The Room Where It Happened, Chapter 9

Chapter 9: "Venezuela Libre" or "We Can Make A Mess of Foreign Policy Anywhere"

Quick Hits: Bolton spends this chapter discussing the failed attempt by the opposition in Venezuela to topple Maduro. He notes that while there were no guarantees of success, the president's characteristic lack of resolve and focus basically ensured its failure. Naturally, he has criticisms for other administration officials as well, but, as we all know, only one man is ultimately responsible (even if he tries to not take any responsibility for anything): "Perhaps Trump forget he made the actual decision on policy, except when he said he was the only one who made decisions" (Bolton 276).

1. President Trump: as always, the president constantly changes his positions on the foreign policy decision. Bolton again implies that the issue stems from from Trump's obvious lack of experience in and knowledge of American policy. As constantly demonstrated throughout the administration, we are frequently presented with the image of a president infatuated with the military as a personal toy rather than the essential institution full of individual Americans (e.g., his desire for military parades, desiring to "collect" generals in his administration, denigrating any military official who disagrees with him, attacking war heroes, defending war criminals, etc.). Bolton shows this here with Trump's initial desire to "send in the troops" to force regime change; even a hawk like Bolton knows the complete foolishness of such a course of action. Trump is also shown again to lack patience for actual diplomacy, wanting immediate results to issues that have decades or centuries of historical conflict; these issues all prevent a clear sense of purpose within the administration, with different officials working at cross-purposes trying to follow the inconsistency of the commander-in-chief:

The President vacillated and wobbled, exacerbating internal Administration disagreements rather than resolving them, and repeatedly impeding our efforts to carry out a policy. (247)

Naturally, it wouldn't be a complete foreign policy story without another scene of Trump getting pantsed by one of America's traditional foes; here Bolton notes that Trump ridiculously calls Putin and takes in all the obvious lies from the Russian dictator as true.

2. Treasury Secretary Mnuchin: by this point in the book, it is blatantly obvious that Bolton has an extremely low opinion of Mnuchin, who usually preferred a slower approach to all things requiring action, especially in terms of imposing sanctions and other levers of diplomatic pressure (he even puts down the insult of calling Mnuchin basically a Democrat). In Bolton's mind, Mnuchin does not have a great understanding of international priorities with a focus on oil interests and credit card companies (269).

3. Secretary of State Pompeo: while Pompeo usually gets a more favorable view from Bolton, in this situation the NSA criticizes his lack of clear control of the State Department, and more relevant to the final failure, his decision to evacuate the embassy (Bolton attributes this to a fear of a Benghazi situation).