My interview with John Bolton
On Friday night I interviewed former United States ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton at the Radisson in downtown Manchester. (It took me forever to transcribe the interview, which is why I’m only posting it now.) We spoke for about 45 minutes, in which time he said Hillary Clinton was right to say she would not meet with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad without conditions, before she said she would; he has been asked for an endorsement by several Republican campaigns but will wait until after Christmas to give one; Ron Paul is wrong and Iran is a threat to us; and the greatest long-term threat America faces is the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
Do you have any plans to endorse a candidate for President?
Well, I have a book coming out next month, on November 6, called Surrender Is Not An Option, and so I’ve been working on that feverishly from when I got out of the government at the end of last year. And, you know, you do all these interviews and whatnot associated with that, so that’ll take me basically through Christmas, and I think I want to get past that point at least because I say a lot in the book, I’ll say a lot in interviews, and I think it’s just better to be separate from any particular campaign so I can speak my mind, which was the purpose of writing the book in the first place.”
Have you been approached by any campaigns?
I’ve talked to several of them, yeah. Many people at AEI, where I’m a senior fellow, are affiliated with campaigns. But AEI is an institution that doesn’t take a partisan position; we are happy to meet with any candidate.
But have you been asked for an endorsement by any campaign?
From several of them, yes.
All Republicans, I assume.
So far, yes!
Are you hearing anything that you like from a particular candidate, or don’t like?
Well, I think there’s a pretty clear distinction in the field on the Democratic side vs. the Republican side. . . . But I actually think on the Republican side, while there are obviously differences among the candidates they have a generally very strong, appropriate view of national security. Whereas on the other side I think we see a lot of the same failings that characterized the Clinton administration now reemerging, and it’s almost as if Sept. 11 hasn’t happened.
I view next year’s election as a very crucial election from the national security point of view. You know, obviously there are a whole range of domestic, economic, social issues that are going to come up. That’s completely natural, that’s what a presidential election brings out. But I think that it’s extremely important that people think about the candidates with a much higher priority on national security because whoever we elect next year is going to carry in the next four years that have nothing to do with Iraq.
Iraq is at the center of the debate now, and it’s an important issue, but it’s not going to be the most important issue over the next 20 years that the next president in the next four to eight years is going to have to face. We need to hear more about what all the candidates are going to say on these issues, the broad issues: how do we handle China, a resurgent Russia, India. These are the issues that will carry us forward for decades.
But in the near-term, the medium-term, what are we going to do about the continued risk of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction from rogue states, Iran and North Korea being the two most visible examples. But this is what we mean by proliferation: If they’re allowed to keep or obtain nuclear weapons, a lot of other states are going to draw the conclusion that they can get away with it.
Much will still happen in the remaining 15 months or soof the Bush administration, to be sure, but still, this debate is going to be, I think should be, a much bigger part of the presidential campaign next year.
Is that our biggest threat, the proliferation of WMDs?
I think, ultimately it’s the confluence of international terrorism and WMD. But the fact is, the possession of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, will fundamentally change the balance of power, certainly in many specific regions. And it could have a global effect because the risk of the threat of use of a weapon of mass destruction is going to change people’s minds. That’s why the Bush administration’s strategy, which is often tough to apply, but the idea is you prevent these rogue states and terrorist groups from getting the weapons in the first place. Because once they get them the situation changes radically.
And that’s why Iran is such a concern?
It is. It also goes to the point why, despite the difficulties we have in Iraq now, the decision to overthrow Saddam remains the right decision, and it remains a strategic victory for the United States because that country is not going to possess weapons of mass destruction any time in the near future. And it’s the misreading of the consequences of the subsequent four years since the overthrow that worries me because it calls into question what I still believe is the fundamental correctness to overthrow Saddam in the first place.
It was the regime itself that was a threat. President Clinton declared it to be a threat. Congress passed a resolution in both houses, overwhelming bipartisan majorities, saying it was our national policy to effect regime change in Baghdad. This was not a Bush invention. And yet if you watch the debate on the Democratic side, they’re all saying it’s time to turn this back into a criminal law matter. I think that’s very dangerous. It’s naive and very dangerous.
So when Ron Paul says we needn’t worry about Iran getting a nuke because Iran can’t directly attack us. . .
Well, A. I’m not so sure of that. It has a very aggressive ballistic missile development capability, a program that’s for nearly 10 years now been conducted in conjunction with North Korea. While at this point it doesn’t have that capability, it’s working on it and it’s growing. Besides that, Iran has demonstrated over the years that it’s perfectly prepared to transfer weapons, finance, training, equipment to terrorists. You remember the Korean A, a famous ship that was captured on its way to the Palestinian Authority, to Arafat, loaded with arms, conventional, but if they’re willing to do that with terrorists, and Iran is the world’s largest central banker of terrorists today, then you have to worry about the risk that in a sufficiently apocalyptic moment they would transfer to a terrorist group as well.
If you look at North Korea, which is usually viewed as an East-Asian problem, it is in fact a global problem itself. It is the world’s largest proliferator of ballistic missile technology. It will essentially sell anything it has to anyone with hard currency. So I don’t put it past North Korea to sell to al-Qaida or another terrorist group if the price is right.
So they’ve got the weapon, the question is, what do they do with it? They put it in a box, put it on a ship, and sail it into an American harbor.
We’re taking steps against all this. I don’t mean to imply that we’re completely defenseless. The point is just because they don’t have an arsenal of ballistic missiles capable of hitting the East Coast of the United States now doesn’t mean they’re incapable of delivering a weapon.
What does the U.N. do that is effective?
We all make the mistake, I make the mistake, of referring to the U.N. as a whole as if it’s one organization. In fact, part of its problem is that it’s that it’s a range of organizations, specialized agencies, funds, programs, decision-making bodies. It’s part the complexity of it that helps make it ineffective in many respects. But because of that, there are pieces of the system that do a very good job. Protection and assistance for refugees; the World Food Program, which provides food and other humanitarian assistance in natural disasters or conflict situations; UNICEF. A lot of the specialized agencies you don’t hear much about. The Universal Postal Union, for example. Or programs like the World Health Organizations, UNAIDS.
There is a lot of very good work being done in differing parts of the system, especially when the specialized agencies stick to their knitting and don’t get involved in politics. It’s really political parts of the U.N. that are far less effective. You know, during the Cold War the Security Council played essentially no role in the struggle because it was gridlocked by the vetoes of the major powers. When the Cold War ended many people thought that was a potential new beginning of the Security Council. But if you look, especially since 9/11, at the Council’s record in the area of terrorism, in the area of WMD proliferation, it’s been very, very ineffective, in part because of the role Russia and China take, in part for other reasons.
But I think it’s legitimate to ask whether the Security Council has not entered into a new period of gridlock when confronted with these threats of terrorism and WMD proliferation, that render it unable to be very effective on the threats that I think are most important for the United States. That leads to the question: Can it handle the smaller questions, smaller in the sense of not being as directly threatening to the United States, but things like the situation in Burma, the horrible tragedy in Darfur, the repressive regime in Zimbabwe. And the answer there is, it’s not very effective in those areas either.
I have a whole chapter in my book on, it’s called “Darfur and the Failings of U.N. Peacekeeping in Africa,” where I go through U.N. peacekeeping operations and I think demonstrate pretty clearly that while peacekeeping operations may be helpful to stop a conflict, they don’t then go on and help resolve it. So that the peacekeeping force itself becomes part of the problem.
If you look at Sudan, everybody’s focused on what’s going on in Darfur, which is genocide. Powell called it genocide; I think it’s genocide. But at the same time the North-South agreement appears to be coming apart. Just yesterday, I think, most of the representatives from the Southern region withdrew from the national government. I don’t if that’s final or not. It shows that even that agreement may be in deep trouble. There’s fighting and rebellion among the Eastern providences of Sudan. The situation in Darfur spills over into Chad, the Central African Republic. Somalia is still coming apart. Ethiopia and Eritria are still at war. And yet there are huge peacekeeping operations in Eritria, in Ethiopia, in Sudan. And yet the situation’s not improving.
We had to fight for weeks to get Burma even onto the Security Council agenda. We had to force a vote. China voted against it, but because it was a procedural question they didn’t have a veto. So we got it on and they just have now issued a statement this week. In Zimbabwe the Security Council is effectively not even a player. So you have to say even in these less globally significant conflicts the Security Council role is minimal at best.
What can the United States do about that?
I think, No. 1, let’s just take the Security Council. The Security Council is never going to be any better than the international geopolitical situation. The problem is it may sometimes be worse because when you’re in the hothouse environment in New York, in the peculiar culture of the U.N., things happen that out in the real world you just couldn’t explain. So you’ve got an upper limit of not being any better than the world really is and sometimes being worse.
As long as you’ve got countries pursuing their interests, which all countries do — only the U.S. is criticized for it, everybody else pursues their interests too — you’re going to have that clash. So in political terms there are outer boundaries that you can effect by diplomacy, but the U.N. qua U.N. isn’t going to make it any better.
In terms of operational capabilities, the Oil for Food scandal turned up deficiencies that Paul Volker in his famous report uncovered. And Volker’s central insight was that the mismanagement, the fraud, the corruption of Oil for Food didn’t come into existence just for Oil for Food. They reflected problems that were endemic in the U.N. system itself because Oil for Food grew out of the U.N., it followed U.N. procedures, it had U.N. personnel.
Volker made a series of recommendations which were really quite good but hardly sweeping. One of his most significant recommendations was that you need a truly independent outside auditing capability. I mean, how is that for a revolutionary idea? And we couldn’t get it. We couldn’t even get something like that. So the conclusion I draw from all this to cut a long story short is that efforts at incremental or marginal reform at the U.N. are doomed to failure because by the time you try and correct one problem another one emerges.
For example, just recently the Cash for Kim scandal, as the press calls it, we find things going on in North Korea that contravene clearly written U.N. policies, and it’s been going on for years. The Wall Street Journal just reported that a thing called the Procurement Task Force that was set up to look into procurement fraud is now about to be terminated because of the opposition of a number of countries who have had nationals, their citizens, in the secretariat found to be engaged in procurement fraud.
So the conclusion I draw from this is that marginal and incremental change won’t work, and the only significant change that could make a difference would be to move the U.N. from a system of mandatory contributions to a system of voluntary contributions. Right now the U.S. pays what’s called an assessed contribution of 22 percent of the total U.N. budget. It’s 27 percent of peacekeeping. We’re far and away the biggest contributor. And in fact, because most of the other governments view the system of assessed contributions as a kind of entitlement systems, we don’t have nearly the influence that we should have on a lot of important policy matters. Not just management and budget issues, which are important, but it’s reflected in inadequate influence in policy as well.
Now, if we were to switch to a system of voluntary contributions, we’d pay for what we want and not for what we don’t want, and we insist that we get what we pay for, you would change the entire incentive structure of the organization. And in fact our historical experience is, looking at agencies that already are primarily voluntarily funded right now, like the World Food Program or the High Commissioner for Refugees, typically these agencies are much more efficient, much more effective, more transparent, more responsive because they know that if they don’t perform the donor countries can take their money somewhere else. This is not rocket science, except at the U.N.
Now, trying to shift to a system of voluntary contributions would be very controversial. It would take a lot of effort. But I think, frankly, even talking about it would have a beneficial impact because it would force people to address some of the concerns that we are raising.
Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize, do you have any thoughts on that?
At least he didn’t win the Nobel Prize for Economics. The prize has been politicized for years. Ronald Reagan never got it. John Paul II never got it. I don’t know what it is that motivates them. It’s a terrible shame because it is an important prize and this is just politicizing it and distorting it all out of perspective. He didn’t get it for chemistry of physics, either.
The House is preparing to pass a resolution condemning the Armenian genocide by Turkey. Is that a good idea or a bad idea?
It’s not a good idea. I think, based on my review of the historical record, is that what happened to the Armenians clearly qualifies as genocide as we use that term today. I don’t think this is even worth arguing about. But that fact alone, as horrible as it is, doesn’t indicate that Congress ought to get into the act of passing these kinds of resolutions. This resolution will have a very negative impact with our relations with Turkey at a very critical time. But I don’t rest my view simply on the fact that it’s inconvenient for Turkey. I just don’t think this is a proper function for Congress to be getting into in the first place. And it’s not like they don’t have other work to occupy their time. So I think it’s just bad from the perspective of Congress doing the business it’s sent there to do, and because inevitably these kinds of issues, which are emotional for very good reasons, are just distractions from what Congress’s real work should be. As I say, I don’t in any way dispute the fact; I firmly believe that what happened to the Armenians was genocide. But it was conducted by the Ottoman Empire. The current Turkish government was founded as a rejection of the Ottoman Empire, an effort by the military to create a secular, democratic state. In fact, the secular principles of which are now under attack by Islamic fundamentalists. So I just don’t see this will change what happened in history, a very sad chapter of history, and it reflects a politicization of the current issue that is not very helpful.
But my fundamental objection is an institutional objection. It’s just not something appropriate for Congress to do. And I think these particular negative effects show why it’s institutionally inappropriate for Congress to get into.
Do you think the House under Pelosi, in addition to this, has strayed from its appropriate role?
I think that when the Framers of the Constitution wrote the document and they dealt with questions of war and peace, they had just come away from the experience of our Revolution, where Washington, as commander of the Continental Army, reported directly to the Continental Congress. There wasn’t any doubt in his mind, or in the minds of most people who watched that, that this was not something they ever wanted to repeat. They wanted a strong commander in chief in the executive. And many people thought Washington would be the first President. And he certainly didn’t want to be in a position where the commander in chief was being second-guessed at a tactical level by Congress. And that’s in effect what’s been going on here.
Even these proposals on the amount of leave time that members of the service can have between tours in Iraq. Nobody questions we want to give them the most amount of leave that we can. They deserve it; it’s good for them; it’s good for the military. But the notion that Congress is down in the capillary level is really bizarre.
If the opponents of the war want a straight-out vote, they ought to make a motion to cut off funding. Let’s have the vote. I would oppose it, to be sure. But if you want to have a decision on whether the President’s policy is right, let’s have an up or down vote. I think in many respects this effort to micromanage the conduct of the war really shows why the Framers drafted the Constitution the way they did. You can’t have 435 commanders in chief; you just can’t do it.
Hillary Clinton said that she would indeed meet with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad without preconditions. Is that a good idea?
No. It’s a very dangerous idea. The administration’s policy has been that they won’t negotiate with Iran until it stops uranium enrichment. In fact, that is the stated European position, although they’ve been negotiating like crazy for four years. They’ve at least said that none of the benefits that they want to confer upon Iran will happen until Iran ceases uranium enrichment.
Even that policy, the European policy, the European diplomatic initiative, which is now over four years old, has failed. The idea that you can sit down with Iran and chit-chat them out of their nuclear weapons program I think is utterly unrealistic. That’s not a prediction. That’s a fact based on over four years of observation.
When Barack Obama said something like this several months ago, I don’t know if she called it naive, but she said it was irresponsible, something like that. Whatever that criticism was, she was right the first time.
Do you think so far that her foreign policy is something to be classified on the whole as more realistic than Obama’s?
I can’t really tell because it shifts so often. I think the tendency that I find most disturbing when it comes to the War on Terrorism or related things is the shift in thinking to the pre-9/11 conceptual model that this is a law enforcement matter and not a matter of war and peace. If you treat it as law enforcement, then you’re saying you just need better litigators, better prosecutors. And I think that model has been conclusively proven not to work. If that’s what they’re going back to, then I think we’re in real trouble.
Hillary said in the last debate that it will not be the official policy of the United States to torture. Do you think that’s a reasonable thing, we shouldn’t say as a matter of policy that will do these things, with a wink?
We’ve got statutes about torture that we’ve adopted over the years. I don’t see any reason we shouldn’t follow them. The hard moral choice is what if you have somebody who has information that could prevent the detonation of a nuclear weapon and save hundreds of thousands of people and he’s not responding to accepted techniques of questioning? I can make the hypothetical fit and say if you torture this guy he would spill his guts and you could stop the nuclear detonation. What’s the moral thing to do? I think the answer there is to save the greatest number of lives extraordinary circumstances would be warranted. That’s why absolute formulations on this are so hard. As a general practice, nobody’s going to condone torture. And we shouldn’t. But I give you that hypothetical and I’d be surprised that 99.9% of Americans say you do what you need to do to make sure that nuclear weapon doesn’t go off.
That was all we had time for. At the end of the interview, a woman from the Clean Air, Cool Planet conference taking place in the ballrooms a few yards away, Debbie Grinnel of Massachusetts, came over and accosted Bolton. She berated him for supporting the Iraq war, said he was an awful person, and asked how he could live with himself. She said there was no reason to invade Iraq, to which he asked if she’d ever seen someone burned by chemical weapons, but she had already turned and walked away. Bolton said he rarely gets that kind of treatment, though it happened a few times in New York City.
Comment from Joe Geiger in Merrimack: From the remarks that Amb. Bolton delivered at the NHGOP special election last Sat. (which are very similar to those delivered here), it is clear that this Yale educated gentleman is extremely bright and well spoken, but he is not objective in his analysis of world affairs. A few comments made here manifest the latter. To suggest that the AEI is non-partisan is misleading. While they may technically not have a party affiliation, AEI’s fellows wrote GWB’s foreign policy handbook, which is Wilsonian and therefore liberal. So then again maybe they are nonpartisan after all. Included in the good work that the U.N. performs were the activities of UNICEF, which is one of the largest exporters of abortion and sexual decadence presently in operation. Draw your own conclusions. Social liberal who wants to export those mores to countries that hate our decadence. While Congress should not micromanage a war, I am pretty sure it is their sole responsibility to declare one, no? This is our modern day GOP.
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