The Atlantic: Despise Bolton, but Read His Book Anyway

And Bolton doesn’t have many friends outside the White House, either. He seems to be doing his best to present himself as a principled whistleblower going head-to-head with a White House trampling his rights. But his welcome within anti-Trump circles has been decidedly frosty. Democratic Representative Mike Quigley, who serves on the House Intelligence Committee, suggested to Politico that anyone who wants to see what Bolton has to say should borrow his book from the library, rather than give the former national security adviser any money. Clicking on any of #JohnBolton’s recent tweets, meanwhile, reveals a cascade of replies calling him a coward and accusing him of selling out his country for book profits. [...]

The best answer is to treat the book—and its author—bloodlessly, as a source of information that needs to be evaluated with due consideration for the source but without an instinct to either valorize or condemn. Bolton has a story to tell. It is very likely a story worth hearing. To absorb it implies no heroism or redemption for the man. It is not an embrace. It is possible to hear his story while maintaining one’s disdain for his behavior. The relationship is transactional. [...]

And what does Bolton get in this transaction? We actually don’t know. Maybe he’s motivated by the money. Maybe he just wants to tell his story. Maybe he craves the attention. (This is a guy, after all, who tried to create a hashtag out of his own name.) That’s really his business. He’s getting something, or he presumably wouldn’t have written the book. The point is that hearing his story need not mean validating or vindicating him.

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The Red Line: Venezuela

Venezuela, home to the largest proven oil reserves in the world was once the jewel of South America, the envy of the Latin world, but now the country sits on the brink of collapse. Venezuela has gone so far now that other nations like China, Russia, and the US have begun circling like hungry vultures, looking to smash apart the nation and divide up the assets. So this week we sit down and ask where will it all go, how did we get here and what is next for this South American titan. Giancarlo Fiorella - (Bellingcat institute) Nick Mutch - (Conflict Journalist) Christopher Sabatini - (Chatham House).

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Politico: Bolton unloads on Trump’s foreign policy behind closed doors

John Bolton, President Donald Trump’s fired national security adviser, harshly criticized Trump’s foreign policy on Wednesday at a private lunch, saying that inviting the Taliban to Camp David sent a “terrible signal” and that it was “disrespectful” to the victims of 9/11 because the Taliban had harbored al Qaeda. [...]

Speaking on an airport tarmac in Los Angeles, Trump introduced his new top foreign policy aide as “highly respected” and hailed their “good chemistry.” The remarks indicated that in O’Brien, Trump sees a more compatible adviser than Bolton, whose disagreements with the president and clashes with other senior officials often spilled into public view.

After the attack in June, Trump was poised to launch a military response against the Iranians — strongly urged by Bolton — but pulled back after Fox News host Tucker Carlson and others warned him that it was a bad idea. [...]

On Venezuela, a focus of his short White House tenure, Bolton claimed there were 20,000 to 25,000 Cuban troops in the South American country. The day they left, he predicted, the Nicholas Maduro regime would fall by midnight.

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VOX: John Bolton left because Trump wouldn’t let him start a war (Sept 10, 2019)

When Bolton joined the administration in April 2018, the worry was that the arch nationalist hawk would convince the war-averse Trump to see the world as he did. Here was a guy who for decades called for bombing North Korea and Iran, exercising unilateral American power around the world, and cutting tethers to international institutions.

Bolton actually had a thought-out worldview that in many ways mirrored Trump’s. The question was if the top aide could channel the president’s instincts into actions that he has long wanted an administration to embrace. [...]

He has certainly threatened conflict before, going so far as to risk nuclear war with North Korea to persuade Kim Jong Un to come the negotiating table (remember “fire and fury?”). And he’s more willing to use military force than Obama, twice bombing Syria and escalating airstrikes on ISIS and other terrorists worldwide. He’s even continued and augmented US support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen.

Still, Trump has walked back every chance he’s had to escalate to the highest level tensions with adversaries. That was always going to put Trump’s “America First” in conflict with Bolton’s “America Everywhere.”

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Politico: Trump’s better deal with Iran looks a lot like Obama’s

At times, analysts and former officials say, it sounds like Trump wants to strike a deal that essentially mirrors the agreement that his White House predecessor inked — even if he’d never be willing to admit it. Iranian officials seem willing to egg him on, saying they’ll talk so long as Trump lifts the sanctions he’s imposed on them and returns to the 2015 Iran deal. And as European ministers warn that the existing deal is nearly extinct, Trump may feel like he is backed into a corner and running out of options. [...]

He’s said he’s “not looking for war,” wants to talk to Iran without preconditions and isn’t interested in regime change. He called off a military strike on Iran over its downing of an unmanned U.S. drone, overriding the advice of several top aides. His main public demand is that Iran not build nuclear weapons. In return, Trump has offered to help revive Iran’s sanctions-battered economy. [...]

Several European officials express astonishment at the audacity of the Trump administration demanding that Iran adhere to the deal when the U.S. the one who breached the agreement in the first place. Some said they were not surprised that Iran may have taken actions in the Persian Gulf as payback for the U.S. abandonment of the deal. 

Europeans “know that the original sin causing the current escalation in the Gulf is the U.S. violation of the Iran nuclear deal,” said Nathalie Tocci, an adviser to European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini. “At the same time, they are terribly concerned about the escalation and the threat it poses to the Middle East and to Europe itself.” [...]

Perhaps sensing this, Trump on Tuesday went out of his way to note that he didn’t want to oust the government in Tehran. “We're not looking, by the way, for regime change because some people say [we are] looking for regime change,” he said. “We're not looking for regime change.”

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The Atlantic: The Day Denuclearization Died

There were many remarkable aspects of the U.S. president’s surprise meeting with the North Korean leader at the border, but perhaps the most notable was the absence of the issue that brought Trump and Kim together in the first place one year ago: Pyongyang’s development of a nuclear-weapons arsenal that directly threatens the United States and its allies, and which Trump’s advisers once vowed to remove by 2021. [...]

As Adam Mount of the Federation of American Scientists pointed out, Trump repeatedly described the personal connection he has established with North Korea’s dictator not as a means to denuclearization, but as an end in itself. “The relationship that we’ve developed has meant so much to so many people,” Trump says in a highlight reel from his trip to the demilitarized zone that contains no reference to Kim’s nuclear program. [...]

Theatrics aside, the third Trump-Kim meeting was the product of deflated ambition. Trump and Kim initially agreed on something general, then disagreed on the specifics, and now were essentially agreeing to disagree. While the first summit, in Singapore, yielded a vague North Korean commitment in writing to “work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula,” and the second summit, in Vietnam, ended with no agreement when U.S. demands for denuclearization and North Korean demands for sanctions relief couldn’t be reconciled, the third appears to have featured little substantive discussion altogether. [...]

Yesterday, National Security Adviser John Bolton denied a New York Times report that the Trump administration is now aiming to verifiably freeze North Korea’s production of nuclear-weapons material, and thus prevent Kim’s arsenal from becoming more dangerous than it already is. (Bolton specifically said the National Security Council is not working on such a plan, leaving open the possibility that the effort could be under way elsewhere in the government.)

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The Atlantic: Trump Invites Kim Jong Un to Yet Another Summit

All the buildup and made-for-TV drama, however, has distracted from one salient fact: North Korea has not given up its nuclear weapons. In fact, it likely has more nuclear-weapons material now than it did a year ago, when Trump became the first American leader to meet with his North Korean counterpart. What the fevered anticipation does underscore is that progress on North Korean denuclearization rests largely on Trump and Kim’s personal relationship—even though this dependence contributed to the collapse of their second summit, in Vietnam last February.  [...]

As recently as this month, Trump-administration officials such as National Security Adviser John Bolton and Defense Intelligence Agency Director Robert Ashley Jr. have stated that North Korea hasn’t yet decided to give up its nuclear weapons. Last week, Steve Biegun, Trump’s special representative for North Korea, acknowledged that the two sides still haven’t agreed on a common definition of the “complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula,” which Kim committed to work toward during the first summit, in Singapore. “We’ll never get to our destination if we don’t know where we’re going,” Biegun said during a conference at the Atlantic Council. “The progress has not been as much as we would have liked.” [...]

So far, however, this problematic history appears to be repeating itself. After the humiliation in Vietnam, the North Koreans shifted into “silence mode” and a “severe [internal policy] review,” one senior South Korean official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive negotiations, told me in April. North Korean officials and state media denounced Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for sabotaging the nuclear talks with their hard-line positions, implying that they considered Trump (and perhaps Biegun, who has thus far escaped Pyongyang’s wrath) as their only viable American interlocutors. Biegun reportedly received no answer to a letter he wrote to Choe Son Hui—a savvy North Korean diplomat with extensive experience dealing with Americans—requesting a resumption of working-level talks. Rumors have swirled about Kim purging members of his negotiating team, and it’s not even clear at this point who Biegun’s counterparts are.

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The Guardian: The Trump administration is trying to make war with Iran inevitable

Like the recent oil tanker attacks in the Gulf of Oman, the Trump administration has framed the drone incident as if it occurred in a vacuum – implying that the Iranians are launching these (alleged) attacks without provocation, and providing an aura of legitimacy to a possible American military response. [...]

The current Iran predicament is the result of a years-long campaign by the same people who pushed for invasion of Iraq. Instead of learning from the Iraq debacle, they’ve decided that any means, including a potentially catastrophic war with Iran, are justified in order to achieve regime change in Tehran. Their public arguments for escalation with Iran have generally been cloaked as criticism of Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear agreement, by disingenuously calling for what they know is an unachievable “better deal”. [...]

But instead of capitalizing on these gains, the Trump administration threw it all away to take a different path. Slowly, over time, Trump officials ramped up their bellicose rhetoric toward Iran; falsely accused Tehran of coordinating with al-Qaida (presumably to invoke the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force as legal justification for a possible attack); pulled out of the JCPOA; and imposed sanctions so devastating that the Iranians were almost certain to lash out, whether in the form of the minor skirmishes we’ve seen in recent weeks or rejection of the terms of the 2015 nuclear accord.

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Today in Focus: Is John Bolton trying to drive Trump to war with Iran?

John Bolton, who has been called “the most dangerous man in the world”, was not Donald Trump’s first pick for his national security adviser. But after a series of resignations, he was plucked from a life of Fox News appearances to reprise his career as the foremost military hawk in the US. Now he has his sights set on Iran and has pushed for a buildup of US military assets in the Gulf.

The Guardian’s world affairs editor, Julian Borger, tells Anushka Asthana that as tensions rise, so do the chances of an accidental – or deliberate – escalation towards war. The echoes of the drumbeat to war in Iraq in 2003 are all too apparent, and it was Bolton’s role in that crisis that prompted a Guardian columnist to attempt to make a citizen’s arrest of him in the tranquil surroundings of the Hay literary festival in 2008. George Monbiot describes how he came out second best from that encounter.

Also today: the Guardian has updated its style guidance for journalists writing and talking about the environment. Instead of “climate change” the preferred terms are now “climate emergency, crisis or breakdown” and “global heating” is favoured over “global warming”. The editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner, explains why precision in language is important in reporting on the climate and why the changes have been made now.

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The New York Times: Trump Undercuts Bolton on North Korea and Iran

President Trump was grousing about John R. Bolton, his national security adviser, at his Florida club not long ago. Guests heard the president complaining about the advice he was getting and wondering if Mr. Bolton was taking him down a path he did not want to go. [...]

The disparity was on stark display during Mr. Trump’s four-day visit to Japan that ended Tuesday after he contradicted Mr. Bolton on high-stakes confrontations with both Iran and North Korea. The president declared that, unlike his national security adviser, he was not seeking regime change in Iran and he asserted that, contrary to what Mr. Bolton had said, recent North Korean missile tests did not violate United Nations resolutions. [...]

The president’s supporters, however, said too much was being made of the differences. Mr. Trump has often surrounded himself with advisers who do not agree and encourages the debate, they said. If the disparate messages keep Iran, North Korea and Venezuela uncertain of how far the United States will go, they added, that can work to Mr. Trump’s benefit. [...]

And in some fundamental ways, the two diverge sharply over their approach to the world. Mr. Trump came to office vowing to pull out of overseas wars and has made diplomacy with North Korea a signature initiative. Mr. Bolton has been an advocate of military action and an opponent of negotiations with North Korea.

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The New Yorker: John Bolton on the Warpath

A former American official who worked closely with Bolton suggested that Yale had inspired Bolton’s lifelong contempt for “élites,” whom he regularly lambastes in his writing and on Fox News: “I think John looked around at Yale and said to himself, ‘This is the soft élite. They’ve always had it easy. Mommy and Daddy took care of them. These guys are weak. They’re always looking down on me.’ He has a chip on his shoulder.” His classmates went to hear Muhammad Ali speak about resisting the draft; they argued that the Black Panthers were being unfairly persecuted and inveighed against Richard Nixon. Bolton spent a summer as an intern for Nixon’s Vice-President, Spiro Agnew, whom he later described as “a kind and humorous man, a real Middle American.” (Agnew, after years of corruption allegations, resigned in 1973 and pleaded no contest to tax evasion.) [...]

Bolton’s immersion in the arcana of weapons of mass destruction encouraged an absolutist view. “The first thing he thinks about in the morning is protecting Americans from nuclear weapons,” Sarah Tinsley, who has worked as an aide to Bolton since the eighties, told me. In 2003, as he prepared testimony for an appearance before Congress, he described Syria’s efforts to produce nuclear and biological weapons as an urgent threat—an assessment that intelligence agencies thought was exaggerated. A bitter internal debate ensued; the accusations endangered the Syrian government’s coöperation in hunting suspected terrorists. “We were getting some of our best, if not our best, intelligence on Al Qaeda from Damascus,” Lawrence Wilkerson told me. Richard Armitage, the Deputy Secretary of State, took Bolton aside and “told him to shut up,” Wilkerson said. Before Bolton testified to Congress, much of his language was diluted. Armitage reached out to a team of intelligence officers who vetted public statements made by State Department officials, and asked them to give special scrutiny to Bolton’s. “Nothing Bolton said could leave the building until I O.K.’d it,” Thomas Fingar, who led the team at the time, told me. [...]

In March, 2005, Bush nominated Bolton to be the Ambassador to the United Nations, a move that was widely seen as an expression of contempt for the institution. Bolton had a history of deriding the U.N., once saying that if the headquarters “lost ten stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.” Still, Democrats in the Senate anticipated a routine hearing; they were the minority party and could do little to resist. Tony Blinken, who was the staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told me that the members began to reconsider as they examined Bolton’s work in the State Department. “We saw a pattern of Mr. Bolton trying to manipulate intelligence to justify his views,” Blinken told me. “If it had happened once, maybe. But it came up multiple times, and always it was the same underlying issue: he would stake out a position, and then, if the intelligence didn’t support it, he would try to exaggerate the intelligence and marginalize the officials who had produced it.” After several days of testimony, Senator George Voinovich, a Republican from Ohio, declared, “John Bolton is the poster child of what someone in the diplomatic corps should not be.” [...]

Colleagues from other countries struggled to accommodate him. “On a personal basis, you can joke with him,” the Western diplomat who knows Bolton told me. Working with him was a different story: “Coöperation was possible, but very much on his conditions.” Bolton had spent decades refining an argument that multilateral institutions and international agreements often did more harm than good—that each one represented a loss of American sovereignty. “Bolton has a Hobbesian view of the universe—life is nasty, brutish, and short,” the former American official who worked with Bolton told me. “There are a lot of nasty people out there who want to do us harm. If our country’s interests align with another’s, it’s a fleeting phenomenon, and the moment our interests diverge they will sell us down the river.” Bolton doesn’t ordinarily concern himself with the internal affairs of other nations, or with trying to democratize them, the former official said: “The U.S. has values domestically, but he doesn’t give a shit about the values of others. If it advances your interests to work with another country, then do it.”

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Today in Focus: The Venezuela uprising: the story so far

Juan Guaidó described his attempted uprising last month as the “final phase” of his plan to oust Nicolás Maduro. But after a day of chaos and confusion in which Guaidó’s mentor, Leopoldo López, was sprung from house arrest, the Venezuelan president was still in power and many of the plotters had gone into hiding.

The Guardian’s Latin America correspondent, Tom Phillips, is in Caracas and describes to Anushka Asthana the sense of defiance among supporters of Maduro, and Guaidó’s mood of optimism in an exclusive Guardian interview.

Also today: the Guardian columnist Owen Jones on the headteacher of the public school Stowe, who has claimed Oxbridge is persecuting students from elite backgrounds.

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Vox: How America’s relationship with Turkey fell apart

The US, Sloat added, worries about Turkey’s growing friendship with Russia and acceleration away from democracy. That’s been exacerbated by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, an authoritarian who has dismantled secular liberal politics in favor of Islamist political values, harbors anti-Western views, and has widened the US-Turkey gap. [...]

“This is no longer anything that can accurately be called a strategic partnership,” Lisel Hintz, a Turkey expert at Johns Hopkins University, told me. “I wouldn’t even call Turkey an ally. An ally doesn’t behave the way in which Turkey has been behaving.” [...]

A faction of the Turkish military, claiming to speak for the entire Turkish Armed Forces, aimed to oust Erdoğan in the name of democracy — despite the fact that Erdoğan and his party were democratically elected. But the attempt failed, mainly because large portions of the military sided with their president. [...]

And Erdoğan’s rhetoric during local elections last week stoked anti-American sentiment among his base throughout the campaign. There has long been anti-US feeling within the Turkish government and public — partly because of rampant conspiracy theories about America secretly plotting to crush Turkey, and Washington’s much-disliked Middle East policies — but the autocrat ratcheted up the language to a whole new level.

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The New York Review of Books: Return of the Neocons

Yet exactly this has happened. Today, neoconservatives are riding high once more, in the White House, on Capitol Hill, in the most prominent organs of opinion. The Weekly Standard may have shuttered, but anti-Trump neocons enjoy increasing influence in the center of the Republican and Democratic parties and in publications like The Atlantic and The Washington Post. Others, meanwhile—call them neo-neoconservatives, or post-neoconservatives—are busy making policy in the Trump administration. They’ve gone with Trump for good reason. Although he is repudiating the export of liberal democracy and degrading its practice at home, Trump is also reasserting the American right’s pugnacious antipathy to “globalism.” He is acting as many within the neocon firmament have long favored, positioning the United States against a vicious world and fetishizing brute force in response. [...]

For the dominant strand of neoconservatism, embodied by those who left the Democratic Party in the 1970s and 1980s in order to keep waging the cold war behind Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump’s political ascent offered a unique opportunity, even if it did not look that way at first. Ever since the Iraq War began to lose the American public’s support in 2005, the neocon agenda had proved increasingly bankrupt, out of step with the world and therefore dangerous if imposed upon it. The hallmark of the mainline neoconservatives was their alarm against totalitarianism, originally aimed at the Soviet threat. But their anti-totalitarian ethos had little to offer in the post-totalitarian twenty-first century. After the September 11, 2001, attacks, some neoconservative mainstays, such as Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz and Bill Kristol’s The Weekly Standard, tried to conjure “Islamofascism” into existence. Here was a totalitarian enemy to succeed the Nazis and the Soviets, the idea went—except that numerically small terrorist groups, however threatening and odious, possessed neither the geopolitical strength nor the universalist ideology to sustain the analogy, even among Islamophobes. It was due to their basic intellectual commitments, and not just their particular policy failures, that neoconservatives spent the Obama years on the defensive, carping about Obama’s supposed weakness but unable to put forward a fresh program of their own. [...]

What best explains centrist Democrats’ rapprochement with neoconservatives isn’t an anti-Trump strategy but rather a genuine affinity with their current political objectives and style. Neocons have spent decades reducing politics to an all-encompassing crisis, a Manichean struggle between an imperiled liberal democracy and a pervasive totalitarian menace. Now certain liberals see things in much the same way. Lionizing the neocons indulges these Democrats’ fantasy that respectable Republicans will rise up to sweep Trump and all he stands for onto the ash heap of history. Decent citizens, the tale goes, will recoil at Trump’s profanities and banish his like for good—but only if they are led by the very authorities for whom those citizens have demonstrated deep mistrust. “We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators,” Vice President Dick Cheney claimed in March 2003, days before the first bombs dropped. The Never Trump neocons hold out a similar promise. The question is whether they have any more to offer America than they had to Iraq.

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The New Yorker: How Trump Made War on Angela Merkel and Europe

European leaders now worry that Trump’s illiberal aims go well beyond his insistent demands on Merkel to pay more for nato and stop shipping so many cars to the U.S. “Many European leaders have told me that they are convinced that President Trump is determined to destroy the E.U.,” a former senior U.S. official told me. Trump has begun publicly calling the E.U. a “foe,” and promoting the resurgence of nationalism, which Macron and Merkel see as a direct threat. Trump’s Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, in a recent speech at the German Marshall Fund in Brussels, attacked the United Nations, the E.U., the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, and derided what he called Europe’s flawed vision of multilateralism as “an end to itself.” [...]

The foreign-policy establishment, in both Washington and Berlin, told Merkel and her advisers that Trump was sometimes unpredictable and volatile, but not an existential threat. He was ignorant, but would be constrained by his staff. He didn’t really mean what he said. One veteran of Republican Administrations recommended “strategic patience,” telling a senior German diplomat to ignore the tweets and focus on policy. Other Europeans received similar advice and came to similar conclusions. Rob Malley, a senior Obama adviser on Europe, who now heads the International Crisis Group, said, of the French, “Their view was that you shouldn’t take irreversible steps as the result of a reversible Presidency.” [...]

Russia figured heavily in the dinner conversation at the Adlon: Trump was threatening to abandon the Ukraine policy and embrace Putin. Obama’s lobbying that night to get Merkel to run for a fourth term was, I’ve been told by German sources, critical in her considerations. “I think the Chancellor listened very carefully to what [Obama] said,” a senior German official told me. As Rhodes recounts in his memoir, “The World as It Is,” when Obama left the country, on November 18th, he thought he saw a tear rolling down Merkel’s face as she said goodbye. Obama turned to Rhodes and said, “Angela, she’s all alone.” Two days later, Merkel announced that, because of “insecure times,” she was running again. However, she cautioned those who hoped that she would be a foil for Trump and the Trump-friendly forces throughout Europe: “No person alone, not even the most experienced, can turn things to good in Germany, Europe, and the world, especially not a Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany.” [...]

The irony is that, for all of Trump’s bluster and threats, the Trump Administration’s positions on these issues, aside from the Iran nuclear deal, are consistent with his predecessor’s. Obama also pushed for greater European defense spending, set in motion nato troop increases in Eastern Europe after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and objected to Nord Stream 2. Many German leaders oppose the pipeline project, too, and favor more defense spending. Where Trump is different is in how far he is willing to push his allies to accomplish long-standing American priorities, not to mention his public denunciations, abrupt policy shifts, and willingness to insult his allies. This behavior has thoroughly alienated Germans, who are sharply divided on many issues but united in their dislike of Trump and their resistance to just about anything he champions. The Pew Global Attitudes survey this year found that only ten per cent of Germans had a favorable view of Trump. When Trump “tells the German public on television that you owe me, the German public says, ‘We owe this guy? Don’t pay him a dime,’ ” Wolfgang Ischinger, the former Ambassador, told me. “It makes it harder to agree on anything. It is poisonous for the relationship.”

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The New Yorker: The White House Coverup of the Saudi Coverup of the Jamal Khashoggi Murder

Congress has been outraged over the Administration’s response to the Khashoggi murder, especially Trump’s willingness to give the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, a pass. “I never thought I’d see the day a White House would moonlight as a public relations firm for the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia,” Bob Corker, the Tennessee Republican who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, tweeted recently. On Wednesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defense Secretary James Mattis went to the Hill to explain U.S. policy on Saudi Arabia—in the context of the Khashoggi murder—and U.S. military support propping up the kingdom’s brutal four-year war in Yemen. Moves to punish Saudi Arabia for the murder by curtailing its war have rapidly gained momentum in recent weeks. Mysteriously missing from the briefing, however, was Haspel. [...]

The C.I.A. later issued a statement denying that Haspel had been blocked from the briefing. “The notion that anyone told Director Haspel not to attend today’s briefing is false,” a spokesman, Timothy Barrett, said. The C.I.A. response kind of fudged the issue. The White House may not have told Haspel not to go, but it also didn’t invite her to accompany Pompeo and Mattis, even though she has, by far, the most firsthand intelligence about the Saudi killing. [...]

Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, was furious. He vowed not to vote on any key legislation pushed by the White House—including government-funding bills and judicial nominations—until Haspel fully and candidly briefs Congress on the Khashoggi assassination. “I’m not going to blow past this,” he told reporters. “I’m talking about any key vote. Anything that you need me for to get out of town, I ain’t doing it until we hear from the C.I.A.” His threat is real. A government-funding bill is due to be voted on next week; without its passage, the government could be shut down. [...]

But on Wednesday, Pompeo, who was Haspel’s predecessor at the C.I.A., never even mentioned Khashoggi’s name in his opening remarks. He instead digressed from the event that has galvanized Congress to frame Riyadh’s importance in terms of countering Tehran. “Degrading ties with Saudi Arabia would be a grave mistake for U.S. national security,” he said. U.S. military exports help the kingdom deter regional rivals. He even dismissed the impact of U.S. bombs, warplanes, and intelligence on the Saudis’ four-year war in Yemen, which has produced the world’s worst humanitarian crisis in the twenty-first century. “The suffering in Yemen grieves me,” Pompeo said, “but if the United States of America was not involved in Yemen, it would be a hell of a lot worse.”

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Vox: From “Mad Dog” to “Democrat”: How Defense Secretary Mattis lost Trump

For instance, Mattis reportedly stopped Trump from ordering the assassination of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in April 2017, a move that would have escalated Syria’s brutal civil war and brought the US much deeper into the conflict. He also pushed Trump to stick to a diplomacy-first approach to North Korea rather than defaulting immediately to military options. And according to Trump himself, Mattis convinced him that torture is a bad idea. [...]

Mattis, along with Tillerson, opposed pulling the US out of the Iran deal — something Trump had promised to do on the campaign trail. They argued that Iran, despite its support for terrorism in the region, had not violated the terms of the deal by working toward a nuclear weapon. And for a while, they were successful, forcing Trump to recertify the deal every three months. [...]

Mattis also opposed moving the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, creating a Space Force, and starting a trade war with America’s European allies. But he failed to persuade Trump to see things his way on each of those issues, despite his once-good rapport with the president. [...]

Ultimately, Trump wants to disrupt world affairs while Mattis wants to maintain the status quo. So even though they began their time together speaking several times a day on the phone, their fundamental disagreements seem to have pushed them further and further apart as time went on — and now they rarely talk.

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The New York Review of Books: Why Trump’s Hawks Back the MEK Terrorist Cult

In the 1980s, the MEK served as a private militia fighting for Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War. Today, it has a different paymaster: the group is believed to be funded, in the millions of dollars, by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In Washington, D.C., as in Paris, France, the MEK pays tens of thousands of dollars in speaking fees to US officials. Bolton, in particular, is a long-time paid supporter of the MEK, reportedly receiving as much as $180,000 for his appearances at the group’s events. [...]

The MEK goes back a long way. Founded in the early 1960s, it was the first opposition group to take up arms against the repressive regime of the Shah. Its ideology was based on a blend of Marxism and Islamism, and the group enjoyed widespread support inside Iran in the 1970s. But a series of missteps saw its popularity dramatically dwindle. After the Shah was deposed, the group’s rivalry with Ayatollah Khomeini came to a head not long after the MEK opposed Khomeini’s decision to release the fifty-two American embassy staff held hostage by Iran, and instead, called for their execution. In fact, only a few years earlier, as part of a campaign targeting the Shah’s regime, the MEK assassinated three US Army colonels and three US contractors, in addition to bombing the facilities of several US companies. [...]

The MEK’s human rights abuses have been well documented by human rights organizations. The MEK leadership has reportedly forced members to make taped confessions of sexual fantasies that are later used against them. In Iraq, disobedient members were routinely put in solitary confinement—in at least one case, for as long as eight years, according to HRW. Other members were tortured to death in front of their kin. As one US official quipped to me in 2011 when the organization was running its ultimately successful multimillion-dollar lobbying campaign to be removed from the State Department’s terrorist list: “Al-Qaeda actually treats its members better than the MEK treats its.”[...]

Al-Qaeda may treat its members better, but rest assured, neither al-Qaeda nor ISIS has ever rented office space in Washington, held fundraisers with lawmakers, or offered US officials speaking fees to appear at their gatherings. But the MEK did this openly for years, despite being on the US government’s terrorist list. The money that Maryam Rajavi (Massoud Rajavi’s wife, who has taken over leadership of the organization since Massoud’s mysterious disappearance in Iraq in 2003) offers to American politicians and the organization’s aggressive advocacy and lobbying only partly explain the group’s freedom of action at the heart of America’s political capital. Certainly, some politicians have likely been duped by the MEK’s shiny image, but Washington’s better-informed hawks are not duped; they simply like what they see, even at the risk of running afoul of federal ethics laws.

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The Atlantic: The Unintended Consequences of Helsinki

Since Trump took office, the U.S. has sanctioned more than 200 Russian individuals and entities, expelled 60 Russian diplomats, closed the Russian consulate in Seattle, approved weapons sales to Ukraine, and significantly increased spending on European defense meant to deter Russia. And despite Trump’s lambasting of European allies for not spending more on defense at last week’s nato summit in Brussels, the U.S. signed the joint nato communique, which condemned Russia for its annexation of Crimea, its alleged nerve-agent attack in the United Kingdom, and other acts of aggression against European countries. In 2017, the U.S. Senate passed legislation that prevents the president from unilaterally removing sanctions on Russia without Congress’s consent. The law also grants a broad mandate to the administration for sanctioning Russian companies and Putin’s cronies. Oddly, the president himself has appointed advisers, most notably Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National-Security Adviser John Bolton, who are known for their hawkish views on Russia.

In stark contrast to the administration’s policies, however, Trump’s own views on Russia don’t seem to have shifted—something Trump made clear in the lead-up to the Helsinki meeting. Trump suggested that he would be open to recognizing Russia’s annexation of Crimea because “everyone there speaks Russian.” He called for Russia to be readmitted to the G7. At a rally in Montana earlier this month, Trump said that Putin is “fine.” There is no shortage of evidence that despite occasional lip service to being tougher on Russia than Obama, Trump’s affinity for Putin in particular has remained unshakeable. Indeed, Trump has likely grown increasingly impatient with the constraints his advisers, Congress, and the unfolding special-counsel investigation have placed on his ability to pursue that elusive U.S.-Russia friendship. He undoubtedly felt frustrated that he was prevented from meeting with Putin earlier in his presidency and instead had to seek out opportunities to talk with Putin one-on-one on the sidelines of other meetings (which he did twice, in Germany and Vietnam). These frustrations likely built up when he went against his advisers and called to congratulate Putin on his sham election victory in March. It was during that call that Trump finally invited Putin for a tete-a-tete and set the wheels in motion for Helsinki. [...]

Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, suggested that the Senate may take up new legislation to address the Russian threat. In January, Senators Marco Rubio and Chris Van Hollen introduced a bill that would require the administration to implement sanctions on Russia within 10 days if Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats determines that the Kremlin has interfered in any future elections. It likely had little chance of amassing enough support before the Helsinki summit, but it’s gaining traction now. And if President Trump was hoping to be able to remove sanctions on Russia, he has achieved the opposite: The bill would require even harsher sanctions on Russia’s economy, and it would be up to Coats, who has reaffirmed that Russia is actively carrying out influence operations ahead of the fall midterms, to make that call. Earlier this month, the Senate also passed, 97–2, a motion to support nato. Some Congressional members are now considering new initiatives that would make it impossible for the U.S. president to pull out of the alliance.

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Social Europe: The End Of Global Britain

Trump’s evident lack of personal chemistry with British Prime Minister Theresa May – and the Anglophobia of his new national security adviser, John Bolton – ensured that this was never going to be the best of times for the United Kingdom. But it also doesn’t help that generations of British foreign-policy hands have regarded themselves as ancient Greeks to America’s Rome. To a Brit like myself, this analogy always seemed too confident. Having lived in America, I suspected that US leaders did not heed the advice of British diplomats nearly as much as those diplomats liked to think. [...]

At the same time, the British government’s all-consuming preoccupation with untying the Gordian knot of Brexit has blinded it to what is happening in the rest of the world. And its blinkered view seems certain to persist. Negotiating the terms of Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union is likely to take years, and the outcome will inevitably have implications for the country’s unity, given the intractable issue of the Northern Irish border. Even if that issue can be sorted out, a campaign in Scotland to link it to the EU rather than to London will continue to command the attention of the government and civil service for the foreseeable future. [...]

A country like India could potentially be a major UK trade partner after Brexit. The problem is that Indians see Britain and Europe as one market. To them, Britain’s quest to adopt its own rules and standards amounts to a frivolous inconvenience. Before expanding trade and investment with Britain, India will most likely pursue a deeper relationship with the EU. Indeed, India never saw Britain as a particular champion of its interests inside the EU.  

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