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The Room Where It Happened
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Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “The Singapore Sling”
As Bolton works to exit the Iran deal, Pompeo negotiates the terms of a summit between Trump and Kim Jong Un, the oppressive Supreme Leader of North Korea and long one of the US’s major adversaries. Bolton senses Trump’s appetite for a monumental denuclearization deal that will play well with voters and define his presidential legacy. This deeply concerns Bolton, who’s watched American presidents since George H. W. Bush attempt to negotiate with North Korea only to make concessions and receive nothing in return. To Bolton, any strategy that doesn’t involve applying maximum pressure toward complete and verifiable denuclearization only benefits North Korea by giving it more time to build up its nuclear capabilities. Nor does Bolton favor the so-called “action for action” approach to North Korea that involves step-by-step tradeoffs; for example, the US might ease one sanction in return for the closing of one nuclear facility. This never works, Bolton argues, because it is too easy for North Korea to simply move nuclear assets around under the guise of closing facilities.
Bolton’s pessimism only grows as he watches Trump succumb to Kim’s transparent attempts to flatter him through warm letters—letters that Bolton characterizes as press statements likely written by a North Korean propaganda clerk. Further complicating matters is that a Trump-Kim relationship—which, to Bolton, looks more and more like a “bromance”—threatens tripartite relations between the US, South Korea, and Japan.
In June 2018 Trump, Bolton, Pompeo, and other members of the US delegation arrive in Singapore for a summit with Kim. From the start, Bolton sees that Trump views the trip as an exercise in publicity, not diplomacy. He knows this because Trump literally tells him, “This is an exercise in publicity” (106). Bolton and Pompeo worry that Trump’s desire to sign even a substance-free deal could lead to dangerous concessions.
Finally, the one-on-one meeting between Trump and Kim arrives, followed by a larger meeting where the two are joined by Bolton, Pompeo, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, and members of Kim’s delegation. Kim immediately launches into flattery, commending Trump for his leadership, which his predecessors lacked. When Kim asks Trump what he thinks of him, Trump gushes. Bolton writes, “[Trump] saw Kim as really smart, quite secretive, a very good person, totally sincere, with a great personality” (109).
Kim goes on to say that while he is committed to complete denuclearization, the hardliners in his party oppose it—a classic negotiating tactic that completely misrepresents the political situation in North Korea. On the topic of US-South Korea exercises, Trump agrees to overrule his generals and suspend operations during the talks, in part because the operations are too expensive. As the vibe of the meeting grows more loose, Trump jokes that while Bolton used to be a hawk on North Korea, Trump turned him into a dove. All of this is mortifying to Bolton.
For a week after the Singapore summit, Trump is in a state of euphoria. As Trump tries his hardest to deliver a Trump-autographed CD of Elton John’s “Rocket Man” to Kim, more glowing letters arrive from North Korea. Bolton and Pompeo do everything in their power to prevent a second meeting from occurring prior to the 2018 midterm elections; otherwise, Bolton figures, who knows what Trump will give away to strike a deal in a dubious effort to boost votes for Republican congressional candidates.
Chapter 5 Summary: “A Tale of Three Cities—Summits in Brussels, London, and Helsinki”
In July 2018 Trump attends three summits: a NATO meeting in Brussels, a bilateral meeting with UK Prime Minister Theresa May, and a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on neutral ground in Helsinki, Finland.
Unlike Trump, Bolton sees great value in the NATO alliance, despite his general aversion to international organizations. While it angers Trump that the US contributes far more militarily than the rest of the alliance, Bolton realizes that the US benefits from this arrangement, adding, “not because we were renting ourselves out to defend Europe, but because defending ‘the West’ was in America’s strategic interest” (133).
So when Trump angrily threatens to leave NATO at the summit, Bolton feels he must rein the president in. Trump ultimately agrees to remain in NATO, but that doesn’t stop him from veering into a long rant at Brussels in the company of other world leaders about all his grievances with the organization.
The meeting with May, meanwhile, occurs largely without incident—at least by Trumpian standards. At first, it seems to Bolton that the Putin meeting in Helsinki will go equally smoothly. Trump’s one-on-one with Putin results in no substantive change in foreign policy, which Bolton—who increasingly views his job as a form of damage control—counts as a victory. Yet during a press conference following the summit, Trump creates a political catastrophe for himself by admitting he trusts Putin’s word over his own intelligence community when it comes to Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
In the face of considerable pushback from intelligence agencies and congressional Republicans, Trump walks back his statement by saying he misspoke at the press conference—a highly uncharacteristic move for a president who rarely apologizes. Nevertheless, Bolton writes, “This was hardly the way to do relations with Russia, and Putin had to be laughing uproariously at what he had gotten away with in Helsinki” (158).
Chapter 6 Summary: “Thwarting Russia”
Along with the Iran deal, another international agreement Bolton wants the US to abandon is the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with Russia. Signed in 1987 by US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, the INF was designed to prevent nuclear war in Europe. Yet today, Bolton writes, the treaty is woefully obsolete, technologically and geopolitically. For example, the treaty only applies to Russia and the US, despite the fact that since 1987, at least six other countries have developed nuclear weapons capability. Moreover, Russia routinely breaks the treaty, according to Bolton.
The US’s withdrawal from the treaty should have been fairly straightforward. Russia was even prepared to mutually withdraw from the treaty, which Bolton expects Trump will favor, given the president’s efforts to maintain strong relations between the two countries. Yet Trump is so averse to mutual withdrawal that he preemptively announces the US’s plans to withdrawal at a Nevada campaign rally. Even Pompeo, who rarely offers explicit criticism of the president, calls the move “horrific.”
Finally, Bolton seeks to make real progress to stop Russia and other foreign countries from meddling with US elections. While the mixed messaging between Trump and the rest of his administration on Russian meddling persists, Bolton claims there was far less election interference in 2018 than in 2016.
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
Trump’s approach toward foreign policy begins to truly take shape. In Bolton’s telling at least, there seem to be three main pillars of Trump’s foreign policy. The first is a persistent tendency to elevate his personal interest over the national interest. Trump openly admits that the Singapore summit is a publicity stunt designed either to strike a historic deal that will play well in the press, or to create an opportunity in which Trump walks out of the meeting with Kim to appear tough. The second scenario is the one Bolton prefers, highlighting once again how the author’s and the president’s goals may occasionally align but rarely for the same reason. From Bolton’s perspective, there is little if any ideology driving Trump’s decision-making, aside from an allegiance to his personal interests.
The second pillar is a weakness for flattery, especially when it comes from global authoritarians. This arises on two separate occasions in these chapters. The first surrounds the Singapore summit, when an angry Trump who once vowed to rain “fire and fury” on Kim is quickly soothed by a fawning letter from the Supreme Leader, the substance of which appears to center solely on how great Donald Trump is. Kim continues his charm offensive in person, complimenting the president on his leadership skills and easily gaining the advantage in the talks. What’s most striking is how easily and transparently Kim uses flattery and compliments to put himself in a strong negotiating position with Trump. If Bolton’s recollections are to be trusted, this says less about Kim’s skill as a negotiator and more about Trump’s weakness for validation from despots. This dynamic also emerges in Trump’s relationship with Putin. While Bolton is not in the Trump-Putin bilateral meeting, it is not difficult for him to imagine how Putin convinced Trump to publicly imply that he trusts Putin more than the US intelligence community.
The third pillar is a rash impulsiveness which Trump displays at the NATO meeting in Brussels. In Bolton’s telling, Trump is on the verge of withdrawing from NATO, in part because he wants to “do something historic” (142). It speaks to the importance of NATO in deterring global conflict that even Bolton, who never met an international agreement he didn’t want to tear up, is mortified by the prospect and forced to walk Trump off the ledge. Although Bolton never uses this word, these three foreign policy pillars can be effectively collapsed into one pillar: narcissism.
On the topic of NATO, Bolton also explores what he views as the “end of history” myth. This theory is credited to American political scientist Francis Fukuyama, who in 1992 wrote that the end of the Cold War marked the end of history as we know it. By that, he meant that the Cold War victory of the US and Western Europe constituted “the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” (Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press. 1992.) With the Soviets defeated, the United States and Europe redirected military spending into domestic social welfare programs, which Bolton calls the “peace dividend.” The key difference, he writes, between the US and its NATO allies in Europe is that European countries still buy into this theory. Bolton continues: “This ‘peace dividend’ illusion never ended in much of Europe, but it ended in America with the September 11 mass murders in New York and Washington by Islamicist terrorists” (133).
While Bolton doesn’t spend much time unpacking his belief system in the book, these passages reveal the precepts undergirding his worldview. Thanks to the September 11 attacks, he continues to view the role of America through a Cold War-era lens that paints the US as the defender of Western values against foreign adversaries. Yet while the threat of global terrorism is very real, one wonders if individuals like Bolton are pathologically incapable of viewing global affairs within a nonadversarial framework. As the saying goes: To a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
As with many of Bolton’s more disturbing accounts, the incidents central to these chapters take place in private meetings with a very small number of people and are therefore difficult to verify. In an effort to evaluate the veracity of Bolton’s particularly harsh depictions of Trump, it is worth examining whether the private behavior the author alleges is consistent with the president’s public behavior. For example, Trump’s willingness to prioritize his personal interest over the national interest is well documented. He routinely welcomes election-meddling from foreign adversaries, both generally and with regard to specific countries, if he believes the interference will benefit him electorally. For example, in June 2019—a month before the president’s infamous Ukraine call during which he leveraged military assistance to secure an advantage in the upcoming election—Trump told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos that he wouldn’t call the FBI if a foreign adversary offered dirt on his opponent. (“ABC News’ Oval Office interview with President Trump.” ABC News, 13 June 2019.)
On the matter of Trump’s affinity for strongmen, the opinions Trump shares in public reflect a fairly clear preference for authoritarians over more democratically aligned leaders. When looking at Trump’s Twitter feed or at interview transcripts with him, it is far more common to see Trump lavish praise on the likes of Vladimir Putin, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, and Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman than, say, Germany’s Angela Merkel or Canada’s Justin Trudeau. Meanwhile, much of Trump’s so-called “bromance” with Kim took place in plain sight over Twitter, in press conferences, and at rallies. Bolton’s retelling of the disastrous Kim meeting squares well with what Trump told a crowd of supporters at a 2018 rally: “[Kim] wrote me beautiful letters, and they’re great letters. We fell in love.” (Rucker, Philip, and Josh Dawsey. “‘We fell in love’: Trump and Kim shower praise, stroke egos on path to nuclear negotiations.” The Washington Post, 25 Feb. 2019.)
Evaluating Trump’s impulsiveness is more of a judgment call that cannot easily be made without living inside the president’s head. Some supporters maintain that Trump merely feigns impulsivity as part of an elaborate “three-dimensional chess match” with his opponents. Yet at the very least, Trump has made a series of decisions—like announcing a troop withdrawal from Syria and canceling a last-minute retaliatory strike on Iran—that took his advisors by surprise, suggesting an impulsive streak. In future chapters Bolton expounds upon these incidents in greater detail. The main takeaway is that Bolton’s depiction of Trump, though incendiary, is at the very least highly plausible, given what the president does when the world is watching.
Finally, these chapters bring Bolton closer in spirit to the “axis of adults” he decries in later chapters. The author actively works against Trump’s agenda on matters related to North Korea and NATO in a trend that only intensifies as the narrative progresses. Bolton might reply by saying he never actively disobeyed a presidential order, yet the same appears to be true of Tillerson, McMaster, and Mattis. Alternatively, Bolton might reiterate the argument made earlier in the book that when he arrived, the well was already poisoned by early appointees’ attempts to rein Trump in, thus feeding his paranoia. Needless to say, by this point in the book, the chief difference between Bolton and the “adult” Mattis is their threat assessment of foreign adversaries, not their approach toward managing Trump and mitigating the consequences of his actions.
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