The departing national security adviser embraced a hawkish strain of Cold War-era Republican foreign policy that the president has largely sidelined
Longtime Republican thinking on national security, which embraces American intervention abroad and is comfortable with military action, just collided with Trumpian thinking on national security, which is dubious of intervention abroad and deeply skeptical of foreign wars.
In a nutshell, that is the story of the abrupt departure of John Bolton as President Trump’s national security adviser Tuesday. Obviously, Mr. Bolton’s departure roils the Trump national-security team once again.
More important, though, the Bolton exit represents something far broader: It underscores a significant turn in Republican national-security philosophy, as least as Mr. Trump envisions it today.
Mr. Bolton is a longstanding figure in a hawkish wing of the Republican party that was prominent, and sometimes dominant, in the party’s national-security thinking from Ronald Reagan’s presidency until Mr. Trump arrived on the scene.
Today, such conservative national-security thinkers, including Mr. Bolton, are deeply skeptical of Russian intentions, doubtful that North Korea will ever shed its nuclear weapons and undaunted by the idea of a military confrontation with Iran. They are champions of staying the course in both Iraq and Afghanistan, sites of long-term troop deployments started under a previous Republican president, George W. Bush.
Mr. Trump doesn’t really share those views. He has long been scornful of the war in Iraq and eager to get American troops out. The president is so anxious to improve relations with Russia that he proposed, just two weeks ago, allowing Moscow back into the club of top industrialized nations. He seems convinced that his friendship with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un is built on an understanding that Pyongyang is, in fact, willing to scrap its nuclear program.
The president was on the verge of striking at Iranian targets this summer, a plan that Mr. Bolton and others in the administration advocated, before pulling back military planes at the last minute. And most recently, Mr. Trump has pursued a deal with the Taliban that would allow for a withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, bringing him into conflict with Mr. Bolton, who favored neither the deal nor a complete withdrawal.
These aren’t just disagreements on a few, random issues but rather represent a significant philosophical debate that has opened up within the president’s party. Whether Mr. Trump has settled that debate for the long run, or merely tilted the balance to his side temporarily, while he is atop the party, is an open question.
There always have been some differences of views among Republicans on such issues, of course, but rarely in recent decades have they been so stark. When Mr. Reagan was running for president in 1980, he pulled into the party a group of leading neoconservative foreign-policy thinkers, such as former United Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, who previously identified as hawkish Democrats. They favored, in particular, a tough, confrontational stance toward the Soviet Union and an activist global role in defending American interests and values.
Those figures fell away from the Democrats because of what they saw as President Jimmy Carter’s insufficiently hard-line policies toward Moscow. They fit nicely into the GOP because of its staunchly anti-Communist views.
Mr. Bolton, who served in the Reagan administration, has in the past rejected the neoconservative label. Still, he is a kind of philosophical descendant of that school of thought. While the Cold War was under way and Republicans could unite in opposition to the obvious Soviet enemy, differences in emphasis were easier to paper over.
Today, the Soviet Union is gone, and the glue that held conservative foreign-policy thinkers together has gone with it. When Mr. Trump ran for president in 2016, he gave loud voice to what had previously been a distinctly minority view in the party: that the U.S. had been too eager to serve as a policeman and hired army around the world. Others in the party, notably Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, had been saying similar things, but not with the same volume and impact Mr. Trump brought to the task.
Mr. Bolton was well aware of a philosophical gap with Mr. Trump before taking the job as national security adviser. Indeed, shortly before taking the post, he wrote an opinion piece for this newspaper laying out the legal and security case for launching a pre-emptive military strike against North Korea to take out its nuclear program. Soon thereafter, Mr. Trump was meeting with North Korea’s Mr. Kim and expressing confidence that he would eliminate his nuclear program.
As a result, the Trump-Bolton alignment was never an entirely comfortable one, and in some ways it’s surprising it lasted almost a year and a half. Mr. Bolton handled the contradictions by telling all who would listen that he understood he was the national security adviser, not the national security decider—a balancing act that worked until this week.
Write to Gerald F. Seib at jerry.seib@wsj.com
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