Please refer to my previous postings (http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily2/20180413) (http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily2/20180414)(http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily2/20180415)(http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily2/20180417)(http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily2/20180418). (Lily)
TAI: When you look back on the time since September 11, 2001, do you think that the Administration overreacted rhetorically after that event? Has our foreign policy as a whole become captive, too narrowly focused on some issues to the excessive exclusion of others? Has the kind of language the White House has been using all along generated a climate of, if not fear, then anxiety that is very un-American?
John Bolton: I think the problem is not being able to keep people focused on the real threat. The real threat is not terror coming from already known and defined places. It’s terror combined with weapons of mass destruction in the hands of states or terrorist groups anywhere that might be inclined to use them. That doesn’t mean that the threat is not acute, and it may be growing, but it should be clear to the American people what kind of threat it actually is.
I think part of the problem is that too many Americans don’t live in a climate of fear. Five years after September 11, without a subsequent attack of that size on American territory, people have been led to think the threat has disappeared. Yet we can see even now in Somalia, where elements of al-Qaeda tried to regroup, that the threat is still there. A rogue state or a terrorist group with weapons of mass destruction turns those weapons automatically into weapons of mass terror. And that is why the notion of preemption to make sure that attacks don’t take place in the first instance is a proper response to the kind of environment we face.
TAI: I’m glad you mentioned preemption. Very shortly after the preemption language was unveiled in September 2002, Condoleezza Rice, then National Security Advisor, went to New York to give the Wriston Lecture, in which she elaborated on the conditions in which preemption might be used. It seems to have gone right by a lot of people, but preemption was never meant to replace deterrence, only to supplement it in those cases where we could not logically depend on it.
Of course, there’s another argument about what kind of Pandora’s Box we opened by talking about preemption in public. A lot of people think there’s nothing wrong with preemption, but that there is something wrong with talking about it openly, and without consulting our allies beforehand. I agree that preemption makes sense in certain circumstances, but I’m not sure the Administration has done such a good job of explaining what it means in practice.
John Bolton: I think as a general proposition we haven’t explained a lot of concepts well. I’m not an expert in public diplomacy, but my theory is that you should go out and say what your position is, and say it to as many different people as you can, in as many places as you can, and I don’t think we’ve done that. I don’t have any grand strategy for public diplomacy, other than to show up and state your case as often as you need to, which is one of the things I tried to do in New York.
TAI: We haven’t mentioned Iran. Iran is both like and unlike North Korea. There are people in the Administration who think that a negotiated solution to this ultimately could work. There are others who think that such a negotiation could not work except with very sharp sanctions that really bite, but which we are unlikely to get thanks to opposition in the Security Council. A third group thinks none of this will work, but that we have to go through the motions of showing the world that we’ve done everything we could short of using force, should it ever come to using force.
Beyond that, there’s an inherent paradox here: If we take the use of force off the table, which the President has refused to do, then we undercut all the rest of the diplomacy we can employ. But if we leave the threat of force on the table, it amounts to an incentive to the Iranians to move faster to get nuclear weapons. That’s a nasty double-bind. Because of these difficulties, in part, the accusation made against the Administration is that it doesn’t have a policy, that disagreements have paralyzed the bureaucracy, and that the President has never forced the issue to closure. Is this how you read the problem?
John Bolton: In part, what we’re doing now is comparable to what we did with China and North Korea, which is to say, China will take the lead on North Korea, and we’ll let the EU Three—the “Euroids”, I call them—take the lead on Iran. When we first thought hard about Iran, it was in the context of the new strategic framework with Russia, and the assistance that Russia was giving Iran for the construction of the Bushehr nuclear power plant and other aspects of their program. But after we withdrew from the ABM Treaty and signed the Treaty of Moscow reducing strategic deployed warheads, we began to look at Iran in a broader context.
Now, my original thought was that we would get a statement by the IAEA about the Iranian nuclear program, refer it to the UN Security Council, and let the Security Council take action on Iran, all of which would have been done in early 2003. The problem with the approach we’ve taken is that it has taken too long. We’ve allowed the Europeans over that period of time so much running room, and the Iranians have very skillfully used the negotiations to their own advantage.
TAI: To buy time, basically.
John Bolton: Right. Hassan Rowhani, the former Iranian chief nuclear negotiator, said in a speech covered in the New York Times that they have used the calm of negotiations to perfect their uranium conversion process while they’ve also been working on their enrichment process and everything else they need to do. So we can go through an infinite number of diplomatic steps, but it’s like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice: We get captivated by the process and it takes over. Going through the process with the IAEA and the Security Council took on a larger role than stopping Iran’s nuclear weapons program. That’s why we’re in a potentially difficult circumstance, where time is not on our side. The Administration’s tenure is growing short, and we face a potential crunch.
TAI: So what’s next for you? Have any 2008 presidential candidates been calling? Would you like to associate yourself with a campaign, or are you more inclined to sit and write?
John Bolton: I subscribe to the perspective that you draw down intellectual capital while you’re in the government, and when you’re out of government, you have to take advantage of the time to increase it. I do think the 2008 election will be extremely important. Particularly in the foreign policy area, there are some real differences in approach that have not been resolved during the six years of the Bush Administration and are unlikely to be resolved in its remaining two years. So I take that seriously, and even though I’ve only been out of the government a couple of days now, I’ve already begun to think about what I should be doing in future.
TAI: Whatever it is, it probably won’t be boring.
John Bolton: Probably not.
TAI: Thanks for talking to The American Interest.
John Bolton: It’s been a pleasure.
（End）
