America’s war games

 Washington, DC

Donald Trump has an itchy trigger finger, and his name is John Bolton. The President’s national security adviser is a lifelong war hawk who, unlike Trump, was a diehard supporter of the Iraq War. Now Bolton has Iran in his crosshairs. He’s not the only member of the administration drawing a bead on the mullahs. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is also a throwback to the mentality of the George W. Bush years of high misadventure in the Middle East. But Trump, believe it or not, is smarter than the last two presidents, who started fires they couldn’t extinguish in Iraq and Libya. As his manoeuvres with North Korea show, war is not the way he expects to win. To understand what Trump is up to, one has to forget the conventional wisdom of US foreign policy. That wisdom has led to a string of failures, and not just obvious ones such as Iraq and Libya. Two decades of Nato expansion have not made Russia more tractable; trade policies predicted to lead China to political liberalisation have not only failed but built that country into a rival to America’s own industrial power. All the clever tactics brought to bear on North Korea, from smooth talk to sanctions, failed to keep the Kims from acquiring nuclear weapons. A complete change in how Washington dealt with the world was long overdue. At first Trump seemed to mean more war, not less. He rattled his sabre, or at least his Twitter account, at the ‘Little Rocket Man’ in Pyongyang. By the end of 2017, war with North Korea looked as likely as it does with Iran now, or indeed likelier. Instead, Trump swerved to diplomacy, and although denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula remains out of reach, he has not given up talking to Kim.