[The passages that have generated the most headlines this week center on Bolton’s account of Trump’s talks with Xi, in which he apparently asked the Chinese president to help him win the 2020 election by boosting agricultural imports from the American heartland, spoke openly of executing journalists, and — perhaps in the most eye-catching anecdote — encouraged Xi to carry on the industrial-scale detention of more than a million people from Turkic Muslim ethnic minorities in the far-western region of Xinjiang.]
By Ishaan Tharoor
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President Trump speaks as then-national security adviser John Bolton listens
in the Oval Office on August 20, 2019. (Andrew Harrer/EPE-EFE
/Shutterstock) (Andrew Harrer/Pool/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
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Maybe we didn’t need John Bolton to hammer home the point. Since the beginning of President Trump’s time in office, analysts and critics have all noted his apparent venality, his blinkered and transactional approach to diplomacy and his questionable rapport with strongmen and dictators. Trump was impeached by the House — a process in which Bolton, his former national security adviser, decided not to participate — precisely for his willingness to illicitly bend U.S. foreign policy around his own personal interest.
But the revelations in a forthcoming memoir by Bolton, a right-wing hawk with a checkered reputation in Washington, paint a damning picture of the president. Bolton served in the White House’s top national security post from March 2018 to September 2019, long enough for him to witness firsthand Trump’s interactions with Chinese President Xi Jinping and chronicle some startling exchanges.
According to my colleagues who have read advance copies, Bolton’s book casts Trump as an “erratic” and “stunningly uninformed” leader, while dishing dirt on those in Trump’s orbit, including former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
The passages that have generated the most headlines this week center on Bolton’s account of Trump’s talks with Xi, in which he apparently asked the Chinese president to help him win the 2020 election by boosting agricultural imports from the American heartland, spoke openly of executing journalists, and — perhaps in the most eye-catching anecdote — encouraged Xi to carry on the industrial-scale detention of more than a million people from Turkic Muslim ethnic minorities in the far-western region of Xinjiang.
On social media and in news conferences, Trump and the White House have rejected Bolton’s claims. They have launched a court case to attempt to stop the book’s release. Bolton now joins a lengthy list of Trump appointees who have publicly fallen out with the president, in often rather ugly fashion.
“I don’t think he’s fit for office. I don’t think he has the competence to carry out the job,” Bolton told ABC News in an interview that’s scheduled to air in full on Sunday. “There really isn’t any guiding principle that I was able to discern other than what’s good for Donald Trump’s reelection. I think he was so focused on the reelection that longer-term considerations fell by the wayside.”
“If these accounts are true, it’s not only morally repugnant, it’s a violation of Donald Trump’s sacred duty to the American people to protect America’s interests and defend our values," said Joe Biden, Trump’s Democratic rival in the presidential race.
China casts a particularly curious shadow here. In recent months, the White House has seized on widespread antipathy toward China and its initial handling of the coronavirus outbreak as a signature theme of its reelection strategy. Trump’s allies tout their tough approach to Beijing — from launching trade wars, to championing the cause of Hong Kong’s protesters, to pushing legislation that punishes Chinese officials linked to Xinjiang’s detention camps, which Trump signed Wednesday. They argue that their predecessors were too permissive of Beijing’s behavior in the past.
In a podcast this week with the conservative American Enterprise Institute, Pompeo criticized previous U.S. administrations for not taking the threat posed by China’s military expansionism and economic opportunism more seriously. “For 20 years, the United States has not responded to these things in a real way,” he said. “We’ve viewed the 1.5 billion people in the Chinese market as so important to the American economy and the risk that the Chinese would respond by closing us out for the favor of some other nation.”
But the Bolton revelations — plus numerous other documented instances of Trump seeking to ingratiate himself or acquiesce to Xi — make the anti-China electoral pitch trickier. “If reality mattered, this would make it extremely hard for Trump to now argue that he’s tough on China and that Biden is soft,” noted Post columnists Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman. “Trump has been making this claim in absurdly lurid ads that laughably rip Biden’s words out of context.”
Biden, too, has adopted a hawkish line on China, a reflection in part of the extent to which anti-Beijing sentiment has become bipartisan. But his advisers articulate their China strategy in more subtle terms, calling for “competition without catastrophe” and the bolstering of alliance systems in Asia that Trump has let fray.
There needs to be “less focus on trying to slow China down and more on running faster ourselves,” Jake Sullivan, a former senior Obama administration official and an adviser to Biden said during a Thursday webinar where he and Michèle Flournoy, a former defense official under Obama, both cited the need for significant domestic investments at home to help reposition America abroad.
It could be the Chinese view, not that of Bolton, that undermines Trump most. While Trump likes to say that China is rooting for a Biden victory, a Bloomberg News investigation published this week suggested the opposite.
“If Biden is elected, I think this could be more dangerous for China, because he will work with allies to target China, whereas Trump is destroying U.S. alliances,” Zhou Xiaoming, a former Chinese trade negotiator, told Bloomberg. A number of current Chinese officials reportedly echoed this view, recognizing that Trump’s turbulent unilateralism weakened the U.S.'s hand in its dealings in Asia.
Their regional counterparts may agree. “Several countries in Asia have concerns about aligning themselves with a U.S. that seems less predictable and not reliable,” Bonnie Glaser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies said to the Financial Times. “If Trump is voted out in [presidential elections in] November, there will be a sigh of relief across the region.”
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