John Rossomando
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ConHomeUSA: Have the Republican candidates for president have paid enough attention to foreign policy issues?
Bolton: I don’t think they have. But I think it’s less their fault than te president’s fault for three years now, of not paying enough attention to foreign policy. People talk about the presidency as the “Bully Pulpit”, and there’s no doubt that the president helps set a major part of the presidential debate.
He is so uninterested in international affairs that it’s had an effect across the board among Republicans in Congress and now at the presidential level. So I don’t see it as much their fault when it comes time for them to speak out more in the debates. And the questions on foreign policy come out in the last half-hour after most people are asleep and after questions about what kind of pizza you like and that sort of thing.
The opportunities for the candidates to state their positions are reduced, and it feeds the impression that national security is not that important. I happen to think that’s a big mistake because I think there’s a very strong feeling, especially among Republicans, about America’s place in the world and of having a president who stands up for America and who isn’t apologizing for America … unlike Obama who is content with American decline.
I think that a candidate who does that is going to be tapping into a very big well of emotional concerns that would be very helpful politically.
ConHomeUSA: Some in the Republican Party, especially some in the tea parties, like Congressman Ron Paul think we should become more isolationist and more inwardly focused as a country? Do you think the Republican Party resist the impulse to become more inward-looking and isolationist?
Bolton: There are some elements like Congressman Paul who believe that, but even among the tea party, some of the very libertarian tea party people are also great American patriots who believe in peace through strength. They understand the connection between the domestic economy and national security.
The Ron Pauls get a lot of attention, and it is a voice within the party. But I don’t think it’s close to being anything like a predominate voice or even a very strong voice.
I think most Americans, most Republicans especially, take a long view. They understand that the president’s gotta be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. Obviously cutting the role of federal regulation and federal spending, taxing and the like to allow the economy to recover is critical, but the president also has to be alert to the threats we face internationally.
Look at the instability in the Middle East and the effect it has on gasoline prices that every American sees every week when they go to fill their car up.
ConHomeUSA: Do the looming budget cuts in the Defense Department concern you?
Bolton: I am very worried about the cuts that Obama has already imposed and the cuts that are in the works with the first round of the debt ceiling legislation. And I am even more worried the massive cuts that would come from the trigger mechanism if the supercommittee doesn’t reach agreement.
I have to say I’m very pessimistic about the prospects for the supercommittee reaching agreement, and I am very worried about the potential impact of the trigger mechanism. It’s something that I don’t think we fully understood when the debt ceiling deal was being cut, and the Democrats have found a way to put us unbelievably given the importance of the issue … in an unpleasant place of choosing between higher taxes and lower defense expenditures.
Neither side of that equation is something that we conservatives want to see, so we need to find a way, either in the joint committee or otherwise, to put the onus on the Democrats and let them make the tough choice.
ConHomeUSA: What message will they send to China, the Islamist radicals, and others that want to do us harm?
Bolton: I think it sends the message of continued American decline. They can see it in the president already. They can see it in the fact he’s weak and indecisive.
They see these defense cuts and you add lack of capacity to weakness and indecision on the part of the president, and it is just going to get our adversaries to challenge us even more on a whole variety of fronts than they are already.
That’s one reason why this election of 2012 is so critical. It’s not just the future of the country’s economy and the kind of domestic society we are; it’s whether we will be able to protect our interests in the wider world.
ConHomeUSA: Would Abbas and the Palestinians have decided to unilaterally seek U.N. recognition were George W. Bush still in the White House?
Bolton: I would have hoped that President Bush would have done what his father did when we faced a similar problem with the PLO back in 1989 and we threatened to cutoff funding to the U.N. if any U.N. agency admitted the PLO or enhanced its status. That stopped that whole effort dead in its tracks.
But the fact that in this last several weeks where it’s been clear that even the Obama administration was telling the Palestinians, ‘Don’t go ahead with this’. The Palestinians have flat out ignored us.
It shows they don’t think they are going to pay a price. It shows that they think they are dealing with a weak administration, or the administration was sending signals under the radar that actually they think they could live with this resolution.
Either one ought to be unacceptable. It’s not just an issue for Jewish-Americans. It should be an issue for all Americans given the support that Israel has on a bipartisan basis across our population.
How will this move affect American standing in the world, especially if the Palestinians find enough votes in the General Assembly to make a statement in favor of Palestinian independence?
Although our veto will stop it. It will show incompetence and weakness on the part of the administration, and all that does is to incentivize people who don’t have our best interests at heart to try and advance their own agendas, which is exactly what I think is going to happen now.
ConHomeUSA: Do you feel your assessment that the Arab spring revolutions would bring about an advancement of Islamist radicalism in the Middle East has been vindicated by developments over the past nine months?
Bolton: I don’t see much that’s encouraging on the Arab spring front in the Middle East. I think things are going in the wrong direction, and I don’t think that the issue is resolved one way or another.
But it doesn’t look good, really, since December when this began. We’re over nine months into it, and some really serious problems still remain. So I’m quite concerned about the direction it’s taking from country by country, and what that means for the U.S. and for our friends in the region and the stability we’ve sought there for a long, long time.
ConHomeUSA: Will the Middle East become an even more dangerous place in the aftermath of the revolutions in Libya, Egypt, and Yemen?
Bolton: Sure there’s a problem there. If you look at Egypt, even the pro-democracy leaders have called for substantial modifications to the Camp David Accords with Israel, which has been the bedrock of our policy there for over 30 years.
And when you see Turkey moving in the wrong direction in terms of its relations with Israel. When you see the uncertainty about what the post-Gaddafi regime will look like in Libya.
Kind of country by country, you have to worry about Israel’s strategic security and what it means, and what might come next. I think it is time for a very active American role to head off these difficulties, but I just don’t see that coming from the administration.
Obama just does not pay attention to international affairs. I think he spends less time on national security than any president since Franklin Roosevelt. I think it has more to do with what his priorities are than what I think this country’s priorities ought to be.
ConHomeUSA: Should the Obama administration do more to support dissidents in places like Syria and Iran?
Bolton: My feeling is that we ought to be pursuing a very active policy of regime change in both Iran and Syria going back to my time during the Bush administration. These are regimes that are not going to change as long as they are in power.
It was foolish of the Obama administration to ever believe that Bashar al-Assad was ever a reformer as they kept saying over and over, and over again.
We can see now how far from the truth that is. We can’t live in a world of illusion, and that is as much as we hoped for the best as a result of the Arab spring, we can’t make policy according to our hopes and aspirations for how it’s going to turn out.
We have to make our policies in a very realistic fashion and base our policies on what’s actually happening, not on what we wish would happen.
ConHomeUSA: Will the Maliki government be able to survive the looming completion of the U.S. pullout from Iraq?
Bolton: I think it’s going to be a new-run thing for them because of the efforts by Iran to assert its influence because of al-Qaida and other groups that want to get back in.
I think it’s potentially very troublesome, and we could lose a lot of what we’ve gained there.
That’s why I thought the whole notion of withdrawal according to a prefixed schedule rather than looking at facts on the ground was a mistake.
And it was a mistake that the Bush administration made as well as the Obama administration.
I think unfortunately we’re now going to pay the price of that mistake.
ConHomeUSA: You have been critical of the Obama administration’s policies on Afghanistan, what ramifications do you see ahead as the U.S. withdraws its troops?
Bolton: We have two strategic goals there. One I think is keeping Afghanistan from falling back under the control of the Taliban and al-Qaida where it can be used as a base for terrorist acts against our friends and allies.
And that’s why we overthrew the Taliban after 9/11.
And second to make sure that the instability in Afghanistan and Pakistan too doesn’t result in Pakistan being taken over by radicals or militant Islamists who then get control of that country’s arsenal of nuclear weapons, which would be an immediate worldwide threat.
So there again, I don’t think withdrawal according to an absolute and arbitrary time schedule rather than the conditions on the ground is sensible from our perspective.
ConHomeUSA: How do you feel the Obama administration has handled Pakistan?
Bolton: More could be done. It’s a difficult line to walk because we are at war with one part of the government of Pakistan at the same time we are trying to cooperate with another part of the government of Pakistan.
It’s probably the most complex relationship with any country we have in the world today.
I think the Obama adminstration’s problem as much as anything has been inconsistency. One year they are doing one thing, and the next year they are doing something else. And I think that is in part because the president phases in and phases out, and that helps contribute to the inconsistency.
ConHomeUSA: What impact has the Obama administration’s foreign policy had on China’s military expansion?
Bolton: I think when they see a weak and indecisive president, they try to take advantage of it, which I think their growing military capacity will give them the opportunity to do.
ConHomeUSA: What impact will this expansion have on the future of American foreign policy?
Bolton: I think we’ve got to be prepared to deal with a China that’s trying to assert its influence beyond East Asia, and certainly I think much of what we are seeing is their thirst for minerals, oil and natural gas, and raw materials they need for their economy.
In one sense that’s not unusual, but if we’re not prepared to deal with it, we’re not just going to see our economic influence, but also our political influence diminished as well.
And I think this administration has no clue what to do about any of that.
ConHomeUSA: What advice would you have for the next Republican administration should President Obama lose re-election in 2012?
Bolton: The precondition for everything else is to get our economy moving again. There’s no disagreement with the focus that people have had on economic issues.
You cannot have a strong defense without a strong domestic economy. So if we don’t get out from under this morass of taxation and regulation, and federal spending, we won’t be able to protect ourselves in the wider world.
But I have great confidence we’ll be able to do that if we get the federal government off its back.
I think we need a president who can address not just the damage of four years of Obama, but we need to be brutally honest here – the last couple of years of the Bush administration did do us internationally and work to correct them.
We need somebody who’s prepared to think in grand strategy terms of how you deal with a rising China.
This might be a peaceful rise of China as some have said, but we need to be prepared for the opposite. And we’re not. Right now we’re not doing either one very effectively.
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