National Security adviser with no heart

Graeme Wood

I do not normally watch Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, but when the fate of the Earth is at stake, I make an exception. On Friday night, after an extraordinary week of brinkmanship in the Persian Gulf, Carlson delivered a seven-minute philippic against John Bolton, President Trump’s national security adviser ...

Carlson is wrong about tapeworms, which usually get expelled after a single dose of praziquantel, and do damage only before emerging, not after. Is he also wrong about Bolton? ... Bolton ... agrees with Trump: America must be made great again, and the rest of the planet can go to hell if it tries to stand in our way. Trump bombed ISIS indiscriminately, but he happily befriends tyrants if they join Team America. Bolton is no different. His closest friends among the Iranian opposition belong to the Mujahedin-e Khalq, a cultlike religious group that was still a State Department–designated foreign terrorist organization when he spoke at one of its rallies in Paris. The group hates the Iranian government, though ...

... as a matter of international relations, rapid fluctuation between policies is disastrous ...

If the national security adviser has no heart, and the president has no brain, their adversaries will play their respective deficits off each other, appealing to the heart when the brain says no ... Presidents have disagreed with their national security advisers before. Now, however, the split is real and visible. National security advisers have, in the past, had confidence that their presidents would at least approach international security issues consistently, so that threats bore the proper menace, and enemies could not respond by waiting around for the boss to change his mind ...

... once it becomes known that the president favors the advice not of his government but of his favorite television host, Americans (and foreign powers) might conclude that we have no government at all ...

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/tucker-carlson-versus-john-bolton/592372/