On April 17, as criticized in a prior post, U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton announced in Miami additional U.S. sanctions against Cuba on the anniversary of the 1961 failed U.S. invasion of Cuba’s Bay of Pigs (Playa Girõn).[1]
Now Dexter Filkins, an award-winning journalist, reminds us that Bolton has a deserved reputation as the “Republican Party’s most militant foreign-policy thinker—an advocate of aggressive force who ridicules anyone who disagrees.” Bolton also is a consistent opponent of multilateral institutions and treaties.
For example, In the George W. Bush Administration Bolton was Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs and a strong advocate for the 2001 U.S. invasion of Iraq. He re-endorsed that opinion in 2015 when he said, “I still think the decision to overthrow Saddam was correct.”
In May 2002, still as Under-Secretary, in a speech at the Heritage Foundation he said the Cuban government was developing an ambitious biological weapons program and collaborating with Libya and Iran, all contrary to the opinion of the State Department’s internal intelligence bureau.
Today he presumably would admit that Venezuela poses no immediate threat to the U.S., but believes it is dangerous because it was allowing Russia to gain a foothold in the region and because it has the largest proven oil reserves in the world. On the other hand, presumably he would not concede that U.S. hostile policies towards that country and Cuba were providing Russia with the opportunity to expand its influence in the region.
The Monroe Doctrine, Bolton recently admitted, is a prohibition against outside powers interceding in Latin America that does not include U.S. use of armed forces in the region. But the Roosevelt Corollary, he added, provides for that use of force, and Bolton says, “I haven’t invoked that—yet.”[2]
Given the Trump Administration’s currently not having a permanent Secretary of Defense and no Secretary of Homeland Security and Ambassador to the U.N., “Bolton would have extraordinary latitude in a crisis., and as long as Trump’s base is applauding, then Bolton can do whatever he wants.”
Dexter Filkins, the author of this New Yorker article, has been called “the premier combat journalist of his generation” for his reporting from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 and a National Book Critics Award for his “The Forever War.”[3]
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[1] Filkins, John Bolton On the Warpath, New Yorker (May 6, 2019). See also, John Bolton’s New threat Against Cuba, dwkcommentaries.com (April 2, 2019); U.S. National Security Advisor Announces New U.S. Hostility Towards Cuba, dwkcommentaries.com (Nov. 3, 2018); Zakaria, Does a Trump doctrine on foreign policy exist? Ask John Bolton, Wash. Post (May 2, 2019) (Bolton has “a dark view of humankind” which requires the U.S. to be “aggressive, unilateral and militant;” and a “longtime fan of regime change”).
[2] State Dep’t, Office of the Historian, Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, 1904.
[3] Dexter Filkins, The New Yorker; Dexter Filkins, Wikipedia.