“…Chairman Kim has a great and beautiful vision for his country, and only the United States, with me as President, can make that vision come true. He will do the right thing because he is far too smart not to, and he does not want to disappoint his friend, President Trump!
That was our North Korea policy.”
It’s easy to hate John Bolton! He just has that type of manner about him, that type of un-connectable personality and reputation… that type of face! And so, many people will only ever open this book for gossipy quotes like the one above, and reaffirmations of the worst things already known about America’s forty fifth President, Donald Trump.
What dominated Bolton’s brief moment as National Security Advisor, through endless flights and meetings, was North Korea. And it doesn’t seem like anyone else in the media, or the world, is willing to say the obvious, so I will: thank god he was there!
That quote from Donald Trump is, of course, no longer shocking for most people. And for anyone who has been paying attention, nor should it be. But what seems to have slipped-by over the years, and what the uncomplicated ego of Trump is now shadowing further away, is that this “policy” – once shaken free from the infantile language – is remarkably similar to that of previous American administrations, and that of every South Korean administration, with the mild exceptions of Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye.
Like a grizzled, veteran police officer, Bolton sees the world through single, unflinching eyes. ‘Criminals are everywhere, and always looking for opportunities. The only way to stop them, or reform them, is through strength and punishment’. So he gets almost everything wrong about North Korea – and still none of it matters, because he does a much better, and much less dangerous, job of getting it wrong.
If you didn’t already have your mind inside this level of diplomacy, there is a lot of travel, late nights, and empty planning. Shuttling between leaders and countries, hoping to get just a few sympathetic people speaking in the same voice – only to be quickly disappointed once your smiling, nodding, counterparts leave the room. So you book another flight, have the same meeting, get the same smiles, and then the same disappointment.
There is a certain rhythm of dishonesty to all cross-border relationships. But when the point of discussion is a neighbour with weapons of mass destruction, concentration camps, a history of launching both full-scale and limited warfare, and who threatens more of it each day as they flood the sky with new missile technology, it shouldn’t be this hard. And the fact that it is, says something important, something that Bolton seemed to understand instinctively…
The real problem on the Korean peninsula – the barrier to peace and denuclearisation – is not North Korea, but South Korea!
Watching the Trump-Kim “fandango” playout, and hoping that “the whole thing would collapse”, Bolton became a happy target for the North Korean propaganda machine, accusing him of trying to undermine the ongoing talks – a badge that Bolton wears proudly across the pages of The Room Where It Happened. Just as he does being called “human scum”. There are some regimes that it is an “honour” to be on the bad side of!
But what made Bolton so off-putting for Kim Jong-un, as well as Moon Jae-in in South Korea, was that he refused the hype and heady atmosphere. Every time Trump grew hot and romanced – “I want to go [to meet Kim at the DMZ]. It will be great theatre” – Bolton was the boring, overbearing Victorian mother, nagging away about the importance of remaining a virgin until someone produces an engagement ring… or, at least, a “full, baseline declaration on their nuclear and ballistic-missile programs”.
This is where the “Libya model” begins to matter, and where the morality of ordinary people begins to fail. The model runs something like this: ‘when a rogue state begins to pursue nuclear/chemical weapons, other countries should respond with economic sanctions. If that rogue state then has a change of heart and wants an end to those sanctions, it should first give up its weapons program’. This should leave most people asking, ‘where’s the controversy?’
Well, seven years after Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi gave up his bombs, he threatened and began initiating a genocide of his own people – promising out loud that there would be “rivers of blood” – and was stopped from doing so by international forces following international law. We should all be as shocked as Bolton is that, somehow, the universal lesson here seems to have been ‘never voluntarily disarm’, as opposed to ‘never commit genocide’.
But North Korea is different. They don’t need nuclear weapons, and never have, because they already hold an insurmountable military deterrent: tens of thousands of artillery placements within shelling-range of Seoul and the threat of another all-out ground invasion similar to 1950. Any attack on Pyongyang comes at the non-nuclear cost of millions of South Korean lives, within a matter of hours.
Through his hardened Realist lens, Bolton misses this, because he also misses the subtleties of language and behaviour playing out around him. In a world wholly explainable through power, what naturally becomes irrelevant is ideology, and North Korea’s internal propaganda (how North Koreans think and how they see themselves in the world). Of course, it shouldn’t be!
It is amazing how often people seem to forget that there are two Koreas! Not two independent nation-states that happen to share a border, but two governments, two systems, both claiming and competing (enshrined in both constitutions) for ownership of the whole peninsula. ‘Competing’ is the important word here, because since the late 1970s it was increasingly difficult for the northern regime to deny its economic inferiority. And when the famine of the mid-1990s made it impossible, then-leader Kim Jong-il needed a new source of legitimacy, a reason for why North Koreans should not abandon him in favour of their alternative government south of the 38th parallel.
His answer was Songun, or ‘military first’ policy, and the promise of the “final victory”! Beyond the tuned-in ears of South Korea and Japan, neither of these terms have translated very well. It is a horrible cliché, but context is everything here. Military first is not a response to a fear of invasion, but an excuse for an economic crisis (‘the leader is so busy defending us that he can no longer take care of our daily needs’). And final victory is not a military triumph but actually the reunification of Korea.
This is why North Korea behave the way they do – from the outside erratic, bellicose and militant; from the inside protective, resolute and longing to embrace their southern family.
During his time in the Trump administration, Bolton came close to grasping this – all the information was there, he just couldn’t put it together in the right way. Most of the help here came from Japan, with Shinzo Abe telling him that the North Koreans “have staked their lives on their system… they will go back to their old ways”, and importantly having it explained to him by Japanese officials that the whole diplomatic outreach was coming as much from Seoul as it was from Pyongyang; all a part of their “unification agenda”.
Whereas South Korea obviously don’t share the North’s military first policy, they do however have – deep within their national identity and across the policies of multiple administrations – the same idea of a final victory; just in different language and with a different government. And there was Moon Jae-in, at every step, pushing the Trump-Kim friendship closer together with “schizophrenic” enthusiasm. It takes a while, but Bolton gets there in the end: “I was revising my earlier view, wondering if greater South Korean involvement in denuclearization might not complicate things”.
At one point in this summit season, when the American negotiators are worrying about the legal implications of an “end-of-war declaration”, the North Korean delegation look back at them casually and say that it was just “something Moon wanted” and that “they didn’t care about it”. When Bolton then muses aloud “which of course raised the question of why we were considering it at all”, you can almost feel his head dramatically turning, eyes narrowed in suspicion at the double agent he has just sniffed out.
His mind made-up, and now thoroughly pissed off, Bolton doesn’t need any confirmation, so he doesn’t go looking. But it is there, and easy to find. Moon Jae-in pledged more than once during his election campaign to achieve a North-South confederation before the end of his term in office - with less than two years remaining, he is fast running out of time.
Much of our understanding here comes from the work of Brian Myers (author of The Cleanest Race). And it’s worthwhile considering just how this type of ideology quickly becomes a trap, and how little can be done to change things considering the ramifications in Pyongyang of dropping the military first bravado:
“The left wing is wrong because you cannot bribe or sweet talk a country into committing political suicide, the right wing is wrong because you can’t bully it into doing that either, the centre is wrong for thinking you can get the Chinese to persuade them to do it.”
But something can be done. North Korea exists and behaves the way they do today, because they are playing for a South Korean audience. An audience that is always willing to forgive and excuse Kim Jong-un – just as they did with his father and grandfather before him – because they also hug reunification as their highest goal; thinking it will happen on their terms and not his. For the administration in Seoul, a belligerent North Korea is better than an indifferent North Korea. And in that, is also the solution…
Seventy five years of North Korean aggression could all be drawn to a swift end tomorrow by the Blue House pushing through a constitutional reform denouncing reunification, under any and all circumstances. As the news of the economic miracle eventually travelled north, so would this. Without a Korean neighbour to unify with, the final victory would suddenly no longer make sense, and so neither would the malnutrition and the suffering… neither would the Kim dynasty.
But some people would rather have a brother in prison with the ambiguous hope that he will one day be released, than have that same brother alive, free and happy, but living in a different home.
John Bolton is an unfortunate character in American political life. Impossibly stubborn and bathed in cold, obnoxious emotions, when he forces quotes from Winston Churchill into the text, it is easy to read this as an overt self-comparison: both misunderstood, both friendless, both to be vindicated with time. If so, then Bolton is still waiting, as well as getting a little impatient, because through the pages of The Room Where It Happened, he is also consciously searching for rehabilitation.
It is a new side to the man, and it doesn’t fit him well. Trying to be funny and lighten his image, paragraphs regularly end with pithy and pubescent turns - “How encouraging”, “Just what we needed.” And it might have worked if it wasn’t surrounded by the stuffy, business-like prose that comes a little more naturally to him, with “Trump said…” or “Trump had…” lazily intruding into every paragraph, as well as favourite words – like “certainly” – echoing without shame, page after page.
When Bolton was first hired, he arrived at the White House and was greeted by Chief of Staff John Kelly, with this: “You can’t imagine how desperate I am to get out of here. This is a bad place to work, as you will find out”. During his time in the job Bolton kicked and screamed and fought with the President – as much as was possible – pulling him back from the ledge when no-one else dared.
This didn’t get the world any closer to seeing a denuclearised North Korea, but it did help the world to see the North Korean problem for what it really is, even if Bolton didn’t properly see it himself. The next time Kim Jong-un launches a series of nuclear-capable ballistic missiles over Japanese islands, and the government in Seoul dismisses them as “projectiles”, there might be more people alert to the game they are playing; and the liberties that they are taking with everyone else’s peace and security.
At the time though, riding in the cheap seats of Air Force One, it all “felt like Custer’s Last Stand”, like John Bolton was out gunned, hopelessly out numbered, surrounded on all sides, and yet still charging down a hill to slaughter and certain death, trying and failing to go out on his shield – “the whole thing was a waste of time”.