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Putin-Xi summit should be a wakeup call on worldwide threats facing America

March 21, 2023
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This article was first published in The New York Post on March 21, 2023.  Click Here to read the original article.

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin is more evidence of the increasingly worldwide nature of the threats facing the United States and its allies.

Beyond discussing Xi’s “peace plan” for the Ukraine war, the Moscow meeting further crystallizes the 21st-century’s anti-Western Axis.

Putin wrote that Russian-Chinese relations “today practically represent the cornerstone of regional, even global stability.”

He greeted his “dear friend” Xi, who proffered his “deep gratitude,” adding that China’s “friendship” with Russia is “growing day by day.”

There is little joy in Kyiv over the Chinese proposals, and there should be even less in Washington, since they amount to little more than a Sino-Russian propaganda exercise.


Putin characterized Russia’s war of unprovoked aggression against Ukraine as an “acute crisis,” which is certainly one way to put it.

Beijing’s Western sympathizers, during the nearly 13 months of Moscow’s unprovoked aggression against Ukraine, have repeatedly contorted themselves to explain that China was embarrassed by Russia’s conduct, China wanted to “separate” itself from Russia and China was not significantly aiding Russia’s war effort.


These assertions were palpably untrue even when the apologists were making their apologia and now stand fully exposed.

Today, it is the West’s China apologists who should be embarrassed.

In reality, China is the Ukraine war’s biggest winner no matter how it ends.

If Russia prevails in whole or in part, it is China’s ally that is victorious, over bitter Ukrainian resistance and substantial US and NATO assistance, thereby increasing the threat to other former constituent parts of the Soviet Union and to Western Europe generally.

And if Moscow is defeated, Beijing’s ally will be even more heavily reliant on China and thus even more in its thrall. It is hard to describe a range of scenarios more to Xi’s liking.

Unfortunately, Ukraine and the rest of the former Russian empire will not be the only targets of this new Eurasian Axis.

By denying the legitimacy of the basis on which the USSR dissolved, the Kremlin is calling into question the security of all former Soviet republics, including the three Baltic states, now NATO members.

In East Asia, Taiwan is urgently strengthening its defenses, while the United States, Japan and other allies consider larger structures of collective self-defense to blunt any hegemonic Chinese ambitions.

Others along China’s Indo-Pacific periphery are growing understandably nervous.

Russia and China, Security Council permanent members, immunized by their United Nations Charter-granted veto powers and deemed legitimate nuclear-weapons states by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, are on the move, accompanied by assorted hangers-on like North Korea, Iran, Belarus and other nations not yet out of the closet.

Following China’s recent, surprising brokering of an agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran to restore their sundered relations, who can predict what their next diplomatic ploy might be?

Even more graphically, after decades of the West pretending there was a “rules-based international order,” and the supposed deterrent impact of the International Criminal Court, Xi arrived in Moscow just days after the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Putin.

The Kremlin’s leader had immediately disdained the warrant by traveling to Russian-occupied Ukraine, both Crimea and the Donbas.

Neither China nor Russia are parties to the ICC’s Rome Statute, and neither is likely to sign up any time soon. A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman directly contradicted the ICC’s action, calling on the court to “respect the jurisdictional immunity of a head of state under international law.” (America is also not an ICC member, largely because of its fundamental illegitimacy.)

Moreover, during the COVID pandemic and until the present day, China has shown exactly what it thinks of the World Health Organization, systematically obstructing UN investigation of COVID’s origins and protecting China’s interests against other affected nations’.
And neither Russia nor China will contribute significantly toward substantive agreements or action in international climate-change negotiations.

Even on international trade and investment, the increasing prospects of long-term struggle between the Eurasian Axis and the West are growing rapidly.
So much for the benefits and protections of multilateral diplomacy. The only good news that might emerge from the Putin-Xi meeting is that Westerners who didn’t previously perceive the malign intentions of Russia and China will be awakened — and not a moment too soon.

John Bolton was national security adviser to President Donald Trump, 2018-19, and US ambassador to the United Nations, 2005-06.

China’s global diplomacy undermines Josh Hawley’s security strategy

March 20, 2023
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This article was first published in The Washington Examiner on March 20, 2023. Click Here to read the original article.

The competition for “most startling photo of 2023” may already be over. The smiling photo of China’s top foreign-policy official and the Iranian and Saudi Arabian national security advisers looks hard to beat.

China scored a diplomatic win cozying up to Riyadh by exploiting President Joe Biden’s palpable disdain for the Saudis. China also helped rehabilitate Tehran, which has been brutally suppressing its most extensive domestic opposition in the Islamic Republic’s history. Whether this is ultimately more than just a Chinese public relations triumph, however, is still unclear.

Secretary of State Blinken embarrassed himself trying to put a positive spin on the debacle, thereby underlining how marginal the United States was. Equally important was the embarrassment caused to those Americans arguing that to focus adequately on China and its neighborhood, Washington can pretty much ignore everywhere else.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) is the principal Senate proponent for this approach, arguing that U.S. involvement in Europe (particularly aiding Ukraine) and the Middle East distracts from our ability to contest China in Asia, especially over Taiwan. He voted against admitting Sweden and Finland to NATO, for example, the only senator to do so (Rand Paul voted “present”). Hawley’s quasi-isolationist analysis rests on the flawed assumption that America cannot muster sufficient resources to walk and chew gum at the same time. He says that narrowing our attention to East Asia and the Chinese threat necessarily means reduced US involvement in lower-priority regions.

Of course, resources may be finite at any given point, but responsible political leaders know how to increase them when the times demand, as Ronald Reagan did so successfully. If Hawley’s resource analysis were true, the U.S. is lucky it only had to fight on one front in World War II; otherwise, we surely would have lost.

The “Asia only” argument stresses Beijing’s many threats and highlights the existential menace posed to Taiwan’s continuing self-government, which is no small matter. Having first advocated full U.S. diplomatic recognition of Taiwan in 2000 to counter Beijing’s hegemonic aspirations, I have no disagreement with Hawley’s concerns about Taiwanese security.

Consider, for starters, Washington’s long-standing alliance with Taipei, whether de jure or de facto; Taiwan’s enormous economic importance as a trading partner and focal point of information-technology production and innovation; its critical geographic location in the “first island chain” standing between China and the open Pacific; and the mutual interest of close allies like Japan.

Unfortunately, however, China’s geo-strategists do not view the world through a soda straw, and neither should we. Beijing’s diplomatic coup de main with Iran and Saudi Arabia should shatter any illusions that our struggle with China is anything less than global. If the U.S. deprioritizes or abandons a geographic area, it is simply an invitation to Beijing (and Moscow) to enter and fill the vacuum we create.

In the Middle East, adding insult to injury are last week’s joint naval maneuvers by China, Russia, and Iran in the Gulf of Oman(just outside the Strait of Hormuz). These drills, so near to critical Gulf Arab hydrocarbon producers, are tangible evidence that China is vigorously contesting U.S. influence region-wide, militarily as well as politically. Inevitable future Sino-American crises will undoubtedly involve clashes over critical energy supplies.

Examples of China’s global reach and agility are all too plentiful. Reflecting years of China’s successful efforts to penetrate the Western Hemisphere, for example, Brazil’s left-wing President Lula da Silva is taking a delegation of 240 business people on a weeklong visit to Beijing and Shanghai. Chinese infiltration in Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua, bolstering Russia’s faltering presence, has also long been underway covertly. Both Lula’s trip and the Iran-Saudi ploy are consistent with Xi Jinping’s “Global Security Initiative,” expressly melding economic and security concerns to China’s advantage and leaving Washington again on the sidelines.

Tellingly, notwithstanding an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin, Xi is now visiting Moscow to discuss their “no limits” alliance. So disdainful is Putin of the court that he made a surprise trip to occupied Ukraine, including visiting children’s care facilities. No comment from China.

Purportedly shopping a Russian-Ukraine “peace plan,” Xi is actually demonstrating that he has been and remains entirely on Putin’s side in the Ukraine war. Indeed, there are reports that China intends to or already is shipping weapons to Russia, or at a minimum, providing support fungible with lethal aid. China, for all practical purposes, is as much involved politically in Europe’s ongoing war as the U.S.

To his credit, Hawley has received harsh criticism from China because of his opposition to its threatening behavior. And if he continues his good work on China, I will surely, in due course, warmly welcome him to the honor roll of officially sanctioned Americans, he hopefully having long since discarded the “Asia only” outlook.

John Bolton was the national security adviser to former President Donald Trump between 2018 and 2019. Between 2005 and 2006, he was the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

After the Iraq War

March 16, 2023
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No one lied us into invading, and what came later was its own set of decisions

This article was first published in National Review Plus Magazine on March 16, 2023. Click Here to read the original article.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq and overthrow of Saddam Hussein were accomplished rapidly, with consummate skill and professionalism, and with thankfully low U.S. casualties. This period of major combat operations (March 20 until May 1) was close to flawless. Saddam’s day was over, and Iraq’s potential acquisition of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was foreclosed, effectively in perpetuity. We achieved our goals.

These key facts are essentially indubitable. Instead, critics dispute whether deciding to invade, and American policy after toppling Saddam, were correct and justifiable. These are no small matters. But the critical point, typically ignored or misunderstood, is that the “Iraq War” is not one indivisible, 20-year-long block of granite that can be judged only all or nothing. Instead, the ongoing U.S. presence there embodies a long, complex history, some of which Washington got right and some it didn’t.

The reasons to invade were clear and compelling: Saddam directly threatened U.S. security by pursuing WMD and supporting terrorism. After the 1991 Gulf War, U.N. inspectors found Iraq’s nuclear-weapons program far more advanced than indicated by previous intelligence assessments. Despite the physical destruction of centrifuges and other assets by the U.N. and the International Atomic Energy Agency in the mid 1990s, Saddam retained the program’s core intellectual base: over 3,000 nuclear scientists and technicians, his “nuclear mujahideen,” to re-create it later. Under Security Council Resolution 687, Saddam also declared large supplies of chemical weapons and related assets. Pressed repeatedly by the U.N., Iraq claimed to have destroyed its chemical-weapons program but obstructed U.N. inspectors, refusing to supply any proof of its claims, leading essentially all observers to believe that it retained large chemical-weapons capabilities. Biological weapons, the easiest of the WMD to conceal or destroy, were suspected but not proven. Iraq’s ballistic-missile programs had continued.

All this WMD activity was undertaken against the day when U.N. economic sanctions were lifted and weapons inspectors departed. Indeed, sanctions were already collapsing when President George W. Bush was inaugurated. Proposals to “fix” the problem, such as “smart” (more-targeted) sanctions, were at best fig leaves, acknowledging the U.N.’s disarray (both politically and operationally) and its essentially inevitable failure. There are only two kinds of sanctions, but they are not “smart” versus “dumb.” The real dichotomy is between crushing sanctions, swiftly and massively imposed and then rigorously enforced, and all others. Most sanctions historically fail and become mere virtue-signaling. The lesson of twelve years of failed Iraq sanctions between 1991 and 2003 is that sanctions can help avoid war only if they are enforced cold-bloodedly. The U.N.’s Iraq efforts, especially the oil-for-food program, failed in every material respect.

No one lied about WMD. In the wake of 9/11 and the still-unresolved anthrax attacks, Saddam’s murderous history, domestically and abroad, made it entirely prudent to ensure that he could never again threaten America, the region, or the world with weapons of mass destruction. Melvyn Leffler’s recent book, Confronting Saddam Hussein, while not flawless, should be compulsory reading on President Bush’s pre-war decision-making. Post-war findings about the actual state of Iraq’s WMD do not invalidate the pre-war reasoning. Saddam’s real threat was not merely his intentions and capabilities in 2003 but what they could be in the future if he retained power. This was well understood and endorsed across America, which is why congressional and public support for the invasion was overwhelming. Indeed, in hindsight, Saddam should have been removed in 1991 after his unprovoked aggression against Kuwait.

In fact, the brunt of contemporary criticism focuses not on pre-war decision-making but on U.S. policies and what came after May 1, 2003. Certainly, the rapid, near-total collapse of Iraq’s government and the resulting disorder are facts. The real issue, however, is whether Washington should have moved immediately to turn governance functions over to Iraqis, or created, as it did, the Coalition Provisional Authority, which kept America intimately involved in Iraqi politics far longer than initially expected. Important decisions such as de-Baathification, the dissolution of Iraq’s army, and the broader efforts at nation-building and democracy promotion are also all debatable, especially with 20/20 hindsight. Nonetheless, despite the innumerable difficulties encountered and missteps U.S. authorities made, by embracing the 2007–08 “surge,” President Bush in fact reduced internal insurgency to a manageable, marginal level.

The key point, however, is not that these or other individual decisions were right or wrong but instead that they did not inevitably, inexorably, deterministically, and unalterably flow from the decision to invade and overthrow, and the rationale for it. Whatever Bush’s batting average in post-Saddam decisions (not perfect, but respectable, in my view), it is separable, conceptually and functionally, from the invasion decision. The subsequent history, for good or ill, cannot detract from the logic, fundamental necessity, and success of overthrowing Saddam, a threat to American national security since he invaded Kuwait in 1990.

The biggest “Iraq War” mistake was Barack Obama’s catastrophic 2011 military withdrawal, which even Obama recognized as an error, reinserting U.S. forces in 2014 to counter the rise of ISIS. Withdrawing, obviously, was precisely the opposite of Bush’s decision to attack, which makes it hard to see these polar opposites as parts of the same block of granite to be judged as a unity. Moreover, other unforeseen post-2003 events had significant negative impacts on the Middle East, such as the Arab Spring’s rise and especially its collapse, and the resurgence of radical Islamism. How can a 2003 decision be faulted because of subsequent events that completely surprised the world?

Equally wrong was the Bush administration’s failure to take advantage of its substantial presence in Iraq and Afghanistan to seek regime change in between, in Iran, before Tehran’s own WMD programs neared success. Those who say invading Iraq distracted from Afghanistan, or that attacking Iraq rather than Iran prioritized the wrong target, should still agree that we had a clear opportunity to empower Iran’s opposition to depose the ayatollahs. Unfortunately, however, as was the case after expelling Saddam from Kuwait in 1991, the United States stopped too soon.

In any case, Iran policy, like so much else, was not predetermined by the 2003 invasion decision. Lumping everything together as “Iraq War” critics do disserves careful analysis of what America accomplished, or didn’t.

‘Confronting Saddam Hussein’ Review: ‘Bush’s War,’ or America’s?

February 21, 2023
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The president was not eager for war, but he and his advisers had to ponder the risks of leaving Saddam in power in a post-9/11 era.

This article was first published in The Wall Street Journal on February 21, 2023. Click Here to read the original article.

‘I happen to be one that thinks that one way or another Saddam has got to go, and it is likely to be required to have U.S. force to have him go, and the question is how to do it, in my view, not if to do it.” Thus spake then-Sen. Joe Biden on Feb. 5, 2002. He was not alone. The 1998 Iraq Liberation Act, calling for America “to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein,” passed the Senate by unanimous consent and the House by 360-38. In October 2002, the Senate authorized force to overthrow Saddam by 77-23, and the House by 296-133. In March 2003, when the war began, 72% of Americans supported President George W. Bush’s decision; his approval-disapproval rating was 71%-25%.

Today, supporters of “Bush’s war” aren’t exactly thick on the ground. Opinions on his administration’s policies have so hardened that dispassionate discussion is nearly impossible. Melvyn Leffler’s “Confronting Saddam Hussein,” however, assesses the decision to attack, and its immediate aftermath, in a calm, reasoned and persuasive fashion.

One book cannot resolve the debate over a decadelong event involving so many decisions and phases: Mr. Bush’s 2003 invasion; Saddam Hussein’s overthrow; the long, painful transition to Iraqi rule; Mr. Bush’s 2007 troop surge; Barack Obama’s 2011 withdrawal; and Mr. Obama’s 2014 return. But Mr. Leffler’s account does refute several dishonest criticisms of Mr. Bush’s decisions, while also exposing mistakes that remain inexplicable 20 years later. This is no small feat.

Mr. Leffler, who teaches history at the University of Virginia, demonstrates that Mr. Bush was not eager for war. His advisers did not lead him by the nose. They were not obsessed with linking Saddam Hussein to 9/11. They did not lie about Saddam having or seeking weapons of mass destruction, or WMDs. Their objectives did not include spreading democracy at the tip of a bayonet. To do real research, and then present the results evenhandedly amid the prevailing rancor of U.S. academic and political discourse, is an achievement for which Mr. Leffler will doubtless be rewarded with abuse.

I do disagree, however, with significant aspects of Mr. Leffler’s analysis. He concludes that Mr. Bush’s failures stemmed from “too much fear, too much power, too much hubris—and insufficient prudence.” Given the enormous public support for the war, Mr. Leffler says these errors “were the nation’s failures, the failures of the American people—not all, but many,” an assertion that will profoundly irritate Mr. Bush’s harshest critics, who assign him full culpability.

Thucydides wrote that Nicias, hoping to reverse the Athenians’ decision to attack Syracuse, warned at length about the burdens and risks of such a campaign. Instead, the Athenians, “far from having their enthusiasm for the voyage destroyed by the burdensomeness of the preparations, became more eager for it than ever.” If both Athenian and American democracies lack prudence, does Mr. Leffler agree with Bertolt Brecht’s sardonic suggestion that East Germany’s government, having lost its citizens’ confidence, should have “Dissolved the people and / Elected another”? If nearly everyone gets it wrong in a democracy, Mr. Leffler’s admonitions to decision-makers are essentially useless.

While Bush 43’s father would undoubtedly endorse calls for more “prudence,” is that really more than merely a talisman for national-security decision-makers? Academics should recall Dwight Eisenhower’s handwritten draft statement, hastily written for use if the D-Day invasion had failed. Eisenhower stood ready to take full responsibility for defeat. “My decision to attack at this time and place,” he wrote, “was based upon the best information available.” The same was true for Mr. Bush and his administration. What else could they, or anyone else, base their decisions on?

Data, correct or incorrect, do not dictate supreme command decisions. They emerge from weighing imponderables and uncertainties, upon which reasonable people can disagree. British and American officials weren’t the only people who believed prewar that Saddam had or intended to reacquire nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. David Kay and Charles Duelfer, leaders of the Iraq Survey Group, concurred after their postwar investigations that removing the dictator was a good thing, and that he intended, after sanctions were lifted, to resume pursuing WMDs, notwithstanding momentary, diversionary, tactical ploys. Tellingly, Mr. Duelfer wrote that “virtually” no senior Iraqi leader “believed that Saddam had forsaken WMDs forever.”
Mr. Leffler describes at length the administration’s deep apprehensions about Iraq or the terrorists it armed using WMDs against the U.S. and its allies, and about the accuracy of their own information and assumptions about that threat. He does not, however, adequately assess the varying propensities of political leaders to accept risk. Some critics, then believing the potential for such attacks to be low, displayed a higher tolerance for that risk. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and the anthrax scare weeks later (and unresolved to this day), Bush officials’ tolerance for such risk was close to zero.

Which of the two camps was the more prudent? What would be history’s judgment had America hesitated, and suffered another devastating terrorist attack? That no such attack occurred says more about the merits of overthrowing Saddam than anything else.

Mr. Leffler ends his analysis in the immediate postwar period, which he is entitled to do. He is mercilessly critical of failures in the weeks and months after Saddam’s overthrow, which demonstrated not inadequate planning (Mr. Leffler’s view) but the existence of too many plans that were never effectively reconciled. Nonetheless, Mr. Leffler echoes many of Mr. Bush’s critics by implicitly assuming that actions during that time flowed inexorably from the foundational decision to invade. He is wrong about that.

Even so, “Confronting Saddam Hussein” is an important work. It should inspire more scholarship and less rhetoric on America’s Second Persian Gulf War.

The West is in a world war in Ukraine and still lacks a strategy for winning it

February 20, 2023
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One year on from the start of Putin’s invasion, this is no time for extolling Nato’s supposed successes

This article was first published by The Telegraph on February 20th, 2023. Click Here to read the original article.

Since Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine last February, Nato members have spent considerable time patting themselves on the back, extolling their successes. Unfortunately, the West’s overall balance sheet is not nearly so rosy. One year in, consider the debits, not just the credits.

Most tellingly, the US and its Nato allies failed to deter Russia’s offensive in the first place. On several occasions, President Biden said he didn’t really believe deterrence was possible, merely that Russia could be punished for aggression after the fact. For example, a month after the invasion, Biden said: “Let’s get something straight. You remember, if you’ve covered me from the beginning, I did not say that in fact the sanctions would deter him. Sanctions never deter.”

Biden’s careless remarks may have encouraged Russia. At a January 2022 press conference, his first in 10 months, when asked about a possible Russian onslaught, he answered: “It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion and then we end up having a fight about what to do and not do, et cetera. But if they actually do what they’re capable of doing … it is going to be a disaster for Russia if they further degrade and, invade Ukraine.”

But the failure to deter the Kremlin was a consequence of much more than Biden’s sloppy geostrategic thinking and loose lips. Nato’s utterly insouciant response to Russia’s first invasion in 2014 laid the foundation for the seemingly inevitable sequel.

The West stood idly by when Russian forces intervened in Donbas and seized Crimea; imposed only perfunctory sanctions thereafter; negotiated the embarrassing, Moscow-leaning Minsk Agreements; and for years did precious little to provide anything close to satisfactory levels of military assistance and training to Ukrainian forces. Biden’s catastrophic 2021 decision to withdraw from Afghanistan and his unimpressive meeting with Putin in Vienna in June of that year were also significant factors.

Was the West really helpless? Quite the opposite. Even as the risks of Russian invasion grew in late 2021, the US and its allies could have significantly expanded their weapons deliveries (and the accompanying flow of Nato forces into Ukraine to provide training) to show Western resolve. We could have imposed heavy economic sanctions on Russia both for its 2014 aggression (better late than never) and its continuing, menacing build-up along Ukraine’s border. This would have made clear that Nato was reversing its feckless handling of the first invasion and would not repeat it. Whether so late an effort to create deterrence could have succeeded is speculative, but at least Ukraine would have had larger stockpiles and been better prepared for Moscow’s aggression last February.

Biden’s reluctance to do little more than grouse about Moscow’s invasion preparations stemmed largely from intelligence failures paralysing Nato capitals. In closed briefings to Congress shortly after Russia struck, American intelligence experts predicted Kyiv would fall within days, and the country within weeks. If there was dissent among US agencies, that disagreement did not make its way into the press, which means there probably was none.

Instead of developing a strategy for victory – repelling and defeating the Russians – Nato settled on a strategy for aiding post-defeat guerrilla warfare, and spiriting Volodymyr Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials out of the country. Zelensky, heroically, was having none of it, replying to the offer of safe transit to Poland: “I don’t need a ride. I need ammunition.”

When, contrary to expectations, the Russian forces underperformed stunningly, while Ukraine stood its ground, Nato had no plan B. It was not ready for success. Make no mistake, the intelligence failures regarding both Russian and Ukrainian combat-arms need to be corrected urgently, lest we are caught by surprise by China and others, perhaps because we have underestimated our enemy’s capabilities rather than overestimated them.

Almost one year later, Nato still has no strategy for victory. Saying that the war’s objectives and operational direction must be left to the Ukrainians is obviously insufficient. At least some Europeans, namely France and Germany, hoped early on that laying off responsibility on Ukraine might help force early Kyiv-Moscow negotiations to end the conflict. Today, this approach is simply a way for Western governments to avoid facing reality: we are in a world war in Ukraine, not directly with Nato forces, but with almost everything else on the line.

Russia is backed by its own entente with China and arms suppliers such as North Korea and Iran. The world is filled with “neutrals”. Nato members have long asserted, and still do, that Ukraine must be restored to full sovereignty and territorial integrity, meaning the boundaries that newly independent Ukraine assumed at midnight on December 21 1991.

Nonetheless, the West has been unable or unwilling to draw appropriate conclusions from its failures. We need a strategy that addresses Nato interests. Instead, for a year, we have had one dispute after another about what weapons systems to supply: Polish MiGs, Himars, longer-range artillery, tanks, F-16s. This is the wrong way to win a war, a war whose objectives Nato leaders fear to state. A list of weapons systems certainly is not a strategy, which emerges first by deciding on goals, then determining and marshalling the resources necessary to achieve them. If we fail to craft an articulable strategy, those who worry about Nato publics growing tired of yet another “endless war” will indeed have much to be concerned about.

Both the Trump and Biden administrations failed to deter Russia. Instead, Putin is deterring us from aiding Kyiv more effectively for fear that he will expand the war, trepidation reiterated just days ago regarding Crimea. We should ask ourselves: with what army? Putin’s nuclear threats have been hollow; he should learn that their use amounts to signing his death warrant. The West needs to call Putin’s bluff, decide what it wants, and then pursue it. Abraham Lincoln once complained that his generals had “a case of the slows”. He would recognise Nato’s problem today. We must break our conceptual chains, or next February will bring more retrospectives about the Ukraine war’s second year and what the third will bring.

Biden’s blindness toward China’s threat could not be clearer

February 18, 2023
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This article was first published in The Hill on February 18, 2023. Click Here to read the original article.

President Biden addressed the nation Thursday to discuss the Chinese high-altitude balloon recently flying over the United States and three other objects in North American airspace, all ultimately shot down by the U.S. Air Force. Biden’s apparent aim was to inform the public and justify his decisions regarding the presence of these vehicles in our skies.

He failed. Obviously unwittingly, Biden simply reinforced the view that his administration had disclosed only partial, highly selective elements of what the government already knew, essentially all of which were, unsurprisingly, consistent with the White House’s political narrative. His remarks sought to present the most innocuous interpretations of these recent events. Biden may have told the truth on Thursday, but not the “whole truth” and most certainly not “nothing but the truth.”

Biden’s briefing came the day after three officials of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (“ODNI”) briefed me regarding the four recent overflights. The meeting, at DNI headquarters in Liberty Crossing, Va., lasted about an hour and was conducted in a cooperative, professional manner. During the briefing, I was shown pertinent documents, which ODNI retained, and I took no written notes.

A precondition for the briefing, reflected in standard government forms, was that I submit any materials intended for publication about the meeting to the National Security Council staff for prepublication review. That review’s purpose was to determine that my draft contained no classified information, and thereby receive assent to publish. I previously submitted my book “The Room Where it Happened” for clearance through this process which, in the regular order, it received, as has this article.

Prepublication review is a highly controversial practice, as I can attest; but critically, the review is confined to classification matters, not matters of policy, politics and opinion. Similarly, the ODNI briefing was on intelligence matters not the administration’s policy or its justification. There is a long-standing, entirely appropriate wall of separation between intelligence and policymaking, so it was right that the ODNI briefers did not (and should not) engage in policy advocacy.

Accordingly, responsibility for the failures, excuses and idle speculation about the four recent incidents lies with the White House’s political leadership. And Biden’s handling of the Chinese balloon was woefully inadequate, characterized by a far-too-benign view of Beijing’s intentions and capabilities. From the outset, the response was weak. The cognizant military official, Gen. Glen VanHerck, said on Feb. 6, “It was my assessment that this balloon did not present a physical or military threat to North America.”

That was manifestly incorrect, but Biden is sticking with it. His blindness toward Beijing’s threat could not be clearer. We certainly do not yet know everything about the Chinese balloon, but we do know through on-the-record administration statements, leaks from anonymous sources and congressional briefings that the balloon’s origin and approach to America were likely known long before the White House said it was first detected near the Aleutian Islands.

China lied, saying it was simply a weather balloon gone astray. Yet, no U.S. official has claimed Chinese authorities made any effort to contact Washington in advance to inform us or discuss how to handle the “wayward” balloon. Beijing either intended that it transit America or was at least willing to risk trying to get away with it.

For many years, U.S officials have worried about Chinese and other foreign intentions to destroy our communications and intelligence-gathering satellites in time of war or crisis.

If anti-satellite weapons could significantly impair our space-based capabilities, we would be severely disadvantaged. Could China’s high-altitude balloon program be a hedge against the destruction of its own satellites? Could this particular flight be a ploy to gain knowledge about our reaction to such overflights in time of peace? Should America consider having a comparable program, so we too have a hedge in a future crisis if our “eyes in the sky” are blinded?

Finally, Biden speculated about the other three objects shot down by the Air Force, stressing that there was no evidence these were of Chinese origin. Despite not yet having recovered the remains of any of those three targets, and lacking much evidence of any sort, Biden, following the path of his advisers and congressional supporters, was eager to say these objects were likely not dangerous.

Now, it may be that our Sidewinders destroyed a high school class’s missing science project. Or two or three. Or maybe not. Perhaps significantly, no business, academic institution or anyone else has come forward to say that their “object” is missing and that they are wondering whether their flying machine was one of the bogeys. Biden’s repeated efforts to de-emphasize the potentially dangerous implications of the incursions only risk confusion and embarrassment for himself and the country if the objects turn out to have more malign purposes. He should have stuck to “nothing but the truth.”

The ODNI briefing conclusively convinced me that we face a serious threat, from China at least, of lower-than-orbit surveillance above our territory. We once had an Open Skies Treaty with the Soviet Union to regulate overflights of our respective countries, which was routinely abused by Moscow. The U.S. withdrew from that treaty in 2020, after a process I helped launch before I resigned as national security advisor. We have never had such a treaty with Beijing, and there is no reason to negotiate an agreement they would undoubtedly violate.

Both the House and Senate have passed unanimous resolutions condemning the Chinese overflights, a rare display of bipartisanship in today’s Washington. Let’s get on with enhancing our national security against Beijing’s menace, not only from balloon flights but across the board.

From the Office of Ambassador John Bolton

February 15, 2023
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 15, 2023
CONTACT: Sarah Tinsley
202-306-0408
[email protected]

I met with intelligence-community officials at DNI headquarters at Liberty Crossing this afternoon for approximately an hour. They provided a briefing relating to the four recent balloon/”object” incidents in a cooperative and professional manner.

In light of today’s meeting, I remain profoundly troubled about the Biden Administration’s handling of these potential national-security threats over the last several weeks. For example, the Administration’s serious mishandling of the first balloon, and its continually changing story line, have only been heightened by press reports on Monday and Tuesday that the United States had been tracking the initial balloon form the time it left China’s Hainan Island, not that it was sighted for the first time north of the Aleutian Islands, the Administration’s initial tale.

Since I was meeting with IC representatives and given the long-standing and entirely appropriate wall of separation between intelligence and policy-making, it was no fault of these representatives that they could not (and should not) be engaged in policy discussions. At this point, responsibility for the failures, excuses, and idle speculation about the four recent incidents, lies with the Biden Administration’s political leadership.

Biden’s bonkers balloon bumbling: This national security expert has MAJOR questions

February 12, 2023
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This article was first published in The New York Post on February 12, 2023. Click Here to read the original article.

The Biden administration dangerously mishandled China’s now-famous, first recent high-flying “object” over America. Confronted Friday, again off Alaska, with a second unidentified object; Saturday with a third, over Canada; and Sunday a fourth, over landlocked Lake Huron, President Joe Biden reacted very differently, perhaps having learned his lesson.

Or maybe the last three shoot-downs merely underline his helter-skelter thinking. Not all the facts of these four incidents are yet available. The administration’s constantly changing excuses and storyline complicate understanding, let alone correcting, its mistakes.

The worst mistake came at the outset, Jan. 28, when NORAD (the North American Aerospace Defense Command) detected a balloon near the Aleutian Islands. NORAD’s commander, Gen. Glen VanHerck, said Feb. 6, “It was my assessment that this balloon did not present a physical or military threat to North America.”The latest balloon was shot off Alaska.

That assessment was wrong and uninformed. Could NORAD say indisputably the balloon’s payload — the size of three buses — contained no nuclear or radiological weapons? Could NORAD say indisputably it carried no biological pathogens or toxins it could release into US water supplies? Did NORAD contact foreign capitals to see who would own up to the balloon?

Two days after first contact, the administration reversed field, concluding the balloon was an intelligence threat. Then, Feb. 9, amid frantic political damage-control efforts, the State Department said the balloon was part of a global Chinese espionage program, covering some 40 countries, capable of intercepting electronic communications and self-steering.

Did the administration so conclude only after first contact Jan. 28, or did it know all this beforehand? And if aware of China’s program in advance, how could anyone conclude the newly sighted balloon, absent clear contrary evidence, was benign?

These questions alone demonstrate that Biden’s approach, following Chinese balloons’ multiple prior intrusions, was palpably inadequate. Was he gulled by Beijing’s claims of researching weather and climate change? Did no one consider the possibility such claims were simply a cover for malign purposes, as is often true in intelligence gathering? Why was Biden himself not briefed until three days after first contact?

In today’s threatening world, any unidentified object nearing US territory should be deemed intrinsically suspicious. NORAD apparently presumed exactly the opposite.

The balloon, moreover, was transmitting signals, assuredly back to China. If the balloon were innocent and merely astray, it is inherently incredible that Beijing, knowing its position in real time, did not immediately alert Washington. Of course, China may well have been lying even then, but by remaining silent, hoping the balloon ultimately traversed the United States without being detected, Beijing showed its true colors.

Days into the controversy, the Pentagon justified not shooting the first balloon down in the waters off Alaska because of the difficulty of recovering the payload for analysis. This rationale is either knowingly false or disingenuous — and constitutes yet another posterior-covering reversal, given Gen. VanHerck’s confession that he initially saw no threat.

Certainly, in intelligence affairs, there is often a tradeoff between acting to stop an adversary’s actions before they become harmful or allowing them to proceed to learn more about them. The Bering Sea is indeed cold and deep, but apparently not so cold and deep that the second “object” could escape being shot down Feb. 10, perhaps closer to Alaska’s shores, with recovery operations now underway.

Finally, the administration has said repeatedly it did not want to destroy the first balloon over land to avoid risks to innocent civilians. Yet it did just that over the weekend, over the Yukon and Lake Huron.

Obviously, no one disagrees with safeguarding civilians. Obviously, the initial balloon itself could have malfunctioned, or been programmed to malfunction, coming down over a densely populated city, causing considerable casualties “accidentally.” But the administration clearly had alternatives to allowing the balloon to transit the entire country, such as downing it over essentially unpopulated regions, as on Saturday.

And were there no other ways of bringing the balloon to ground in a more controlled fashion, thus further minimizing the risks to civilians?

We have barely scratched the surface on the Chinese balloons. The White House offered to brief senior Trump administration national-security officials about this issue — I have a long list of questions.

The Fighter

February 06, 2023
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John Bolton was once the enfant terrible of the Republican Party. Is he now its conscience?

This article was first published in Foreign Policy on February 6th, 2023. Click Here to read the original article.

John Bolton is worried about a virus but probably not the one you’re thinking of. The former U.S. national security advisor arrives for lunch at Edgar Bar & Kitchen in the Mayflower Hotel in Washington carrying a long umbrella and a 5,000-word printout of an essay he had written over the holiday break for the National Review. The subject of his cri de coeur? The “virus of isolationism” that has gripped the fringes of his beloved Republican Party. 

Like the restaurant’s namesake—J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI’s first director, who dined at the hotel on a daily basis—Bolton is a regular. The seat at the back corner, in front of a shelf of Prohibition-era liquor bottles, is his usual spot, the hostess informs me. There is a frisson of excitement among the servers, who evidently know who he is. Shortly before Bolton’s arrival, a Secret Service agent with a discreet coiled earpiece sweeps by, a reminder of the Iranian bounty on his head. “I was offended that they only offered $300,000,” Bolton says when I ask him about it later, before wondering aloud if the price had gone up now that he has a security detail.

Bolton has long served as the id of the Republican Party, happy to say the quiet part out loud on cable news and in the op-ed pages of national newspapers. He has advocated for the bombing of North Korea and Iran, joked on CNN about plotting coups, and most recently called for Turkey to be ejected from NATO.

He joined the White House in April 2018 as then-President Donald Trump’s third national security advisor, at the point when any illusions that the weight of the office would cause Trump’s better angels to prevail had been long since banished. Seventeen months later, he was out—fired or resigned, as Bolton has claimed—as the relationship soured. While much of the Republican Party continues to turn on the Trump axis, Bolton has broken with his former boss in a dramatic fashion. Many of his peers have contorted themselves to fit the MAGA mold or slunk from the limelight altogether, but Bolton has kept on Boltoning. Now, as the Republicans take the gavel in the House of Representatives and Russia’s war in Ukraine approaches its first-year anniversary, I invited Bolton to lunch to find out what one of the party’s foremost hawks makes of recent calls from Republicans to curb U.S. support to Kyiv. 

We meet in early January as Congress is on its sixth—or maybe seventh or eighth or ninth—vote for House speaker as Kevin McCarthy battles a handful of rebels from within his own party. Bolton dismisses the spectacle unfolding on the House floor with trademark alacrity. “I don’t think it’s an ideological division,” he says, “so much as it is between people who may have diverging views but are serious about governing versus people for whom politics has become performance art.”

It’s not that group’s willingness to buck consensus that seems to bother him the most but the hollowness of their position. “If one of the isolationists would stand up and make the case that assisting Ukraine is not in the strategic interest of the United States, then you could at least have a discussion, but that’s not what they do.”

Bolton refused to testify during Trump’s first impeachment hearing, but it was the former president’s declaration that the U.S. Constitution should be terminated that prompted Bolton to throw his hat into an ever-expanding ring of Republican hopefuls weighing a 2024 bid for the White House. “Donald Trump is unacceptable as a Republican nominee,” he said on NBC’s Meet The Press in December. “I had not intended to [run] until Trump came out with his comment,” Bolton tells me. 

One of the presumed 2024 candidates with whom Bolton seems most comfortable is the one who has most often been described as Trump’s heir apparent, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, whom Bolton has known since 2012. “I’ve watched him very carefully. I’d feel very comfortable with his foreign policy.”

Bolton is something of a nerd, and true to form, while we wait to order our salads, he offers a potted history of the restaurant, and we get onto the topic of the Mayflower’s cameo in many a Washington spy scandal. This leads us to one of his latest book acquisitions, Cloak and Gown by Robin Winks, about the secret history between academia and the intelligence agencies during World War II and the early years of the Cold War. 

Whether it’s just his nature or experience born out of years of talking to journalists, Bolton offers compact, to-the-point answers to my questions, distinguishing himself from many a voluble Washington denizen of his tenure. Maybe that’s why he feels the need to justify the length of his essay on isolationism. “My feeling has been that I needed to write all this out. So that’s why it’s 5,000 words long,” he says. 

It’s unclear how many Republicans who have questioned military aid to Ukraine would sit down to read such a treatise on U.S. foreign policy. But Bolton got his start in a different era. During his five decades in Washington, Bolton has served in four Republican administrations, holding positions at the Justice Department, State Department, and U.S. Agency for International Development during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. Through those various stints in office, he enjoyed many wrestling matches with the bureaucrats. In an era of spicy tweets, dubious facts, and 30-second cable news sound bites, though, I can’t help but wonder if Bolton is bringing a knife to what is now a gunfight. 

It was during his tenure as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security in George W. Bush’s first term that Bolton was dubbed “human scum” and a “bloodsucker” by North Korean state media. That came after he delivered a speech in which he described North Korean leader Kim Jong Il as a “tyrannical dictator.” He would later describe the moniker from Pyongyang as the “highest accolade” he had received during his time in the junior Bush’s administration. 

During Senate confirmation hearings for his nomination to serve as Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations in 2005, an altogether more serious series of claims were made—that Bolton had sought to cherry-pick intelligence and bullied analysts who challenged his conclusions. Bolton was a “kiss-up, kick-down” sort of guy, the former head of the State Department’s in-house intelligence bureau, Carl W. Ford Jr., told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Bolton denied the allegations, but his nomination stalled, and he was ultimately sent to the United Nations as a recess appointee. 

Bolton does not seem to mind and perhaps even revels in his reputation as the enfant terrible of the Republican Party. I ask him how he would describe his role within the ecosystem of the party, but the man who has been called all sorts of things says he is not a fan of labels. “I don’t like these bumper stickers, this taxonomy of trying to put people in boxes,” he says.

In August 2022, the Justice Department revealed that it had charged an Iranian man with plotting to have Bolton assassinated. This was in apparent retaliation for the U.S. drone strike at the beginning of 2020 that killed Iranian commander Qassem Suleimani. Bolton was first alerted of the plot in early 2021. He was called into FBI Headquarters shortly before Thanksgiving that year to be warned that the threat had become more specific. 

“‘If this threat were because of my op-eds and speeches, I would be flattered, but I don’t think that’s what it is. I think it’s what I was doing in the government,’” he recalls telling the room of 15 or so investigators, before suggesting that it was perhaps incumbent on the government to therefore to do something about it. “They said, ‘Have you called the Biden White House?’ And I said, ‘Are you crazy? Of course I haven’t called the Biden White House. Why don’t you call the Biden White House?’” Shortly afterward, President Joe Biden signed an order providing Bolton with Secret Service protection. 

Although Bolton’s service in the Trump White House follows him quite literally these days—in the form of a security detail—he is eager to distance himself from the former president. In fact, in diagnosing the resurgence of isolationism within the Republican Party, Bolton points to Trump as patient zero.

Pinning down a coherent way to describe Trump’s foreign policy evaded the Washington commentariat throughout his presidency. His administration cranked the dial on U.S. competition with China, assassinated an influential Iranian general, and brokered the Abraham Accords between Israel and a number of Arab states, while also alienating allies in Europe, signing a catastrophic deal with the Taliban, and withdrawing the United States from both the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate accords. 

It was an approach forged by the president’s own whims and whichever faction of the bureaucracy around him had succeeded in getting his ear. “Donald Trump didn’t have an ideology or a philosophy either, because he couldn’t think coherently enough to have one,” Bolton says flatly. 

Trump’s promises of ending the so-called forever wars tapped an anti-interventionist nerve running through both parties these days. But it is on the question of military aid to Ukraine that the isolationist streak in the Republican Party has been most pronounced. Eleven Republican senators voted against a $40 billion package for Ukraine last May, while Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Chip Roy, and Matt Gaetz are among those who have called U.S. military aid for Ukraine into question, joining Fox News’ Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham. (Speaking at an event in Washington on Wednesday, former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he was “amazed and horrified by how many people are frightened of a guy called Tucker Carlson. … All of these wonderful Republicans seem somehow intimidated by his perspective.”)

Bolton is convinced that the isolationist sentiment that has welled up around Ukraine has more to do with fealty to Trump than the result of a strategic assessment of U.S. national security priorities. The former president’s personal distaste for Ukraine has been well documented by former White House officials. It emerged during impeachment hearings in 2019 that Trump had become convinced by what his former top Russia advisor Fiona Hill described as a “fictional narrative” that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that sought to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election—and not in his favor. 

“It colored his whole attitude toward Ukraine and therefore colored the minds of some people in Congress,” Bolton says.

U.S. intelligence officials concluded that the narrative was likely cooked up by Russian intelligence to undermine U.S. support for Kyiv. If Bolton’s theory is correct, that would mean that elements of the current resistance to sending further military aid to Ukraine may well represent, however unwittingly, the long tail of a Russian disinformation campaign still playing out in Washington.

There is an old saying in Washington that when it comes to choosing their presidential candidates, Democrats fall in love, while Republicans fall in line. In light of McCarthy’s humiliating road to become House speaker, I ask Bolton whether he still recognizes his party as it stands today. “Oh, sure. I still think the isolationist virus is a very small percentage of the party both in Congress and in the public at large,” he replies. 

I tell him I’m inclined to agree, but the skeptic in me is unsure whether the quiet majority will win out against the vocal minority. But Bolton is ready for the fight. 

“I don’t plan to rest on my laurels. Let’s have the debate. That’s how you find out who’s going to win and who’s going to lose. I’m ready for it.”

Germany must decide whether it is a ‘normal nation’

February 01, 2023
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Germany’s very public agonizing over whether to provide its Leopard II tanks to Ukraine (or allow other states that had purchased Leopard II’s to send theirs) graphically exposed Berlin’s continued confusion about its status as a NATO member. Just days after his tank decision, Chancellor Olaf Scholz is already warning against a “competition” to supply Ukraine with needed weapons systems, and ruling out Germany supplying combat aircraft. 

While there is momentary relief that, at last, Scholz has committed to provide the armor Ukraine requested, he did so only after President Joe Biden also agreed to send roughly a battalion of America’s Abrams tanks. While Biden’s decision was correct on its own merits, it was hardly a matter of strategy, and more a matter of horse-trading to persuade Berlin’s decidedly reluctant leadership. 

Amid the illusory self-congratulation following the tank decision, a pattern that has characterized much of NATO’s response to Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine, a much larger issue lurks, one which only Germany’s citizens can resolve. Their reluctance to support a military capability appropriate to their country’s economic weight is uniformly expressed through the prism of the Nazi horror, and the death and destruction wreaked upon Europe and the world until Adolf Hitler’s monstrous tyranny was crushed in 1945. 

Shame and penance are appropriate and necessary reactions for any country electing leaders such as Germany did. But there also comes a time when outsiders can legitimately ask that Germany behave as a responsible military ally, while continuing to carry those burdens. The real question is whether Germany wants to be a full NATO ally, or a doughnut hole in an otherwise strong alliance. Ukraine is as good an issue as any to leverage this decision. 

Germany’s general unhelpfulness on Ukraine, often allied with France (which lacks Germany’s excuse), surfaced almost fifteen years ago by rejecting George W. Bush’s suggestion at the April 2008 NATO Summit to put Ukraine and Georgia on a fast track to join the alliance. Unfortunately, Bush’s key insight — NATO membership was the most effective deterrent to Russia — was ignored, even derided. 

By torpedoing Bush’s proposal, Berlin and Paris almost certainly contributed to Moscow’s decision to invade Georgia four months later, and proclaim two provinces as “independent” countries, a classic manifestation of Moscow’s stratagem of creating “frozen conflicts” in former Soviet republics. When Russia then committed aggression against Ukraine in February, 2014, annexing Crimea and seizing the Donbass, NATO collectively responded with pathetic weakness, undoubtedly contributing to the Kremlin’s assessment that a second invasion in 2022 would evoke an equally limp NATO response. 

The importance of NATO membership as a deterrent has now been graphically proven by the Swedish and Finnish decisions to join the alliance after Russia’s second Ukraine invasion. Abandoning the foundational neutrality premise of their post-1945 foreign policies, Stockholm and Helsinki concluded that the only guarantee of impunity against Kremlin aggression was to put a sheltering NATO border around their countries. Undoubtedly, what was happening in Ukraine reminded them of the consequences of NATO rejecting Bush’s 2008 initiative. 

Since Russia’s February 24 invasion, there has been one disagreement after another within NATO on what weapons systems to provide Ukraine, with Germany almost always on the reluctant side, fearful of provoking a larger war, so its officials said. So doing, however, demonstrated that the Kremlin was effectively deterring NATO, and underlined NATO’s failure to deter Russia’s initial aggression. Germany’s first assistance to Ukraine was 5,000 military helmets. 

Then-Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht said, “The German government is agreed that we do not send lethal weapons to crisis areas because we don’t want to fuel the situation, we want to contribute in other ways.” Kyiv’s mayor Vitali Klitschko called the offer a “joke,” and it remains a paradigm of the doughnut-hole approach. Moreover, Germany’s 2022 defense spending was 1.44% of GDP, still well-below NATO’s 2% of GDP target. 

Berlin has a new defense minister and Leopard II tanks are a step up, but Germany needs to make a broader conceptual decision. Japan shows a way forward. From the 1990’s, there was a quiet but profound debate among the Japanese on the question, “Is Japan a normal nation?” That debate’s outcome was reflected in now-deceased Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s effort to amend Japan’s post-1945 pacifist constitution, imposed by Washington, and his successor Fumio Kishida’s recent announcement that Tokyo would double defense spending from 1% to 2% of GDP over five years, giving Japan the world’s third-largest military, after America and China. Japan has clearly decided it is, indeed, a normal nation. 

Germany should have the same debate. In 1961, Ronald Reagan said, “freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream.” Totalitarianism isn’t transmitted through the bloodstream any more than freedom. Nobody should forget Germany’s past, certainly not its own citizens, but neither are they ruled by that past. Germany must decide whether it is “a normal nation,” and, if so, act like one. 

John Bolton was the national security adviser to former President Donald Trump between 2018 and 2019. Between 2005 and 2006, he was the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.