February 21, 2025
In an interview published in The Guardian of Britain, Bolton said a major international crisis is “much more likely” in Trump’s second term given the president’s “inability to focus” on foreign policy. Bolton, who at 17 months was Trump’s longest-serving national security adviser, delivered a scathing critique of the president’s lack of knowledge, interest in facts or coherent strategy.
He described Trump’s decision-making as driven by personal relationships and “neuron flashes” rather than any understanding of national interests. “Given Trump’s inability to focus on coherent decision making, I’m very worried,” Bolton said.
Bolton recalled: “What I believed was that, like every American president before him, the weight of the responsibilities, certainly in national security, the gravity of the issues that he was confronting, the consequences of his decisions, would discipline his thinking in a way that would produce serious outcomes. “It turned out I was wrong.
By the time I got there, a lot of patterns of behavior had already been set that were never changed. And it could well be, even if I had been there earlier, I couldn’t have affected it. But it was clear pretty soon after I got there that intellectual discipline wasn’t in the Trump vocabulary.” Bolton agreed with “a lot” of Trump’s decisions during his first term but found they had all the coherence of “a series of neuron flashes,” he said. “He doesn’t have a philosophy, doesn’t do policy as we understand that, he doesn’t have a national security strategy.
“I said in my book his decisions are like an archipelago of dots. You can try and draw lines between them, but even he can’t draw lines between them. You try and incrementally get one right decision after another. At least that’s what his advisers thought: that we could string enough decisions together. But that’s not the way he looked at it.” The 45th president “could be charming,” Bolton acknowledged, and placed an emphasis on personal relations with autocrats such as Xi Jinping of China, Kim Jong-un of North Korea and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
But he lacked the competence required for the job and showed a blatant disregard for the national security briefing that presidents receive daily. “He doesn’t know much about foreign policy. He’s not a big reader. He reads newspapers from time to time, but briefing papers are almost never read because he doesn’t think they’re important.
He doesn’t think these facts are important. He thinks he looks the other guy across the table in the eye and they make a deal and that’s what’s important.” Trump believes he has a friendship with Putin, Bolton added. “I don’t know what Putin thinks his relationship is with Trump, but he believes he knows how to play Trump, that Trump’s an easy mark.
Trump doesn’t see that at all. “If you put everything on the basis of personal relations and you don’t understand how the person you’re talking about on the other side views you, that’s a real lack of situational awareness that can only cause trouble.” Asked about Trump’s now notorious affinity for strongmen, the former national security adviser replied: “I suppose a shrink would have a better grasp of it, but I think Trump likes being a big guy, likes other big guys.
“These other big guys don’t have pesky independent legislatures and judiciaries and they do big-guy things that Trump can’t do and he just wishes he could do. It’s a lot more fun if you don’t have the kinds of constraints that constitutional governments impose.” “He now feels more confident in his judgment, having been re-elected, which will make it even harder to impose any kind of intellectual decision-making discipline.”
Later Bolton told an Iran international podcast, “I think there’s a risk with Trump that he’d negotiate anything with anybody. The idea that he believes he’s the best dealmaker in the world he wrote a book called ‘The Art of the Deal’ is something that should trouble us because he doesn’t really understand fully what’s at stake here.” Iran cannot be trusted, argued Bolton, pointing to Tehran and North Korea’s alleged cooperation on the nuclear front.
“We know North Korea has cooperated with Tehran on things like the nuclear reactor in Syria that was destroyed by the Israelis in 2007,” said Bolton. “There’s been [Iran-North Korea] cooperation in the ballistic missile work because they’re both using the same Cold War era Soviet Scud missile technology. The risk that there’s cooperation that we have not uncovered, I think is something we need to be concerned about.”
While Bolton questions Trump’s appetite for a deal, he also feels that Trump would not be fooled by the Iranian establishment’s so-called charm offensive. The Islamic Republic’s outreach is risky and aims only at relief from US-led sanctions, in Bolton’s view.
“I think that’s one reason they want to try to get another nuclear agreement in place so that they can get off the sanctions that violate the agreement and proceed to nuclear weapons. The idea, obviously, is to have the best of both worlds,” said Bolton. Trump was not deceived by the Iranians during his first term as president, added Bolton, who says he hopes Trump will again not be swayed by Iranian assurances.