US President Donald Trump has not stopped taking the world by surprise. Fewer than ten days after he ousted Rex Tillerson from the position of secretary of state, on 22 March he tweeted that, effective 9 April, John Bolton, former US ambassador to the UN during the administration of former president George W Bush, would become White House National Security adviser replacing H R McMaster. Bolton will be the third such adviser in fewer than 14 months. Despite the fact that rumours had begun circulating in Washington after the ouster of Tillerson that McMaster would be next on the chopping block, both White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and the spokeswoman of the White House persistently denied that McMaster would be relieved of his duties. In the meantime, White House officials and friends of Trump insisted that the president had “gained self-confidence” and wanted to assert his complete authority over decision-making in the White House in order to carry out his commitments and promises to his electoral base. The Bolton appointment follows this line of thought. Mark Pompeo, the newly-appointed US secretary of state, once he has been confirmed by the Senate, is known to be hawkish on North Korea as well as on Iran. Bolton is another US foreign policy hawk who is well known for his aggressive positions vis-à-vis these two countries. The two men on different occasions have called for preventive strikes on North Korea and Iran. Both are die-hard supporters of Israel and very lukewarm towards the Palestinian question. Bolton, for instance, called last year for a “three-state solution” to the Middle East peace process, advocating that Israel would “merge Gaza with Egypt and parts of the West Bank with Jordan.” Bolton was also under-secretary of state for international organisations at the US State Department in 1991 when the UN General Assembly abolished its 1975 resolution equating Zionism with racism. Before March 2003, Bolton was among those officials in the Bush administration who urged the overthrow of the regime of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. In fact, he advocated such a course of action during the administration of former president Bill Clinton. And as under-secretary for arms control in the first term of former president George Bush he told the BBC that the US was confident that Saddam Hussein “has hidden weapons of mass destruction and production facilities in Iraq.” Despite the heavy human and financial losses of the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and the subsequent emergence of terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda, Bolton has maintained that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was “worth the effort” even if the decisions made after the invasion “were not always right”. Moreover, the new National Security adviser is known to be anti-UN in general and against international institutions, international agreements, and free trade. Trump could not have found a former senior American official who holds his own foreign policy approach more clearly than Bolton, who once said, speaking of America's career diplomats, that “state careerists are schooled in accommodation and compromise… rather than the aggressive advocacy of United States interests, which might inconveniently disrupt the serenity of diplomatic exchanges, not to mention dinner parties and receptions.” Three major developments in US foreign policy are expected to take place over the next three months. The first is the 12 May deadline that Trump has set to certify or decertify the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the accord concerning Iran's nuclear programme. The second, which could prove an epoch-making development, is the expected summit between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in May in a venue that has yet to be agreed upon. The third directly concerns Egypt, the Palestinians and the Arab world and consists of American proposals concerning the resumption of peace talks between the Palestinians and the Israelis. These three developments combined are key to international peace and security. With the positions of Bolton and Pompeo on record as to the best possible scenarios from an American perspective, we should expect a toughening of American positions particularly in relation to Iran and North Korea. The near-consensus in the US foreign-policy establishment is that Trump will most probably pull out of the Iranian nuclear deal if the Europeans do not succeed in introducing changes in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that pertain to Iran's ballistic missile programme and a commitment by Iran to scale back its regional involvement in the Middle East. However, the Europeans are not the only ones who signed this agreement, as other signatories include Russia, China and Iran itself. Washington insiders believe that both Trump and his new National Security adviser subscribe to former US president Ronald Reagan's principle of “peace through strength.” However, they should realise that the international system of today is completely different from the one that prevailed during the Reagan years. China is much more powerful than it used to be, and the Russia of President Vladimir Putin has nothing to do with the days when the former Soviet Union was slowly disintegrating. US diplomat Christopher Hill, who was responsible for negotiating with the North Koreans during the Clinton years, commented on the appointment of Bolton by stressing that it represented a new level of responsibility for him and adding that he has “always been a kind of in-house free electron, amusing but not particularly consequential. All that changes now.” The first decision for Bolton after 9 April is expected to be to rid the White House National Security Council of Obama-era holdovers. With the high-level changes at the state department and National Security Council now taking place 14 months after Trump entered the Oval Office, resorting to the use of force against the adversaries of the United States has ceased to be a distant scenario. The writer is former assistant foreign minister.
