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Dysfunctions Last Updated: Jun 22, 2018 - 10:01:46 AM


“I Don’t Expect Bolton to Last Much Longer”: How Mike Pompeo Won the Trump-Kim Summit
By Abigail Tracy, Vanity Fair, June 18, 2018
Jun 21, 2018 - 10:16:14 AM

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After the crucible of the Trump-Kim summit, it seems clear that Pompeo has been elevated, and Bolton diminished, by the president’s sudden love affair with Pyongyang. But Pompeo will also be the first to fall “if this thing goes to shit.”

 

In the span of 10 dramatic days in March, President Donald Trump fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, and replaced them with C.I.A. Director Mike Pompeo and infamous Bush official John Bolton, respectively, setting up his White House for a titanic clash of martial personalities. Both Pompeo and Bolton are hardliners, though with distinctly different office politics. Bolton, despite his avuncular mustachioed appearance, is an unrepentant champion of foreign intervention who has advocated violent regime change in Tehran and Pyongyang. Pompeo, a former Army officer, also sees diplomacy as bloodsport. When he first met with Kim Jong Un in North Korea in April, a former Pompeo staffer told me, the North Korean dictator immediately challenged Pompeo, who previously suggested North Koreans “would love to see [Kim] go.” But Pompeo didn’t flinch. The C.I.A. director joked that he was still trying to kill him, this former staffer said, and both men laughed.

The near simultaneous addition of Bolton and Pompeo was expected to create conflict in a White House where membership in Trump’s inner circle is limited by backstabbing and mutual distrust between participants. “There has always been institutional tension between the national security adviser and the Cabinet,” Lawrence Wilkerson, a former Army colonel who served in the second Bush administration alongside Bolton, told me—a dynamic he suggested would lead to both men ultimately falling out of Trump’s favor. “I’ve said several times to people, some of my colleagues, I don’t expect Bolton to last much longer—or Pompeo, for that matter, to last much longer than Tillerson or McMaster.” Other sources previously told me that Bolton’s physical proximity to the president in the West Wing gives him an edge over Pompeo. “The national security adviser has a built in advantage,” a former senior N.S.C. official who served in multiple administrations told me recently. “They see the president every day—and sometimes multiple times every day—so they will always have an advantage, in that their voice will be the one heard first, last, and most frequently.” (Pompeo has dismissed reports of tensions between him and Bolton as “unfounded” and a “complete joke.”)

After the crucible of the Trump-Kim summit, however, it seems clear that Bolton has been diminished, and Pompeo empowered, by the president’s sudden love affair with Pyongyang. The photo op almost didn’t happen, after all, following Bolton’s ill-advised remark about North Korea adhering to the “Libya model”—a reference that North Korean officials took as a threat. (Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi was famously run out of power and executed in the streets after agreeing to dismantle his weapons program—a fate that Kim is particularly sensitive to avoid.) North Korean officials responded angrily, characterizing the comparison as “absurd” and “awfully sinister,” and Bolton was seemingly benched. Though he ultimately attended the summit in Singapore, Bolton’s absence from an Oval Office meeting between Trump and a top North Korean official, Kim Yong Chol, days before the meeting on June 12, was particularly noteworthy. “I don't think the North Koreans would’ve requested Bolton not to be there. That would be very, very diplomatically odd given that they're coming to our house for a meeting, for a meeting on our turf,” a current administration official told me, suggesting that Bolton’s absence was deliberate. “I think that was more of a Pompeo move to try to keep things positive. But that certainly is also a power play in and of itself, right? Because if [Bolton] is not in the room, he doesn’t know what happened, he has to hear from Pompeo through his lens.”

Bolton’s defenders say that his job is to implement policy, not to set it. But among his former colleagues, Bolton’s limited role in the North Korea talks came as a surprise. “It must be galling for him,” a former State Department official told me, reflecting on how Bolton found himself playing second fiddle to Pompeo. “He should be the top dog on this.” Bolton, who has long maintained that North Korea cannot be trusted in any nuclear negotiations, must have been dying to have a bigger role in the talks, this person said. “He would be especially eager to be there because he would be at the top of the list of worrying that Trump would give away the store.” Indeed, Bolton has made no public comment since last week, when Trump promised to suspend joint military exercises with South Korea as part of an agreement to begin talks centered on denuclearization. (The White House dismissed the narrative that Bolton was sidelined. “There is no daylight between the president’s policy and that of the ambassador,” National Security Council spokesman Garrett Marquis said.)

“The devil is always going to be in the details. No one’s going to be surprised if this thing goes to shit.”

Bolton had previously argued, in January, that North Korea was merely “[playing on] the gullibility of American political leaders to make it look like they’re somehow trying to open a channel of communication,” and said Trump should move more troops into the area. In early March, shortly before joining the White House, Bolton insisted that Kim was “lying” about denuclearization. “I think this is potentially a meeting that begins and ends with the president saying, ‘Tell me what you’re going to do to denuclearize,’ and Kim Jong Un saying, ‘Well, we’ll have talks about this and talks about that,’” he told Fox News. “So it could be a long and unproductive meeting, or it could be a short and unproductive meeting.”
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In reality, it was neither: Trump’s meeting with Kim was long and productive, at least from the North Korean perspective. After the summit concluded, Trump announced that Pyongyang had “re-affirmed” its commitment to a denuclearized Korean peninsula and that the U.S. would cease its joint military exercises with South Korea, which he characterized as expensive and “very provocative.” Among foreign-policy experts I spoke with, the summit appeared to be a major win for North Korea based off the joint statement signed by the two leaders. “It is less than any statement that the North Koreans have ever agreed to in the past,” Jeffrey Lewis, the director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at Middlebury, told me last week. “The president continues to say that Kim is giving up his nuclear weapons. Kim continues to refuse to promise that. I don’t know how long they can keep fudging this.”

Pompeo, meanwhile, gave the president what he really wanted out of the summit—a “photo op,” as a former high-ranking State Department official told me, fit for a “reality-TV president.” He laid the ground work for the meeting, making two trips to Pyongyang in the weeks leading up to the event, which Trump hyped like a pay-per-view prize fight. And all along, he played the role with aplomb—straight out of central casting, as the president likes to say. “He is a total wonk on the issues. He’s brilliant and terrifying at the same time, which I think bodes well for the negotiations,” the former congressional aide to Pompeo told me. “I mean, not terrifying, but he is a big scary Italian guy if he’s ever mad. Not to say he’s got a bad temper or anything, but, you know, he's a formidable presence.” With his Harvard law degree and history as an Army officer, Pompeo got to be swashbuckling where Bolton was cynical and defeatist. The result is that Pompeo and Trump’s success is now intertwined, at least in the president’s mind. “He’s the key piece of all the North Korea stuff. He is sort of driving it,” a Republican Senate aide told me. “It shows how much he’s trusted by the president.”

Pompeo’s ascendance comes with the usual attendant risks. As C.I.A. director, Pompeo visited Trump on a near daily basis to deliver the presidential briefing, and he quickly became a favored adviser, cultivating his relationship with the boss behind closed doors. As America’s top diplomat, Pompeo is liable to become an easy scapegoat if the North Korean negotiations go sideways, as many diplomats expect they will. Foreign-policy experts I spoke with have dismissed the joint statement Trump and Kim signed at the summit as flimsy, arguing that it falls well short of past statements between the U.S. and North Korea. “This is a paper-thin agreement” that “does not commit Kim to real compromises and deadlines,” Nicholas Burns, a former U.S. ambassador who served Clinton and both Bush administrations, told me. The Republican Senate aide, speaking on condition of anonymity, was more blunt. “The devil is always going to be in the details,” the aide said. “No one’s going to be surprised if this thing goes to shit. Or there’s a deal, then it gets scuttled once people read the fine print.”

If the negotiations with North Korea fall apart, the blowback from the president is likely to land squarely on Pompeo, a possibility that Bolton—who all but admitted to torpedoing the Bush-era six-party talks in his memoir Surrender Is Not an Option—might be betting on. Bolton-watchers say that his Libya remark was not only an attempt to sabotage the summit, but also to publicly stake out his position on the matter. (Bolton is “very strategic” and “unlikely to say things unless he’s thought it through,” the second senior State Department official, who worked with Bolton under Bush, told me). Should the talks collapse, as many predict they will, given Trump’s erratic and irascible nature, it will be Bolton that the president will turn to for a militant response.

For now, Pompeo seems to have a more intuitive understanding of what makes Trump tick: a desire, much like Kim has, to be taken seriously on the world stage. “He knows how to handle the president, and he knows how to translate things in ways that the president can understand and grasp onto,” the Republican aide told me. But Pompeo’s ability to ingratiate himself with Trump might have an expiration date. One current State Department official, who previously worked the Korea desk, mused that they don’t believe the president will be “particularly loyal” if the nuclear talks go to hell. “If it goes wrong . . . he may look around, implicitly or even possibly explicitly, for people to throw off the boat, to say, ‘Why were these guys misleading me?’ and ‘It wasn’t my fault.’”

If Pompeo appeals to Trump’s ego, Bolton will appeal to his id, should relations with Kim sour. It would be an ironic twist, given Pompeo’s previous life as a strident foreign-policy hawk himself. Under Barack Obama, Pompeo emerged as one of the fiercest critics of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. After the accord was signed, Pompeo flew to Vienna with Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton to investigate a side deal between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency, the international agency tasked with verifying Iranian compliance with the agreement, and was one of 25 House members to vote against a Congressional oversight bill because he argued that it was too weak. Since joining the Trump administration, however, Pompeo has happily shared in his boss’s rose-tinted vision for real-estate developments and fast-food franchises inside the world’s most repressive dictatorship, despite the complete absence of assurances that Kim will keep his word to denuclearize. When a reporter asked Pompeo why the joint statement with North Korea did not include “complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization” language, the secretary of state denounced the question as “ridiculous” and “frankly, ludicrous.”

Critics of Trump’s approach in North Korea expect a reckoning. “The idea that you could criticize the [Iran deal] for not being strong enough and then applaud a meaningless piece of paper just defies credulity,” a Democratic Senate aide said of Pompeo’s apparent hypocrisy. “But this is the Republican Party in 2018.”


Source:Ocnus.net 2018

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