John Bolton was Trump’s National Security Adviser in his first term, one of four that the president appointed. He lasted from April 2018 to September 2019 when he got fired. Bolton has subsequently become one of Trump’s most persistent and vociferous critics in the media and he's in Trump’s sights as the raid on his house in the last few weeks showed. Few people know Trump better, or understand foreign affairs better. He is no liberal, and most commentators would have seen him as a foreign policy hawk. I want you to listen to a clip of an interview Bolton gave to Sky News yesterday.
Here is the clip:
As Modi meets Putin in China, John Bolton explains how Trump has undone decades of work trying to woo India to the west, with tariffs and other things
Bolton points out that Trump, single-handedly and with little thought, has “upended” decades worth of efforts by the USA and others to draw India, the world’s largest democracy, into the West’s trade and security sphere, away from Russia and China.
This follows India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi being warmly welcomed by Xi Jinping in Tianjin, China, along with Vladimir Putin. They have been attending the annual Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). It's the first time Modi has been in China since 2018.
The SCO is a 10-member bloc of Eurasian nations, and the summit is also being attended by the leaders of 16 observer or “dialogue partner” nations. Xi personally welcomed Modi, and the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, before the delegates attended a formal reception.
Putin told the Chinese state news agency that the SCO meeting would “consolidate solidarity” among the Eurasian nations and “help shape a fairer multipolar world order”.
China is building its own bloc, in which it is the dominant partner, and has seized the opportunity to attract India, with its fast-growing economy, into the Orient’s answer to the Anglosphere, which has long been our security blanket and at the forefront of a Western drive to spread democracy. It now has a real rival.
Professor Richard Wolff, an emeritus professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, draws a similar conclusion, but goes even further:
For a man who prides himself on his personal relationship with other world leaders, particularly the very worst ones, he has set American foreign policy goals in Asia back by thirty years. The BRICS have been given a boost as the fool in the White House helps America spiral into irrelevance.
Trump initially upset Modi by first applying 25% tariffs and terminating Indian efforts to secure a deal, similar to the one the UK had achieved. Other Asian countries like Korea and Vietnam were given preferential treatment. I assume Modi wasn't prepared to flatter or bribe the famously narcissistic president.
Trump then claimed credit for ending the recent skirmish with Pakistan over the disputed Kashmir border, which apparently infuriated Modi because he had nothing to do with it.
Then, after India refused to stop buying Russian oil, Trump jacked up the 25% tariff to 50%. Nobody likes having their arm twisted, and since Modi didn’t want to be seen capitulating to the Americans, he’s turned to China. The Indian premier was also upset that China, which is a much bigger buyer of Russian oil than India, isn’t being hit by Trump's secondary tariffs.
Trump has effectively driven India into the arms of his country’s two greatest adversaries for no reason at all. Bolton said it might not be irrecoverable. I suppose Modi may be simply using the summit in China to apply pressure on the US. I wouldn't bank on it.
The Chinese navy has grown massively in the last few years and now has more ships than the USA. Slowly but surely, China overtook Europe and the USA in manufacturing and is now doing the same militarily. If Xi Jinping does attempt to annex Taiwan, stopping him is beginning to look impossible.
China, a one-party state with a leader-for-life, is set to become the world’s dominant economic and military power, and Trump is helping them achieve it.
Trump is a complete fool. You can see this in the comments of Susan Gordon, a career civil servant and a former Deputy Director of National Intelligence, who briefed Trump and other previous presidents. She says he came to the job with “no foundational framework to understand what the limits of intelligence were, what the purpose of it was or how we discuss it.”
Let that sink in. Not only did he not know anything, but he had no way of even understanding what he was being told! It should shock and stun, but somehow it doesn't. It simply aligns with what we already know.
He was apparently “the first president to arrive with no framework and a world with massively available information and infinite people offering opinions.” Unfortunately, Trump had no way of assessing which opinions were worth anything and which weren't. He would, as we know, accept a Fox News host's throwaway comment live on air as an absolute fact while rejecting his own professional and well-funded intelligence-gathering machine. In Trumpworld, Putin is an oracle of truth, while the CIA is a hotbed of lefty intellectuals trying to subvert America.
Despite his near-total ignorance, he would challenge the intelligence, saying he didn't believe it!! And whereas the analysts and intelligence officers would focus on political and military matters, Trump was always more interested in trade, economics, and his idea of 'deals.' Trump eventually sacked Ms Gordon. I think he probably now gets briefings that are more to his liking - even if they're wrong.
It's what happens when you elect a moronic grifter as president. In the long run we could all pay a terrible price.
