This article appeared in The Hill on February 19, 2018. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
February 19, 2018

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s efforts are far from over, and definitive conclusions about his work must still abide the day. Even so, Friday’s announcement that a federal grand jury in Washington had indicted 13 Russian citizens and three Russian entities for interfering in the 2016 elections and thereafter is highly significant, domestically and internationally. Mueller must still prove his wire fraud, identity fraud and other charges beyond a reasonable doubt, but the indictment alone powerfully reflects a wide-ranging investigation.

Domestically, the political ramifications for Donald Trump are clearly beneficial. After more than a year of public accusations, uninformed speculation and prodigious leaking by members of Congress and the media, the indictment contains no Trump-related allegations of knowing involvement in or support for Moscow’s pernicious activities. Both the indictment itself and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s accompanying press conference describe the Americans manipulated by the Russian saboteurs as “unwitting” or “unknowing.”

Nor does the indictment allege that Russia’s machinations, which began in 2014, well before any announced Republican or Democratic candidates for the presidency, influenced the election’s outcome. Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) previously put Moscow’s social media spending in proper perspective: The known $100,000 of Russian expenditures amounted to a mere 0.005 percent of the approximately $81,000,000 of total social-media outlays by the Clinton and Trump campaigns. Facebook vice president Rob Goldman himself tweeted that the majority of Moscow’s spending occurred after the election.

The safest conclusion based on currently available public information is that Russia did not intend to advantage or disadvantage any particular candidate and that Russia was not “supporting” anyone for president. Instead, its saboteurs sought to sow discord and mistrust among U.S. citizens, undermining our constitutional processes and faith in the integrity of our elections. Advertising or demonstrations for or against Trump or any other candidate were means to the Russian end of corroding public trust, not ends themselves.

Mueller’s indictment, while likely not his last, nonetheless undercuts both ends of the logic chain that many Trump opponents hoped would lead to impeachment. There is, to date, no evidence of collusion, express or implied, nor can it honestly be said that Russia was “pro-Trump.” What Trump rightly feared earlier, based on his political instincts, was that the notion of clandestine Kremlin support for his campaign would morph into the conclusion that his campaign must have colluded with Moscow.

Such cooperation has yet to find anything like real evidence to support it, but the danger of people jumping to that conclusion was both obvious and continuously stoked by anti-Trump media reporting, asserting or implying repeatedly what Russia and Trump were purportedly up to. Typically, the media’s ideological excess is their own worst enemy. They would rather play “gotcha” on Trump’s skepticism of Russian involvement than recognize that their fantasies of bringing down his administration are now undermined.

Accordingly, Mueller has afforded Trump a not-to-be-missed opportunity to pivot from worrying about unfair efforts to tar his campaign with the “collusion” allegation, toward the broader growing danger of Russian subversion. What happened in the 2016 campaign was graver even than the “information warfare” alleged in Friday’s indictment. This is, pure and simple, war against the American idea itself.

Hence, the international ramifications of the special counsel’s indictment: The White House can and should now pivot to the real task ahead, which is dealing strategically and comprehensively with Russia’s global efforts to enhance its influence. Interference in America’s election, much as it necessarily focuses our attention, is only a part of Moscow’s disinformation operations. Russian agents have repeatedly interfered in European elections, although the exact scope remains uncertain.

The Kremlin has conducted cyberwarfare against the Baltic republics, and old-fashioned conventional aggression against Georgia and Ukraine, including annexing Crimea. In the Middle East, during the Obama administration, Russia cemented a de facto alliance with Iran, built and expanded military facilities in Syria, sold weapons to U.S. allies like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and propped up Bashar Assad’s dictatorship in Syria.

Moscow has blatantly violated the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, while rapidly modernizing and expanding its strategic nuclear capability. Heretofore under President Obama, Vladimir Putin hardly had reason to fear that anyone would push back on anything. Finally, because of the overhang of the “Trump collusion” heavy breathing by his political opposition and the media, the Trump administration has neither developed nor deployed a coherent Russia policy.

But it’s never too late to start. Putin’s global aspirations are not friendly to America, and the sooner he knows we know it, the better. It is not enough, however, to file criminal charges against Russian citizens, nor are economic sanctions anywhere near sufficient to prove our displeasure. We need to create structures of deterrence in cyberspace, as we did with nuclear weapons, to prevent future Russian attacks or attacks by others who threaten our interests.

One way to do that is to engage in a retaliatory cyber campaign against Russia. This effort should not be proportional to what we have just experienced. It should be decidedly disproportionate. The lesson we want Russia (or anyone else) to learn is that the costs to them from future cyberattacks against the United States will be so high that they will simply consign all their cyberwarfare plans to their computer memories to gather electronic dust.

In Eastern and Central Europe, the White House needs to expand its efforts to strengthen NATO’s hand by persuading all its members to spend the bare minimum necessary for the alliance’s military resources. At the Munich Security Conference this past weekend, for example, a luncheon discussion on Ukraine produced many solemn pronouncements on Russia’s “violations of the rules-based international order.”

This was music to Moscow’s ears. Let Putin instead hear the rumble of artillery and NATO tank tracks conducting more joint field exercises with Ukraine’s military. That, and much more, will get his attention. An analogous response is warranted in the Middle East, where the White House is already laying a foundation for more robust responses to Russia’s probes. At rare moments in politics, unexpected events produce opportunities which must be seized before they disappear. The Russia indictment is one of them.

This article appeared in The Hill on February 12, 2018. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
February 12, 2018

Appeasing authoritarianism comes in many forms. All of them are ugly. Some are obvious and extremely dangerous, and some are subtle, indicating a mindset portending future danger because of a propensity to ignore reality. Opening the 23rd Winter Olympic Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea, prominent American media outlets displayed the latter appeasement mentality in full measure, becoming stenographers for North Korea’s propaganda machine. Reflecting boundless gullibility, representatives of our free press stepped up to carry Pyongyang’s message.

Virtually North Korea’s entire purpose for participating in these Winter Games was to generate just such reactions. Kim Jong Un’s dictatorship is seeking propaganda advantage of South Korean President Moon Jae In’s “sunshine policy” to make inroads into global public opinion, to split Seoul from Washington and Tokyo in dealing with Pyongyang’s nuclear and ballistic-missile programs, and to distract America and the international community from the imminence of North Korea’s ability to target any spot in the world with nuclear weapons.

By agreeing to a “unified” team marching in Pyeongchang’s opening ceremonies, flying a flag showing an undivided Korean Peninsula, by forming a joint women’s ice-hockey team and by sending a large delegation of North Korean officials and “citizens” to support their athletes, Kim Jong Un played on the naïve and the gullible, of whom unfortunately there are all too many in both America and South Korea. The capstone of Kim’s propaganda campaign was the invitation to President Moon to visit Pyongyang for an inter-Korean summit. Delivered by the North’s nominal top official, Kim Yong Nam, and Kim Yo Jong, sister of the current dictator, the invitation was accepted reflexively.

Most noticeable initially about U.S. press coverage of these carefully programmed developments was the near-uniform lack of historical memory. Because the media either did not know or did not care about this history, the reporting carried the breathless excitement of something “new” that might lead to a diplomatic resolution of North Korea’s nuclear threat.

But Korean athletes have three times before marched as Olympic unified teams (in 2000, 2004 and 2006), under prior South Korean presidents who originated and followed “sunshine policies.” Moreover, there have been two earlier intra-Korean summits, in 2000 and 2007. Neither the unified Olympic teams nor the summits in any way impeded North Korea’s relentless progress toward achieving its goal of deliverable nuclear weapons.

Moreover, diplomatic progress is not possible here because Pyongyang’s purpose is not to “open a dialogue” for the umpteenth time with Seoul, Washington or Tokyo, but to conceal and distract from its menacing activities. Having the media fall for the “rapprochement” line rather than seeing the concealment motivation was precisely Kim’s objective. The U.S. media fully met his expectations. And then some. Vladimir Lenin is often credited with coining the phrase “useful idiots,” but even he would not have predicted the rhapsodizing we have seen.

Take, for example, a report by Morgan Winsor of ABC News describing the cheerleading cadre accompanying North Korea’s athletes: “Clad in coordinated outfits of red with white and blue accents, North Korea’s throng of more than 200 cheerleaders are stealing the spotlight at the 23rd Winter Olympic Games” as they “chant, sway and dance in unison.” I am assuredly not an aesthetics expert, but I saw the cheerleaders as a depressing manifestation of George Orwell’s novel, “1984,” not something that steals spotlights by their “synchronized chants” on behalf of the Korean team. Their “coordinated outfits” didn’t do anything for me either.

National Review editor Rich Lowry had it right when he tweeted to ask why ABC News didn’t realize “that what they are charmed by here is probably as close as you can get to a hideous real-world version of the ‘Handmaid’s Tale?’” Make no mistake, the well-fed visages of the cheerleaders mark them as among North Korea’s most privileged. Of course they perform vigorously. You would too in a society where lack of fealty to the regime is often a death sentence.

Next, enthralled by the combined North-South female hockey team, CNN reporter Aimee Lewis reported as matters of fact that “this women’s team became a tool for rapprochement” and that “not even the wildest optimist could have predicted recent events.” What exactly has happened recently? The joint team lost 8-0 to Switzerland, and many South Koreans resent that several of their female ice-hockey players were displaced by Pyongyang’s athletes. Without any reference to the vanishingly insignificant impact of this precise pattern in three previous Olympics, the real news is the number of reporters with the attention span of fruit flies.

Finally, consider the lionization of Kim Yo Jong, currently under U.S. sanctions for her role heading the ruling party’s Propaganda and Agitation Department. CNN’s Lewis dug into her trove of clichés to call her “the first member of Pyongyang’s ruling dynasty to set foot in the South” since the Korean War. Ruling dynasty? Sort of like the British royal family? There was, in truth, coverage of the brutal, dictatorial ways of the “ruling dynasty.” But reporters and their editors know, as does the North’s propagandists and scammers generally, that what typically matters most is what grabs quick headlines.

CNN wasn’t finished, however. Joe Sterling, Sheena McKenzie and Brian Todd wrote ecstatically that “if ‘diplomatic dance’ were an event at the Winter Olympics, Kim Jong Un’s younger sister would be favored to win gold.” She is the Ivanka Trump of North Korea, they “report,” and “not only a powerful member of Kim Jong Un’s kitchen cabinet, but also a foil to the perception of North Korea as antiquated and militaristic.” Words fail here.

While the media fun was unfolding, Pyeongchang’s Olympics organizers reported that their computers may have been hacked, and they are now investigating. Maybe those cheerleaders have other skills as well. Have reporters done any investigative work to ascertain where North Korea, under so much “pressure” of economic sanctions, found resources for the Olympics? Were they subsidized by South Korea, China or others, as has so often tragically been true, thereby subsidizing the dictatorship?

When P. T. Barnum allegedly said “there’s a sucker born every minute,” he may have been understating the problem. Not that you’d know it from our establishment media.

This article appeared in Pittsburgh Tribune Review on January 14, 2018. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
January 14, 2018

North Korea’s apparently rapid progress last year in both its nuclear-weapons and ballistic-missile programs raises entirely legitimate concerns about U.S. intelligence capabilities. The New York Times recently reported that, as the Obama administration ended, intelligence-community analysts estimated that Pyongyang was over four years away from mastering the complex science and technology necessary to deliver thermonuclear weapons on targets within the continental United States.

Then, seemingly overnight, North Korea was igniting thermonuclear weapons and testing missiles that could hit the lower 48. The Times calls this an intelligence failure, certainly a serious matter. But the real reason was actually much worse.

Evidence in The Times report indicates that President Obama’s team dangerously politicized intelligence gathering and analysis, as senior officials strove to support their preconceived notions of the North’s true progress.

Throughout his presidency, Obama pursued a North Korea policy called “strategic patience,” which was in fact a synonym for doing nothing. As long as intelligence agencies assessed that Pyongyang’s threat was remote, conveniently fitting Obama’s predilection to do nothing, he could contend there was no basis for more robust measures against the North’s nuclear program.

Obama-era intelligence also conveniently painted a very similar picture about Iran as Obama desperately sought a nuclear agreement later characterized as an achievement comparable to ObamaCare in his first term. As with North Korea, if Iran’s program were not increasingly threatening, there was no danger, supposedly, from lengthy negotiations and an imperfect final agreement.

In both cases, however, the truth was much more malign, as North Korea is now demonstrating graphically. During the presidential transition, Obama blithely advised President-elect Trump that Pyongyang would be his most serious foreign challenge. How convenient that reality “changed” for the worst just after Obama departed the White House. Indeed, this “coincidence” is simply further evidence of how deeply his administration had politicized intelligence collection and analysis.

Government insiders recognize that politicization does not emerge via written directives from high-ranking authorities demanding particular outcomes. It arises instead when the intelligence community’s bureaucratic culture intuits what policymakers want to hear — and gives it to them. Highly ideological intelligence-community decision-makers, like Obama’s CIA director, themselves sharing the same benign view of North Korea, create a self-reinforcing feedback loop, rewarding “good” intelligence while shunting aside and disregarding contrary information and analysis.

Before and after the second Iraq war, critics of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney leveled charges of politicization simply because Cheney and others asked hard questions of front-line intelligence analysts. But such questioning is something that first-rate analysts, proud of their work product, relish, providing analysts with key insights into policymakers’ thinking.

What happened under Obama was far different, an insidious ideological fixing of intelligence results.

Post-Obama, Trump’s White House has a full workload to repair and improve American national security, from significantly increasing military budgets to building a more assertive diplomatic corps. Importantly, however, eliminating the corrosive effects of politicized intelligence also needs to rank at the top of his agenda.