A major international crisis is “much more likely” in Donald Trump’s second term given the president-elect’s “inability to focus” on foreign policy, a former US ambassador to the United Nations (UN) has warned.
John Bolton, who at 17 months was Trump’s longest serving national security adviser, delivered a scathing critique of his lack of knowledge, interest in facts or coherent strategy. He described Trump’s decision-making as driven by personal relationships and “neuron flashes” rather than a deep understanding of national interests.
Bolton also dismissed Trump’s claims during this year’s election campaign that only he could prevent a third world war while bringing a swift end to the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine.
“It’s typical Trump: it’s all braggadocio,” Bolton told the Guardian. “The world is more dangerous than when he was president before. The only real crisis we had was Covid, which is a long term crisis and not against a particular foreign power but against a pandemic.
“But the risk of an international crisis of the 19th century variety is much more likely in a second Trump term. Given Trump’s inability to focus on coherent decision making, I’m very worried about about how that might look.”
Bolton, 76, is a longtime foreign policy hardliner who supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq and has called for US military action against Iran, North Korea and other countries over their attempts to build or procure nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.
He was George W Bush’s UN ambassador for 16 months after serving as a state department arms negotiator and in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush. Bolton was Trump’s national security adviser from April 2018 to September 2019.
Bolton recalled: “What I believed was that, like every American president before him, the weight of the responsibilities, certainly in national security, the gravity of the issues that he was confronting, the consequences of his decisions, would discipline his thinking in a way that would produce serious outcomes.
“It turned out I was wrong. By the time I got there a lot of patterns of behaviour had already been set that were never changed and it could well be, even if I had been there earlier, I couldn’t have affected it. But it was clear pretty soon after I got there that intellectual discipline wasn’t in the Trump vocabulary.”
