58 pages • 1 hour read
John BoltonThe Room Where It Happened
John BoltonNonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “The Long March to a West Wing Corner Office”
Having worked in the previous three Republican administrations, Bolton is eager to join the Trump administration after the 2016 election. That said, the former UN ambassador is to loath to take any job other than secretary of state or national security advisor. With Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson installed in the former position and retired general Michael Flynn—soon to be replaced by H. R. McMaster—installed in the latter, Bolton is content to advise Trump in an informal capacity. Of Tillerson, McMaster, and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, Bolton pushes back on the conventional wisdom that these men were the so-called “adults in the room” restraining the president’s worst impulses. Instead, he believes that by working against the president’s opinions on matters like the Iran nuclear deal and the War in Afghanistan, “they fed Trump’s already-suspicious mind-set, making it harder for those who came later to have legitimate policy exchanges with the President” (2).
By April 2018, both the secretary of state and national security advisor positions are vacant, along with a series of other cabinet offices in Trump’s high-turnover White House. Trump elevates CIA Director Mike Pompeo to secretary of state while bringing in Bolton to serve as national security advisor. While Bolton preferred the state department job, that appointment requires Senate confirmation; he admits that the divisive reputation he built during the George W. Bush era would make it difficult to win the approval of the Senate, even with a Republican majority.
Finally, Bolton summarizes the role of the national security advisor as he sees it: to give the president options and opinions on matters of national security, and to ensure whatever the president decides is carried out effectively by relevant bureaucracies.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Cry ‘Havoc!’ and Let Slip the Dogs of War”
On April 7, 2018, two days before Bolton’s start date as national security advisor, the Syrian Army launches a chemical warfare attack against rebel forces in Douma, killing 50 people, some of them civilians. Given the US’s broad policy against the use of chemical weapons by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the Principals Committee of Trump’s National Security Council agree that a US military response is needed.
Just what that response will look like, however, is a matter of debate, particularly between Bolton and the more moderate Mattis. Mattis argues for an attack that is only modestly larger than a similar retaliatory attack the US launched against Syria about a year earlier after the Syrian Army hit civilians with chemical weapons. To Bolton, however, the fact that al-Assad remains emboldened to use chemical weapons is evidence that the original attack failed as a deterrent; for that reason, a larger attack is now in order.
In Mattis, Bolton encounters a savvy bureaucrat who outmaneuvers him at every turn. Ultimately, an exhausted and vaguely bored Trump chooses Mattis’s “low risk” plan. Unsurprisingly to Bolton, 13 months later al-Assad again uses chemical weapons against civilian populations, proving to Bolton that the current strategy of deterrence is a failure. That said, Bolton can tolerate this because he believes Syria is a sideshow to the real threat in the region: Iran.
Chapter 3 Summary: “America Breaks Free”
Following the Syria attack, Bolton’s first major policy objective is to convince Trump to withdraw from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, known colloquially as the Iran nuclear deal. Negotiated under Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama, the Iran nuclear deal eases economic sanctions against Iran, provided that it limits its nuclear activities to peaceful applications rather than weaponry.
Bolton explains why his threat assessment of Iran exceeds that of many colleagues, particularly Mattis. To Bolton, a nuclear Iran is more dangerous than North Korea because of the theological motivations of its Islamic leadership. He also believes that a nuclear Iran will lead to the proliferation of nuclear weapons across the Middle East as they fall into the hands of state and nonstate actors. Finally, he repeatedly characterizes Iran as “the world’s central banker for international terrorism” (66).
In response to the argument that the Iran deal acts as a deterrent to the very things that most concern him about a nuclear Iran, Bolton argues that the deal is effectively unenforceable and therefore of little use. This is consistent with Bolton’s beliefs on most international agreements, including the Paris Accords on climate change. To those who argue that a flawed deal is better than no deal at all, Bolton concludes that bad deals create a semblance that a problem is solved, leading to dangerous complacency.
While Mattis is initially an obstacle to Bolton’s efforts to withdraw from the Iran deal, the defense secretary quickly caves, choosing not to die on this particular hill. By May 8, a mere month after Bolton’s arrival, the United States officially exits the deal.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
Given that the Trump administration has disputed much of the content in The Room Where It Happened, it is worth weighing the arguments for and against the book’s veracity before moving forward. For example, Pompeo—one of the most important figures in the book and an individual who was in many of the same rooms as Bolton—tweeted, “John Bolton is spreading a number of lies, fully-spun half-truths, and outright falsehoods.” (@SecPompeo [Mike Pompeo]. “I’ve not read the book, but from the excerpts…” Twitter, 18 June 2020, 9:22 p.m.) The president himself tweeted that Bolton is “grossly incompetent and a liar.” (@realDonaldTrump [Donald Trump]. “I gave John Bolton…” Twitter, 22 June 2020, 8:34 a.m.)
That Trump officials would fight back against claims that paint the administration in a largely negative light is unsurprising. It should also be pointed out that in “he said, he said” situations like this, many fairly believe that Trump long ago ceded the benefit of the doubt, thanks to his record of public deceit. According to The Washington Post and other commentators, Trump is responsible for making over 20,000 false or misleading claims since the start of his presidency. (Kessler, Glenn, Salvador Rizzo, and Meg Kelly. “Trump has made more than 20,000 false or misleading claims.” The Washington Post, 13 July 2020.)
Yet foreign officials outside the administration have also called Bolton’s recollection of events into question. Chung Eui-yong, Bolton’s South Korean counterpart who appears at numerous points in the narrative, said in a statement, “[The book] does not reflect accurate facts and also distorts a large portion of facts considerably.” (McGraw, Meredith. “Trump’s response to Bolton: No, you’re the threat.” Politico, 23 June 2020.)
On the other hand, most of the quotes Bolton directly or indirectly attributes to Trump are consistent with attitudes Trump professes in public. They are also consistent with the public recollections of other individuals who served under Trump, particularly Mattis and John Kelly. Granted, at this point in the book Bolton is not yet disillusioned with Trump, so there are few controversial attributions to unpack. Later, as Bolton comes to see Trump as a threat to national security, his claims grow far more contentious.
Ultimately, Bolton’s recollections of private conversations simply cannot be verified with absolute certainty. Moreover, the extent to which readers believe him will likely be colored by their personal political beliefs. By contrast, readers can make more empirical assessments of Bolton’s arguments when it comes to various geopolitical conflicts and agreements. This becomes clear when Bolton recounts the first month of his tenure as national security advisor, during which he successfully persuades Trump to abandon the Iran nuclear deal. Bolton’s broad animus toward international agreements aside, he views Iran’s noncompliance with the deal as a given, despite the fact that both the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the US State Department have repeatedly certified Iran’s compliance in the months and years prior to Bolton’s arrival. (Kruzel, John. “Is Iran complying with the nuclear deal? For the most part, yes.” Politifact, 14 June 2017.) In fact, Iran only threatened noncompliance after the US’s withdrawal, calling into question the logic of Bolton’s steadfast efforts to extricate the United States from the deal. However, Bolton contends that because the deal is “unverifiable,” IAEA compliance reports are effectively meaningless. He further concludes that Iran must be violating the deal because of its record as “the world’s central banker of international terrorism” (66). This logic may or may not be persuasive to readers, but in any case it seems to disregard at least some of the facts on the ground in favor of Bolton’s preferred narrative of geopolitics, which places Iran at the center of virtually all threats against the United States.
In the fight over withdrawing from the Iran deal, Bolton also offers some of the earliest glimmers of the book’s central thesis: that Trump’s foreign policy is dictated by what benefits him politically rather than what benefits the nation. Bolton suggests that Trump’s antipathy toward the Iran deal has less to do with the substance of the deal and more to do with the president’s electoral branding of himself as a rebuke to Obama-era politics. In discussing the deal with French President Emmanuel Macron, Trump says, “[Secretary of State John] Kerry made a bad deal. I’m not saying what I’m going to do, but if I end the deal, I’m open to making a new deal” (69). Throughout the book Trump’s eagerness to strike substance-free deals that nevertheless play well in domestic press is a guiding principle behind his foreign policy, according to Bolton. Such a deal would fly in the face of Bolton’s contention—implicit here but explicit later in the book—that the only solution to Iran’s nuclear threat is regime change. Yet Bolton seems to bank on either Trump’s inability to strike a new deal or his fading interest in Iran once the United States withdraws from the deal. Thus, Trump’s reason for leaving the deal doesn’t matter to Bolton so long as the president does it. This too is consistent with other foreign policy “successes” under Bolton’s watch.
This highlights one other point worth scrutinizing in Bolton’s book. Early on, Bolton denigrates what he calls the “axis of adults”—namely, Tillerson, McMaster, and Mattis—who with varying degrees of bureaucratic savvy are said to have manipulated Trump to embrace their own agendas that run counter to the president’s. Bolton situates himself outside this group, chiefly because he and the president are of the same mind regarding withdrawal from the Iran deal. Yet on virtually every other natural security issue going forward—North Korea, Afghanistan, Syria, Ukraine, and even Iran, aside from the nuclear deal—Trump and Bolton are miles apart. This doesn’t dissuade Bolton from pushing Trump to act on his own agenda—quite the contrary, as is seen in later chapters. From Bolton’s perspective, it often appears that what most designates a Trump official as a member of the dreaded “axis of adults” is that they disagree with John Bolton. It is unclear whether this irony dawns on Bolton. Whether or not it does, his journey to becoming one of the “adults in the room,” for whom he holds so much animosity, comprises his dominant character arc.
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