, but two key elements of their program were destroyed to go through the nuclear fuel cycle, you start with uranium in the ground, then you get to uranium oxide which is a solid, you must chemically convert that into a gas to spin in the centrifuges. We think the Iranians only have one chemical conversion facility solid to gas that was destroyed. Then after you enrich the uranium to weapons grade 90% U235 isotope, you must take it from gas to metal to build the pit for the bomb.
And that conversion facility from gas back down to solid was destroyed. So, you can have a lot of enriched uranium, hexafluoride, but if you can’t make it into a weapon, it’s not all that useful. The real danger is at about the time of the bombing. And there’ve been some public reports since then to show there are two new Iranian facilities that we don’t know the full details of that have been under construction that may be underway. One’s called Pickaxe Mountain, near Natanz and another large facility near Isfahan. So there’s not much publicly available about that, but it does show the Iranians are trying to pick themselves up off the ground and get back to something like a capacity to build nuclear weapons. I think they’re very, very setback. I think they lost a lot of scientists in that attack as well.
David Kostin:
Let’s move to the next real estate transaction. Greenland, there are 56,000 people living there. It seems like we could offer a substantial amount of money to each of them to vote on a referendum to apply to become a territory of the United States. What’s the prospect of that happening?
John Bolton:
When this first came up in 2018, I had the staff at the NSC do research on this. I’m a world-class expert on Greenland. What we were trying to do was quietly talk to the Danes and I had a trip scheduled to meet the Prime Minister. Then there was a leak in the papers about Trump wanting to buy Greenland. The Prime Minister of Greenland a said, just off the table, we’re not going to sell Greenland. Trump was asked on his way out to the helicopter the next day, what do you think of that?
And Trump said, she’s a nasty woman. That woman is nasty saying that about the United States. So here it goes. The Danes were just apoplectic. This is now six years ago, but they said, “We want you to come anyway.” I went to Trump, and I said, well, they still want the trip to happen. Maybe we can get this started. He said, no. So, I’m not saying that if I had gone to Copenhagen six years ago, this would have happened. But we had a chance. And because we have a short attention span, we didn’t follow through on it. It is entirely legitimate to say that the defense of Greenland and the threats to Greenland because of China and Russia are very real, and we have an extraordinary national security interest in the island. Then if you say, well, what is China’s interest in it? With the melting of the Arctic ice cap, the Northwest Passage, long a prize of our history is opening. The Chinese want to be an Arctic power and think about Chinese submarines sailing through the Bering Strait under the polar ice cap emerging in the North Atlantic. Tell that to the Europeans if they think China’s a long way away.
Donald Trump didn’t discover Greenland either. William Seward, after successfully buying Alaska in 1867, tried to buy Greenland in 1868, and my staff came up with two explanations, alternatives, why? One, the Danes wouldn’t agree to sell, or two, we think Seward got a treaty.
But the Senate was so consumed with the trial of Andrew Johnson that they never took it up. The dream didn’t die, though in 1914 when we bought the Virgin Islands to protect the Eastern approaches to the Panama Canal, we also said, we’ll take Greenland off your hands too. And they sold us the Virgin Islands, those high-minded Danes. They just wouldn’t sell us Greenland. So, time goes on and in World War 2, we were deployed in Greenland at the request of the government of Exile of Denmark before Pearl Harbor, and by the end of World War 2, we had 17 military bases in Greenland during the Cold War. We had the eastern end of the distant early warning line, Alaska, Canada, Greenland. There. We’ve been in Greenland forever. Some of the airports that they use in Greenland, which are not big airports, about as big as this room, but some of those airports we built in World War 2, I would be delighted if we could make Greenland a commonwealth of the United States, if we were a little bit subtle about it.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to John for joining us. If you missed the last podcast, the topic was Forget the Two State Solution.
Our speaker was Robert Malley who is a Senior Fellow at Yale’s Jackson School of Global Affairs and previously has worked in the Clinton, Obama, and Biden Administrations. He is also the co-author of a new book entitled Tomorrow is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine. We discussed why the Two-State Solution is not going to happen as neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians want it.
You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website
whathappensnextin6minutes.com. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thank you for joining us today, goodbye.
Check out our previous episode, Forget the Two State Solution, here.
