by John Bolton;
“When we get together next month, I’ll explain in more detail. I’ll also lay out aid packages that even Japan can’t match. I won’t violate any UN sanctions because I won’t have to. I’ll provide supplies and assistance the sanctions don’t cover, and I’ll hold the Border Police up from watching too closely at what’s going on. You’ll be fine. Not only do you not have to give up your nukes, pretty soon, you’ll be able to have South Korea fall into your lap like ripe fruit.
“Think long-term, Jong Un. You want to be on the winning side of history, and that’s China. The Americans are no friends of ours.”
On August 29, for some reason, Mattis and Dunford held a disastrous press conference, during which Mattis was asked about US Forces Korea’s readiness in light of the war games’ being suspended. He gave a long, confused answer, the substance of which, however, taken fairly, indicated a split from Trump on the issue. That set Trump off, not surprisingly, riffing about what was wrong with Mattis, the generals, war games, and so on. I said Mattis was working to clear up the confusion, but Trump wanted to tweet, which he did later:
STATEMENT FROM THE WHITE HOUSE President Donald J. Trump feels strongly that North Korea is under tremendous pressure from China because of our major trade disputes with the Chinese Government. At the same time, we also know that China is providing North Korea with…
…considerable aid, including money, fuel, fertilizer and various other commodities. This is not helpful! Nonetheless, the President believes that his relationship with Kim Jong Un is a very good and warm one, and there is no reason at this time to be spending large amounts…
…of money on joint US-South Korea war games. Besides, the President can instantly start the joint exercises again with South Korea, and Japan, if he so chooses. If he does, they will be far bigger than ever before. As for the US-China trade disputes, and other…
…differences, they will be resolved in time by President Trump and China’s great President Xi Jinping. Their relationship and bond remain very strong.
I thought this was all mostly laughable, but it didn’t undercut our basic positions. In Trump White House terms, this was a victory, a good day at the office. The next day, China criticized the tweets—more progress in my view. Mattis told Pompeo and me at our weekly breakfast in the Ward Room on August 30 that he regretted even having the press conference that precipitated this, and I doubted he would hold another for a long time.
Moon and Trump spoke on September 4. Trump complained that he had had a phenomenal meeting in Singapore, and that a good friendship with Kim had been built, and now suddenly there’s no deal. He wondered what had happened. Of course, Singapore had not been “phenomenal” unless you were a North Korean; KJU didn’t make friends with his enemies; and there wasn’t a real deal. Other than that… Moon was still singing the Sunshine Policy song, saying Kim was entirely committed to improving relations with the United States and denuclearizing, but Kim Yong Chol and others around him had rude manners, an interesting surmise. Moon suggested that Trump meet again with Kim Jong Un. Just what we needed. Moon was still pressing for his own summit with Kim in mid-September, something he likely wanted for domestic political reasons.
Pompeo, Kelly, and I gave Trump another Kim Jong Un letter on September 10,31 which he read in the Oval, commenting as he went, “This is a wonderful letter,” “This is a really nice letter,” and “Listen to what he says about me,” followed by his reading one oleaginous passage after another. As Kelly and I said later, it was as if the letter had been written by Pavlovians who knew exactly how to touch the nerves enhancing Trump’s self-esteem. Trump wanted to meet Kim, and he didn’t want to hear anything contrary, which is probably why he didn’t want to hear me explaining that another meeting soon was a bad idea: “John, you have a lot of hostility,” he said, to which I replied, “The letter is written by the dictator of a rat-shit little country. He doesn’t deserve another meeting with you until he has met with Pompeo, as he agreed to just a couple of weeks ago.” “You have such hostility,” said Trump, “of course, I have the most hostility, but you have a lot of hostility.” On we went, until, out of nowhere, Trump said, “I want the meeting the first week after the election, and Mike should call today and ask for it. You should say the [Kim] letter is extremely nice. The President has great affection for Chairman Kim. He wants to release the letter because it’s so good for the public to see the strength of the relationship, and he wants to have a meeting after the election. Where would he like to meet?”
Outside the Oval, Kelly said to me, “I’m sorry that meeting was so rough on you,” and Pompeo seemed discouraged. I said I was ecstatic at the outcome. After all, we had just gained a five-week delay in any possible Trump-Kim meeting, during which time anything could happen in Trumpworld. We should take it and run.
A continuing, very significant problem was Trump’s relentless desire to withdraw US military assets from the Korean Peninsula, part of his general reduction of US forces worldwide. September 1 came and went, and Mattis reaffirmed in early October his concern for our military readiness on the Peninsula. He and Dunford would have to testify in Congress after January 1 during the budget process, and it seemed hard to imagine the problem wouldn’t surface then. Pompeo finally obtained another meeting with Kim Jong Un in mid-October, where Kim complained at length about our economic sanctions but offered little in new ideas from his side. The main outcome of the meeting was to restart working-level discussions, which I considered inevitable but bad news nonetheless. Here is where the US concession train would really start steaming along. But we had at least survived past the November congressional elections without any major disasters and could now face the next round of Trump enthusiasm to meet with Kim Jong Un.
CHAPTER 5 A TALE OF THREE CITIES—SUMMITS IN BRUSSELS, LONDON, AND HELSINKI
Coming a month after June’s Singapore encounter with Kim Jong Un were three back-to-back July summits: a long-scheduled NATO meeting in Brussels with our partners in America’s most important alliance; Trump and Theresa May in London, a “special relationship” bilateral; and Trump and Putin in Helsinki, neutral ground to meet with our once and current adversary Russia. Before leaving Washington, Trump said: “So I have NATO, I have the UK—which is somewhat in turmoil… And I have Putin. Frankly, Putin may be the easiest of them all. Who would think? Who would think?” Good question. As I realized during this busy July, if I hadn’t seen it earlier, Trump was not following any international grand strategy, or even a consistent trajectory. His thinking was like an archipelago of dots (like individual real estate deals), leaving the rest of us to discern—or create—policy. That had its pros and cons.
After Singapore, I traveled to various European capitals to prepare for the summits. One of my planned trips was to Moscow. That stop had its complications. When I told Trump about going there to lay the groundwork for his trip, he asked, “Do you have to go to Russia? Can’t you do this in a telephone call?” Ultimately, he didn’t object when I explained why reviewing the issues in advance would help in our preparations. Shortly thereafter, I asked Kelly why Trump was complaining, and Kelly said, “That’s easy. He’s worried you’re going to upstage him.” This would sound preposterous for any President other than Trump, and while it was flattering, if true, it was also dangerous. What exactly was I supposed to do now to overcome the problem? I obviously did not come up with a good answer.
Trump really wanted Putin to visit Washington, which the Russians had no intention of doing, and we had been skirmishing over Helsinki and Vienna as possible meeting venues. Russia pushed Vienna, and we pushed Helsinki, but it turned out Trump didn’t favor Helsinki. “Isn’t Finland kind of a satellite of Russia?” he asked. (Later that same morning, Trump asked Kelly if Finland was part of Russia.) I tried to explain the history but didn’t get very far before Trump said he too wanted Vienna. “Whatever they [the Russians] want. Tell them we’ll do whatever they want.” After considerable further jockeying, however, we agreed on He
lsinki.
I landed at Moscow’s Vnukovo airport on Tuesday, June 26, and went the next morning to Spaso House, the longtime US Ambassador’s residence in Moscow. Jon Huntsman had arranged a breakfast with Russian think-tankers and influencers, including former Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, whom I had known and worked with during the Bush 43 Administration, and NSC and embassy officials. The Russians were near-unanimous in their pessimism about the prospects for improving US-Russia relations, notwithstanding what they read about Trump. They believed that fundamental American views, both in Congress and among the general public, on Russia had not changed, which was true. I pushed hard on the election-interference issue, knowing most of those present would promptly report to their contacts in the Kremlin and more broadly. I wanted the word out.
Huntsman and our delegation then rode to the Russian Federation Security Council’s offices on Staraya Ploshad, hard by the Kremlin, to meet our counterparts. My opposite number, Nikolai Patrushev, Secretary of the council, was out of the country, but we had full teams on both sides to cover all the issues, from Iran to arms control, that Putin and Trump might later discuss. Putin himself had once very briefly been Secretary of the Russian Security Council, and Patrushev, like Putin a veteran of the KGB (and the FSB, its successor handling domestic intelligence and security matters), had succeeded Putin in 1999 as FSB Director. Patrushev was reputedly still very close to Putin, not surprising given their common background. We had lunch with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at the Osobnyak guesthouse, an estate owned in pre-revolutionary times by a wealthy industrialist who sympathized with the Bolsheviks, and where I had been a frequent guest. I continued to press on the election-interference issue, which Lavrov dodged by saying that, while they couldn’t rule out hackers, the Russian government hadn’t had anything to do with it.
From Osobnyak, we rode to the Kremlin to meet with Putin at two thirty. We arrived early, and while we were waiting, Defense Minister Sergei Shoygu, there with a military delegation of some sort, came in to introduce himself (and later joined the Putin meeting). We were escorted into the room where the main event would occur, almost certainly the same room where I had first met Putin in October 2001, accompanying Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld immediately after the 9/11 attacks.1 The room was huge, painted in white and blue, with gold trim, and an impressive oval, white-and-blue conference table. The press mob was already present, ready to take pictures of Putin as he entered through a door at the far end of the room (and it was the far end). As instructed by Russian protocol officers, I waited in the center of the room for Putin to greet me, and we shook hands for the cameras. He seemed relaxed and very self-assured, more so than I remembered from that first meeting in 2001. I also greeted Lavrov, Shoygu, and Yuri Ushakov (Putin’s diplomatic advisor and former Ambassador to the US), and we sat down at the elegant conference table. The Russian press later reported (incorrectly) that Putin was on time for the meeting, contrary to his practice of keeping visitors waiting, including the Pope and the Queen of England. I didn’t see any need to correct them.
With the media present, Putin started by noting the decline in Russian-American relations, blaming US domestic politics. I didn’t take the bait. I wasn’t going to compete publicly with Putin when he had the home-court advantage. Since Moscow was then hosting the 2018 FIFA World Cup, and the US (with Mexico and Canada) had just won the games for 2026, I replied that I looked forward to hearing from him how to stage a successful World Cup. The press then cleared out in a disciplined way, and we got down to business.
Putin’s style, at least at the start, was to read from index cards, pausing for the interpreter, but frequently he would put the cards down to say something like, “You tell President Trump this.” Ushakov, Shoygu, and Lavrov said nothing at the meeting except to answer Putin’s questions, nor did those on our side (Ambassador Huntsman, NSC Europe/Russia Senior Director Fiona Hill, NSC Russia Director Joe Wang, and our interpreter). Putin spoke for almost forty-five minutes, including consecutive translation, mostly on the Russian arms-control agenda (US national missile-defense capabilities, the INF Treaty, the New START agreement, and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction). When my turn came, I said we could follow one of two conceptual approaches to arms control: negotiations between adversaries to constrain each other, or negotiations between competitors to deconflict activities that could lead to problems. I used America’s 2001 withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty as an example of the latter, which set Putin off on a soliloquy about why he felt Bob Gates and Condi Rice had later shafted Russia on that issue. I responded that Putin had left out much of the history from 2001 to 2003, where we tried to induce Moscow also to withdraw from the ABM Treaty and cooperate mutually on national missile-defense capabilities, which Putin had declined to do—quite likely, I had surmised—because they then had an effective missile-defense technology and we did not! Arms control was not an issue much discussed thus far in the Trump Administration. It clearly warranted much longer conversations before Trump would be ready to engage.
On Syria, Putin asked, regarding our desire to see Iranian forces withdraw, who would accomplish that? This was one of those moments where Putin pointed at me and said I should tell Trump directly that the Russians didn’t need Iranians in Syria, and that there was no advantage for Russia in having them there. Iran was pursuing its own agenda, given their goals in Lebanon and with the Shia, that had nothing to do with Russian goals, and was creating problems for them and Assad. Russia’s goal, said Putin, was to consolidate the Syrian state to prevent chaos like in Afghanistan, whereas Iran had broader goals. While Russia wanted Iran out of Syria, Putin didn’t think he could ensure that complete withdrawal would happen, and he didn’t want Russia to make promises it couldn’t deliver on. And if the Iranians were withdrawn, what would protect Syrian forces against large-scale aggression, presumably meaning from the Syrian opposition and its Western supporters. Putin had no intention of substituting Russian for Iranian forces in the internal Syrian conflict while Iran sat back and said, “You fight it out in Syria.” He wanted a clear understanding with the US on Syria, then running through various aspects of the US and Russian military dispositions there, focusing especially on the At Tanf exclusion zone (near the tri-border area where Syria, Jordan, and Iraq come together). Putin said confidently, following a long-standing Russian propaganda line, that up to 5,000 “locals” near At Tanf were, in fact, ISIS fighters, who would ostensibly follow American direction, but then betray us when it suited them. (Putin said the ISIS fighters would kiss a certain part of our anatomy, although his interpreter didn’t translate it that way!) I thought this exchange on the situation in Syria was the most interesting of the entire meeting. Referring to the Syrian Opposition, Putin pressed strongly that they were not reliable allies for us, and could not be trusted from one day to the next. Instead, he urged that we advance the Syrian peace process. I said our priorities were to destroy ISIS and remove all Iranian forces. We were not fighting Syria’s civil war; our priority was Iran.
Putin took a very hard line on Ukraine, discussing in detail the conflict’s political and military aspects. Moving to a more confrontational tone, he said US military sales to Ukraine were illegal, and that such sales were not the best way to resolve the issue. He refused even to discuss Crimea, dismissing it as now simply part of the historical record. Then, in the meeting’s second most-interesting moment, he said that Obama had told him clearly in 2014 that if Russia went no further than annexing Crimea, the Ukraine confrontation could be settled. For whatever reason, however, Obama had changed his mind, and we arrived at the current impasse. By the time I responded, near the ninety-minute mark, sensing the meeting coming to its end, I said only that we were so far apart on Ukraine there was no time to address things in detail, so we should simply agree to disagree across the board.
Putin also raised the subject of North Korea, where Russia supported the “action for action” approach the North wanted,
but he basically seemed less than fully interested in the issue. On Iran, he scoffed at our withdrawal from the nuclear deal, wondering, now that the United States had withdrawn, what would happen if Iran withdrew? Israel, he said, could not conduct military action against Iran alone because it didn’t have the resources or capabilities, especially if the Arabs united behind Iran, which was preposterous. I replied that Iran was not in compliance with the deal, noted the connection between Iran and North Korea on the reactor in Syria the Israelis had destroyed in 2007, and said we were carefully watching for evidence the two proliferators were cooperating even now. In any event, reimposing sanctions on Iran had already taken a heavy toll, both domestically and in terms of their international troublemaking. Because Trump was still euphoric about North Korea, I merely explained Xi Jinping’s advice to proceed speedily in our negotiations.
Putin hadn’t raised election meddling, but I certainly did, stressing there was even more interest than before because of the approaching 2018 congressional elections. Every member of Congress running for reelection, and all their challengers, had a direct personal interest in the issue, which they had not fully appreciated in 2016, with the attention on allegations of meddling at the presidential level. I said it was politically toxic for Trump to meet with Putin, but he was doing so to safeguard US national interests regardless of the political consequences, and to see if he could advance the relationship. After a few closing pleasantries, the roughly ninety-minute meeting ended. Putin struck me as totally in control, calm, self-confident, whatever Russia’s domestic economic and political challenges might have been. He was totally knowledgeable on Moscow’s national-security priorities. I was not looking forward to leaving him alone in a room with Trump.