With the Trump administration slipping onto war footing with Iran, there are growing fears inside Washington that John Bolton, the president’s hawkish national-security adviser, is plagiarizing his own Iraq war playbook. “Everyone feels the shadow of 2002–2003: The administration seems determined to find a cause for conflict; allies are aghast; the public seems disengaged,” a former senior U.S. official told me, shortly after The New York Times reported that administration officials had begun drawing up plans to send as many as 120,000 troops to the Middle East. “It’s hard for anyone to fathom why [Donald Trump] would think a war of choice is a good idea, given what he’s said in the past about Iraq and Afghanistan.”
And yet, having outsourced his Iran policy to the architects of America’s forever wars, Trump may be stumbling toward another. Earlier this month, Bolton announced the deployment of a carrier strike group to the region, in order to send a “clear and unmistakable message” that the U.S. was “fully prepared” to retaliate against some unspecified Iranian threat. An administration official now claims the military has detected “a number of preparations for possible attack” on American troops—British authorities are skeptical—and are blaming Tehran for the recent sabotage of four oil tankers in the Persian Gulf. On Wednesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo ordered all “non-emergency U.S. government employees” to leave Iraq, raising fears that some kind of military action is imminent.
It’s unclear whether Trump has been fully briefed on the Bolton-led plan—or, indeed, if any concrete plan exists. Asked on Monday whether he was planning on sending 120,000 troops to the region, the president called the reported proposal “fake news” before apparently endorsing it. “Would I do that? Absolutely. But we have not planned for that,” Trump said. “And if we did that, we’d send a hell of a lot more troops than that.”
Experts worry that Bolton, who has long advocated for regime change in Iran, is trying to engineer a confrontation that would draw his more dovish boss into a military conflict. “To name names, there is a concern that if John Bolton got his way, would he lead the United States into war?” said Cornelius Adebahr, a nonresident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The perception is that John Bolton hasn’t changed. He is the same John Bolton that advocated bombing Iran as little as three years ago.” (“The president has been clear, the United States does not seek military conflict with Iran, and he is open to talks with Iranian leadership,” Garrett Marquis, a National Security Council spokesman, told the Times. “However, Iran’s default option for 40 years has been violence, and we are ready to defend U.S. personnel and interests in the region.”)
Bolton, of course, has a history of abusing U.S. intelligence to justify his foreign-policy goals. Perhaps most notorious was a May 2002 speech at the Heritage Foundation, in which Bolton, then the State Department’s undersecretary for arms-control issues, accused Cuba of developing biological weapons—an assertion American officials at the time said overstated U.S. intelligence, and which Bolton subsequently tried to repeat to Congress. Later, as the Bush administration made the case for invading Iraq, Bolton helped sell the lie that Saddam Hussein was building nuclear weapons. “We saw a pattern of Mr. Bolton trying to manipulate intelligence to justify his views,” former deputy secretary of state Tony Blinken recently told The New Yorker when discussing Bolton’s failure to secure Senate confirmation when he was appointed as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. “If it had happened once, maybe. But it came up multiple times, and always it was the same underlying issue: he would stake out a position, and then, if the intelligence didn’t support it, he would try to exaggerate the intelligence and marginalize the officials who had produced it.”
Suzanne DiMaggio, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, agreed that Bolton is a “repeat offender of intelligence manipulation.” But she fears that the Trump administration’s latest moves—bolstering its military presence in the Middle East, escalating rhetoric—will become a self-fulfilling prophecy, goading Iran into responding in kind, and giving Bolton and other hard-liners the justification they need to launch another war. “No matter what you think is happening, the one thing that we know for sure is that tensions and hostilities are coming to a boiling point,” she said. “And for me, my greatest worry is a military conflict that occurs due to a miscalculation.”
In the event of a miscalculation, DiMaggio fears, “Trump doesn’t have the judgment or the skill needed to manage a conflict before it spirals out of control.” With the Iran nuclear deal, President Barack Obama helped institutionalize a set of incentives for Iran to behave—and for future U.S. administrations to negotiate with Iran’s government in good faith. By withdrawing from that multi-national framework, Trump put the United States at odds with its European allies—which were proponents of keeping the nuclear deal intact—and on a collision course with Iran that was arguably bound to end in conflict.
For Bolton, it may all be by design. “Bolton has figured out how to get his way—in Venezuela, now in Iran, simply moving ahead on what certainly looks like a revival of neocon policy,” the former senior U.S. official told me. “And for whatever reason, Trump is on board or perhaps doesn’t care. Or doesn’t notice.”
