This article appeared in The Washington Post on May 30, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
May 30, 2021

The United States and the European Union made a strategic mistake last summer by mishandling the unprecedented protests against Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko’s autocratic regime. Now, after Lukashenko’s commission of air piracy on May 23 to kidnap an opposition critic, the West appears set on compounding its error by driving Belarus further into the welcoming arms of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Western capitals reacted with essentially unanimous condemnation when the Lukashenko government forced a Ryanair flight transiting Belarusian airspace to land and arrested passenger Roman Protasevich, an opposition journalist, and his girlfriend, Russian activist Sofia Sapega. Both kidnap victims were soon displayed in “confession” videos possibly obtained by threats or torture.

Rhetorical condemnation of the seizures came quickly, and E.U. and U.S. sanctions on the Lukashenko regime were announced. Lukashenko responded by accusing the West of launching “hybrid warfare” against Belarus.

Since Soviet days, Belarus and Russia have had an integrated air-defense system, leading to speculation about Moscow’s possible role or at least acquiescence in the kidnapping. Putin’s spokesman called such suspicions “obsessive Russophobia.” Putin pledged support to Lukashenko when the two met in Sochi, Russia, on Friday.

There is no question the West rightly concluded that Belarus committed air piracy, behavior entirely consistent with the regime’s autocratic methods. And as Alexei Navalny and many others could testify, it has the hallmarks of Putin’s equally authoritarian state next door.

Unfortunately, however, virtue-signaling, even accompanied by economic sanctions, does not constitute a satisfactory Western strategy to resolve a vastly more important issue: What is the future for Belarus as a whole? Will it be encouraged to follow the path of former Warsaw Pact states and at least some former Soviet republics into the West? Or will it be allowed to suffer full annexation into Russia?

President Biden needs to decide the answers to these questions and how to make them happen before his June 16 summit with Putin. There is no sign he knows what his answers are.

Last August, amid huge protests in Belarus prompted by a thoroughly rigged Lukashenko election, demonstrators said they were inclined toward neither Russia nor the West and did not want to be pawns in any international struggle. That view was supported by the lead E.U. foreign-affairs official. The Trump administration, consumed by the 2020 election campaign, said and did little. The protests failed. Lukashenko remained in power, and quiet returned. Until now. Will we repeat this strategic mistake?

It may be true that Belarus’s dissidents simply want to end Lukashenko’s oppression, without regard for the geopolitical environment in which Belarus exists. If so, it is touchingly — and dangerously — naive. No one in Moscow, certainly not Putin, sees Belarus’s fate as anything but closely tied to Russia.

Caught between NATO’s easternmost reach and Russia’s border, Belarus and other former Soviet republics are in a gray space that invites insecurity and Russian interventionism. Simply looking at the borders Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine share with Belarus, Western Europeans would see that Minsk’s future is intimately tied to their own.

Supporting Belarus’s political opposition is thus not simply about deploring the thwarting of human rights through corrupted elections or the kidnapping of dissidents, unpalatable as those transgressions are. The potential freedom of all 9.5 million Belarusian citizens is at stake, since integrating Belarus into Russia would all but extinguish the chance for real liberty.

The fact that the West’s attention turned away from Belarus after the unsuccessful anti-Lukashenko demonstrations last summer, and refocused only following the Protasevich air-napping, shows that ad hoc, piecemeal approaches to a strategic problem are unsustainable and unlikely to succeed. Nor does it advance the Belarusian opposition’s cause to ignore the larger strategic context.

One approach, undoubtedly distasteful to the high-minded, would be to develop a way out for Lukashenko. Secure exile for himself and a select few followers in some well-appointed venue might be attractive to him at the right moment.

But such an extrication doesn’t happen overnight. It requires complex planning, specifically in this case to deter any possible Russian military moves into Belarus, as in Moscow’s seizure of Crimea from Ukraine or its creation of other “frozen conflicts” on Russia’s periphery. One potential bargaining chip: Putin’s prized Nord Stream 2 pipeline to Germany still isn’t complete, and it can be stopped at will, assuming the West and Germany in particular still have one.

Some may sniff at the idea of “impunity” for Lukashenko, but other former communist countries have decided that looking to the future outweighs a backward-facing, prosecution-at-all-costs strategy. Nelson Mandela’s South Africa did something similar, employing a post-apartheid “truth and reconciliation” policy.

We cannot underestimate how difficult are the prospects facing Belarus. It is certain, however, that sanctions and one-off expressions of displeasure with Lukashenko will not change his behavior or regime. Merely driving him deeper into Putin’s embrace risks losing all of Belarus, essentially forever. Time was growing short after last summer’s rigged elections. It is even shorter today.

He aggresses in a gray zone between NATO and Russia, so let’s remove it

This article appeared in The National Review on May 13, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
May 13, 2021

The Biden administration billed Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s May 6 visit to Kyiv as showing support for Ukraine’s struggle against Russian aggression. Instead, Blinken served up only rhetorical pablum, retreating from what senior Trump officials (although not Trump himself) did to back Ukraine and re­turning to Obama-era blandishments. Vladimir Putin must be delighted.

Inexplicably, moreover, Blinken equated Russia’s belligerence with Ukraine’s admittedly substantial corruption problems, stating that there is “aggression from outside . . . and, in effect, aggression from within.” This moral equivalence is nonsensical. For both Washington and Kyiv, corruption is hardly as strategically important as Moscow’s threat. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky won election by campaigning against corruption, and while he is struggling to prevail, lecturing him publicly will not improve his performance.

More fundamentally, President Biden still has no policy to deal with Russia (or China) in Europe. During his April 13 telephone call with Putin, for example, Biden raised a long list of issues and ended by inviting Putin to a bilateral summit. Strategic coherence, however, requires allocating priorities and resources among national-security problems, not just listing them. Absent substantive policy direction, process steps such as summits are theater at best and often counter­productive, highlighting the vacuum that lies beneath public rhetoric.

Biden’s inherited problems, complicated by the passage of time, nonetheless increasingly require urgent solutions. After the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact collapsed, NATO’s eastward expansion never reached a decisive conclusion. Six Eastern European and Caucasus countries were left in a gray zone between Russia and NATO’s new borders, thereby remaining vulnerable to Moscow’s desire to reestablish hegemony within the former USSR. (The five Central Asian states, having their own complicated relationships with Russia, deserve separate analysis.)

Following the USSR’s disintegration, Moscow vigorously sought to contest the gray zone: creating “frozen conflicts” in Moldova and Georgia through direct Russian military involvement, and manipulating Azerbaijani–Armenian hostilities over Nagorno-Karabakh. Russia kept Belarus politically and economically close, still its strategy today but an increasingly difficult one after 2020’s popular opposition to the Minsk regime.

The Kremlin tried to mirror its Belarus policy in Ukraine, because both are central to its vision of “Russia.” Moscow initially succeeded in Kyiv, but the 2004 Orange Revolution brought such dramatic changes that, in April 2008, George W. Bush proposed putting Ukraine and Georgia on a sure path to NATO membership. Germany and France rejected Bush’s proposal, and four months later Russia invaded Georgia. Russia subsequently subverted the Orange Revolution through fraud and skullduggery but was in turn reversed by another popular uprising in 2014. In retaliation, Putin seized Crimea outright and created a new frozen conflict in eastern Ukraine.

However messy the history, Russian aggressiveness within the former USSR harms U.S. interests by destabilizing the region and, left unchecked, threatens instability across Europe. Virtually all the states of “new Europe” — the post–Cold War generation of NATO members — believe, with good reason, that blocking Moscow’s interference is critical to their growth and stability. Old Europe, especially Germany and France, is still somewhat tone-deaf here, so the diplomatic heavy lifting ahead for Washington should not be underestimated — par for the course even at the Cold War’s height.

Russia’s belligerence in Europe also shows its increasing, disturbing closeness to China, a relationship reflecting Moscow’s importance to Beijing for supplying hydrocarbons and high-tech weapons and the regimes’ perception of common interests in shielding the likes of Iran and North Korea from U.S. pressure. Breaking this emerging axis should be a high U.S. priority and is entirely consistent with thwarting Russian interference across its European borders.

China’s effort to purchase Ukraine’s major aerospace firm Motor Sich, successfully blocked by Kyiv after considerable American effort, exemplifies this point. Standing up to China’s existential challenge to the West as a whole will also require diplomatic heavy lifting in Europe.

As long as a gray zone remains be­tween NATO and Russia, instability will persist. Shrinking this inherently dangerous geographic space reduces potential Russian mischief, and ultimately confronts Moscow again with the question whether to join the West or oppose it.

Ultimately, inclusion in NATO is the only way for the endangered countries to minimize the inevitable uncertainty and instability between the alliance and Russia. Previously, NATO has rightly shied from adding new members with foreign combatants on their soil, seeing that as inheriting a war and thereby triggering Article Five of the Washington Treaty. Reducing the gray zone does not immediately require any new NATO memberships, but the alliance can surely devise an appropriate status to handle today’s European problem.

To get there, our primary focus should be to substantially augment Zelensky’s diplomatic and military efforts to expel Russia from eastern Ukraine, and then to impose steeply increasing costs on Russia if it fails to respond diplomatically. Succeeding will not solve Crimea, but it will clear the decks to do so. Critically, we must keep Europe focused on rolling back Moscow’s blatant cross-border military action.

Moldova, tucked between Ukraine and Romania, is a frozen conflict ready for melting. Purportedly independent Transnistria, a Russian invention, exists separately from Moldova only through Moscow’s continued military presence. Simply raising international attention to this post–Cold War anomaly would startle the Kremlin, and a determined new government in Chisinau now provides the opportunity for Washington to step up.

Similarly, in Georgia, it is time to push back against Russia’s presence in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, with the aim of re-creating the April 2008 situation in which NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia was serious and feasible. Ukraine and Georgia remain the two most strategically important gray-zone countries. In turn, taken more seriously after Biden’s acknowledgement of Turkey’s genocidal campaign during World War I, Washington can then address the Azerbaijan–Armenian conflict. Real progress, however, will likely have to abide Turkey’s 2023 elections. If incumbent president Recep Tayyip Erdogan loses, much will be possible. But if he wins, Turkey will be dangerously close to removing itself from NATO by spurning Mustafa Kemal’s post-Ottoman vision, and thereby badly undermining NATO’s position in the Caucasus.

Belarus is the hardest challenge of all, with alliance membership inconceivable for quite some time. Yet however difficult it may be, the U.S. cannot leave Belarus to Moscow uncontested. The map alone shows how geopolitically critical Belarus is for Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltic republics, and how grave a threat an offensive Russian military presence would be. Ironically, rising pro-democracy sentiment increases the risk of Russian military intervention, and perhaps an outright Anschluss, even as the popular discontent demonstrates that moving Belarus westward may be more feasible than previously thought. NATO needs more outreach into Belarus, and its Eastern European members should play a major role. Belarus also implicates the related question whether Sweden and Finland will finally accept the inevitable and join NATO, thereby bolstering the Baltic republics and others.

Russia’s promises not to intervene in its former republics — and its protestations that its intentions are benign — carry no weight. Russia will stop meddling when it knows that it cannot succeed and that crossing a NATO boundary (of some sort) will bring inevitable and highly damaging consequences. The sooner we make that clear, the better.

June’s back-to-back G-7 and NATO summits in London and Brussels, respectively, afford President Biden an opportunity to prove he has more to offer than recycled rhetoric. If he fails to deliver next month, there is trouble ahead for Ukraine, America, and Europe.

If mutually acceptable arms-control treaties are suitable for Russia, France, Britain and the US, they are suitable for China

This article appeared in The Telegraph on March 22, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
March 23, 2021

Boris Johnson’s new national security strategy has generated two major controversies. First, the usual suspects are agonising about its laudable aim of increasing the ceiling on Britain’s nuclear-weapons stockpile. Second, characterising Russia as the most “acute threat” but China as only a “systemic challenge”, magnified by a hunger for trade, has created palpable uncertainty. Does Johnson’s government really accept that Beijing is truly an adversary (and likely an enemy), or does it pine for its predecessors’ accommodationism?

These issues are intimately related. A larger nuclear arsenal, part of a significant defence-spending increase, is prudent. “Global Britain” faces, as do we all, China’s burgeoning nuclear weapons capabilities and increasing risks of proliferation by North Korea, Iran, and others. The Cold War’s bipolar, US-USSR paradigm has long been obsolete, even as we continue defending against Russia’s massive nuclear arsenal, and its unacceptable behaviour in cyberspace, Europe and the Middle East.  

Additionally, the UK needs a nuclear deterrent against biological and chemical weapons threats. Covid-19 proves how susceptible we are to biological weapons attacks. Russia’s attacks against the Skripals and Alexei Navalny, and Bashar al-Assad’s myriad assaults on Syrian civilians, show that chemical weapons usage is hardly far-fetched, whether from major powers, rogue states, or terrorists.

Britain need make no apologies for enhancing its nuclear stockpile. And so doing only underlines the related imperative of a strong, united international stance against China’s increasingly hostile posture.

Last week’s Anchorage meeting between top American and Chinese diplomats was a wakeup call to anyone who hasn’t already encountered Beijing’s “wolf warrior diplomacy”. This is not just a new look, but proof that Deng Xiaoping’s policy of “hide your capacities and bide your time” no longer governs. Indo-Pacific nations already understand, and are acting accordingly. A new “Quad” (India, Australia, Japan and America) held its first summit (virtually), also last week, not as an explicit anti-China alliance, but with the potential to become one. The North Atlantic Quad was critical in its time, but today’s real action is the Indo-Pacific, as Johnson’s Global Britain vision recognises.

The Indo-Pacific Quad members all have extensive economic ties with China, but the political-risk calculus of their trade and investment is changing rapidly. Beijing’s belligerence toward Taiwan;  its sheltering of North Korea; and its provocations in the East and South China Seas, in Southeast Asia, and along the Line of Actual Control with India, speak volumes. Prior China trade, capital investment and supply-chain decisions by businesses and governments alike were made in a vastly different risk environment.

As tensions rise sharply, there is no need for a general government-directed “unwinding” of economic ties with China. Businesses themselves will choose to hedge against the new risks, re-shoring manufacturing and investment and significantly reducing exposure to China. National security threats do call for government action, such as against Huawei and ZTE, Beijing’s Trojan Horses aimed at controlling vital 5G networks.

New politico-military approaches like greater UK nuclear capabilities are critical in confronting China’s overall threat. As Moscow and Washington re-negotiate the 2010 New START Treaty, President Biden has repeated his predecessor’s call to include Beijing in any new nuclear-weapons scheme. Beijing has so far rejected this initiative, saying its weapons stockpile is “insubstantial” relative to Russia and America. But we cannot stand idly by while China, purely of its own volition, increases its nuclear forces until it reaches rough parity with the top two, and only then engage in nuclear arms control negotiations.  

How, then, can Beijing be brought to the table? By having London and Paris agree to participate in the diplomacy, thus engaging all five legitimate nuclear powers under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, who by happy coincidence also comprise the permanent members of the UN Security Council. Last century’s Washington naval treaties provide precedent for differential weapons limits on states of varying strengths, so there is no legitimate historical or conceptual objection to such a negotiation. If mutually acceptable arms-control treaties are suitable for Russia, France, Britain and the US, they are suitable for China. And if Beijing still objects? What further evidence do you need to conclude China is not simply a “systemic challenge” but an “acute threat”? The UK’s strategy can then be revised accordingly.

Biden officials’ urgency about emissions makes them likely to sacrifice more-important goals.

This article appeared in The Wall Street Journal on February 3, 2020. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
February 3, 2021

President Biden is eager to make climate change a central issue, and he can expect an intense debate. The trade-offs are complicated and the politics are difficult and uncertain. But the biggest challenge may be international, particularly dealing with China, America’s pre-eminent adversary. Does the Biden administration have the slightest idea how to reconcile its global environmental goals with its China strategy?

The early signs aren’t encouraging. Right or wrong, climate change wasn’t on President Trump’s priority list for dealing with China. But it is paramount to Mr. Biden. In Beijing’s eyes, this makes Washington the demandeur—in diplomatic parlance, the one asking for something. It is never a preferred position in negotiations. You want China to take action on climate change? asks Xi Jinping. Let’s talk about what you’re going to give to get it.

Climate diplomacy czar John Kerry knows he has a problem. Taking his first swing last week, he whiffed. Mr. Kerry told the world, “The stakes on climate change just simply couldn’t be any higher than they are right now. It is existential.” He added that Mr. Biden is “totally seized by this issue.” Asked about handling China, given the many contentious disagreements, Mr. Kerry answered that “those issues will never be traded for anything” relating to climate change, which “is a critical stand-alone issue” that it is “urgent that we find a way to compartmentalize, to move forward.”

He didn’t explain how he’d compartmentalize. Nor does former Obama official John Podesta, who recently said that climate change “changes defense posture, it changes foreign policy posture” and “begins to drive a lot of decision making.” He then contradicted himself, urging Mr. Biden to build “a protected lane in which the other issues don’t shut down the conversation on climate change.” Driving down that protected lane will be interesting.

Climate adviser Gina McCarthy compounded the confusion, stressing that “we have to start shifting to clean energy, but it has to be manufactured in the United States of America, you know, not in other countries.” Her own words prove that “compartmentalization” is a fantasy. Moreover, she underscored the risk, distinctly present under Mr. Trump, that national security concerns can easily devolve into old-fashioned industrial policy.

Unfortunately for Mr. Biden, China has a vote, too. Beijing reacted quickly, criticizing Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s affirmation that oppressing the Uighurs constitutes genocide. A Chinese government account tweeted: “China is willing to work with the US on climate change. But such cooperation cannot stand unaffected by the overall China-US relations. It is impossible to ask for China’s support in global affairs while interfering in its domestic affairs and undermining its interests.” In response, Mr. Blinken repeated Mr. Kerry’s compartmentalization mantra.

China’s Asian neighbors worry about the consequences if the U.S. makes climate its priority. There are many reasons why climate change should rank lower than the Biden administration puts it. Plenty of us still believe that wind turbines don’t rise to the level of intercontinental ballistic missiles as a national security concern.

Beijing will obfuscate the stakes and trade-offs of its demands. Mr. Xi won’t propose substantially reducing carbon emissions in exchange for Mr. Biden recognizing the mainland’s sovereignty over Taiwan. But Chinese planners are certainly contemplating how to slice and dice their policy choices to achieve precisely that and other objectionable goals more subtly. Beijing’s negotiators could, say, be stubborn about climate-change issues with Mr. Kerry until Uighur sanctions are scaled down—then stay stubborn until the U.S. acknowledges Chinese sovereignty over the South China Sea.

It isn’t enough to say that closer cooperation with the European Union will increase American bargaining leverage with China. In recent months, the German-led EU has been thoroughly accommodating Beijing on both trade and strategic issues, such as the threat Huawei poses to 5G telecommunications. For now, teaming up with a limp-wristed EU could leave America in a squeeze between China and our purported allies.

Nor can America ignore its Asian friends. India will resist greater global climate-change regulation and any weakening of America’s posture on China. Japan may be closer to Mr. Biden on climate, but it opposes significant concessions on security. Taiwan will be justifiably nervous for four years. Southeast Asia and Australia also have critical interests, which they won’t cast aside lightly.

Success on climate change and China won’t be as easy as the Biden administration may imagine.

An expiring arms-control deal is a chance to address hypersonics and make China come to the table.

This article appeared in FORUM.EU on January 18, 2020. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
January 18, 2020

The United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union, now completed at last, is the most consequential event in EU history for its aggregate military power. And it is entirely negative. At a stroke, the EU has lost its second-largest armed force, with no prospect that remaining member states, individually or collectively can fill the gaping hole left by London’s departure. The European Union has long been less than the sum of its parts, and that sum is now considerably smaller. Decades of fantasising about an independent “EU army” should have come to an end on December 31.

That won’t happen, of course, because many Europeans have long-believed, often quietly and in discrete conversations, that Europe was “a state under construction,” and, like all proper states, had to have a proper state’s accoutrements: army, central bank, currency, and more. But some aspects of national sovereignty are almost impossible even for the most fervent Europhiles to relinquish, and military power is understandably the hardest of all.

The fantasising should stop for reasons unrelated to Brexit, notably the existence of Nato. The Atlantic alliance is perfectly capable of doing anything the EU could do, has been doing it for seven decades, and is poised to become even more important in the coming years. Britain’s renewed independence will have a powerfully uplifting effect in Nato’s politico-military decision-making, and more broadly, such as in the UN Security Council, with London now entirely free from the cumbersome, puree-making EU common foreign and security policy.

Some persistent advocates of greater independent EU military capabilities are arguing that Washington is no longer a reliable partner, but that is false. Unquestionably, Donald Trump was no friend of Nato, but Europeans should not draw long-term conclusions from his attitudes toward Nato or international affairs generally. He never proceeded according to coherent philosophical or policy logic, and history will rapidly judge his administration to be an unfortunate aberration. Trump saw problems in narrowly transactional (and largely financial) terms, and through the prism of how events could be made to benefit him personally. Extrapolating future US policy from Trump’s “policies,” therefore, is not only wrong, but dangerous.

That is not to say that European Nato members can now safely ignore the 2014 Cardiff Commitments, especially the pledge to spend two per cent of their GDP’s on defence capabilities by 2024. Trump’s obsession with the need to raise Nato spending may have been expressed in his usual idiosyncratic fashion, but it reflects the consistent view, across America’s political spectrum, that its allies must better understand the array of threats facing the west, and the need for everyone to pull their weight.

In a famous 2016 interview just before leaving office, for example, Barack Obama chastised Britain and France, along with many others, as “free riders” for their inadequate 2011 performance against Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. Obama Secretaries of Defense Robert Gates and Leon Panetta repeatedly echoed these complaints. The cost-sharing issue is not going away under Biden, both because he likely agrees with Obama, and because Republicans won’t let it.

Even leaving Brexit and Trump aside, EU efforts on defence matters have been, and are almost certain to remain, long on rhetoric and process and very short on substance and resources. After considerable fanfare and arduous effort almost twenty years ago for example, the “Berlin Plus” agreements have resulted in only two EU peacekeeping operations, both merely taking over from prior Nato forces. While Commission President Ursula von der Leyen may urge the EU to develop “credible military capabilities,” that is far easier said than done. It would be much more persuasive to see Germany raise its defence spending to the Cardiff target, which von der Leyen knows from her tenure as FRG Defence Minister is not going to happen; Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition government with the Social Democrats has struggled just to maintain defence spending, let alone increase it. The same is true across Europe. As 2020 ended, Reuters reported that the first EU defence review “found that only 60% of the national troops and weapons nominally available to Nato are in a fit state to be deployed.” Pushing for more “independence” from Washington could leave Europe bereft of America’s presence and continuing inadequate defence spending EU-wide.

Von der Leyen also said, after Brexit, that “our future is made in Europe.” But this too is fantasy. Global threats, from China in particular, but also from the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and international terrorism, are growing, not receding. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s vision of “Global Britain” is considerably more astute than an inwardly-focused “little Europe.” European capitals would be better advised to heed the suggestion made by former Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar to expand Nato into a global organisation, including possible new members like Japan, Australia, Singapore and Israel. There is no need to create a “league of democracies,” as some have suggested, to confront increasing threats from authoritarian regimes. We already have one in Nato, which simply needs to be enlarged beyond its birthplace in the North Atlantic area.

The basic reality is that a sustained programme to create a meaningful EU military would constitute a dagger pointed at Nato’s heart. That is undoubtedly what some really hope for, and not just our adversaries, but even many in Europe and America. Let us hope they are disappointed, at least until the lions lie down with the lambs.

Former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton on the Trump administration’s top foreign policy objectives:

“The two immediate threats are the proliferation of nuclear, chemical weapons. We see Iran and North Korea as the sort of two leading-edge threats in that regard. And then, second, the continuing threat of radical Islamic terrorism, with ISIS, al-Qaeda, the Taliban in Afghanistan, all really threatening us in palpable ways today.”

“We need to have a long-term strategy to keep Russia in check in both Eastern and Central Europe and in the Middle East.”

“The relationship with China, I think, will be the dominant international issue for the United States for the rest of this century, and we’re not doing well right now.”

This article appeared in the Boston Globe on January 30, 2017. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
January 30, 2017

British Prime Minister Theresa May’s just-completed visit to Philadelphia and Washington came at a critical time for both her country and the United States, and particularly for the one-week old Trump administration. Rarely in peacetime have two national leaders faced a more consequential opportunity to redirect, dramatically and swiftly, the course of international affairs.

The prospects here lie at the core of the alliance structures America has created since 1945 to protect its vital global interests. Strong and lasting alliances are not merely transactional. They do not rest on accounting examinations of recent debits and credits. Instead, they rest on profoundly important shared values and interests, foundations that endure transitory political and economic bumps in the relationship. This is how the US-UK “special relationship” was built over the years since it was forged in World War II.

May and Trump made it clear in their public remarks that they intend to rejuvenate the “special relationship,” in both economic and political affairs. That does not mean they will necessarily agree on everything, exemplified by their likely conflicting views on sanctions imposed on Russia for its military adventurism across international borders in Ukraine. Nonetheless, a newly independent Britain and a new Trump administration have far more uniting than dividing them.

May’s government is currently undertaking the unprecedented task of unwinding itself from the cumbersome, bureaucratic and regulatory morass of the European Union. The Brexit decision, made last June 23 in a referendum, confounded trans-Atlantic business and political elites, who could not imagine that the desire for mere self-government could overcome the secular theology reflected in their conception of Europe’s “ever closer union.” May herself opposed Brexit, but now leads a government whose place in history will be determined by whether it succeeds or fails in exiting the EU on terms advantageous to Britain.

In America, Trump’s victory upended decades of belief in multilateral trade deals essentially for their own sake. The new president has said he believes in free trade, insisting correctly that true free trade is not reflected in the dirigiste, “managed trade” provisions that characterize so many so-called free trade agreements. Perhaps even more importantly, Trump has said emphatically that he will follow a revolutionary principle in administering trade treaties: He will expect the other parties to adhere to their obligations, and will not conceal or ignore their violations.

The potential for a dramatically different trade and investment agreement between America and Britain, despite obvious risks and difficulties, should be the highest and most immediate priority. Both countries can shed layers of stifling government regulations in the process, and London and New York could sustain and enhance their reputations as the financial capitals of the world, while competitors in Europe and Asia lag behind.

US businesses could reach UK markets all but closed-off for decades because of high EU external barriers to trade. In short order, Canada could join this new bilateral trade relationship, with other non-EU nations in Europe coming on board in due course. Not only would the prospect of a US-UK agreement strengthen London’s hand in the exit negotiations with Brussels, it would encourage nations remaining within the EU to demand that the lords of Brussels wake up to what is happening in the wider world.

Politically, with Britain freeing itself from the EU’s common foreign and defense policy, it will resume its role as a full leader of NATO. For far too long, NATO’s European members (with some notable exceptions) have simply not adequately attended to threats to international peace and security. Sustained, disciplined thinking on global threats like nuclear proliferation and international terrorism, and threats on the Continent itself from a belligerent Kremlin, has been lacking, also for far too long.

As Britain once again demonstrates a broader perspective, the possibility of making NATO a global organization, as suggested by former Spanish Prime Minister Jose-Maria Aznar, can receive careful attention. Admitting Australia, Singapore, Japan and Israel, to name just a few, could contribute significantly to international stability if they thought NATO capable of resuming a vibrant existence.

Especially in Europe, there is misplaced concern that Trump will work actively for the collapse of the EU. He doesn’t have to; the Europeans themselves are doing quite a job of demonstrating the EU’s manifold internal problems. The new White House should simply cease propping up the EU’s mercantilist, anti-democratic, inward-looking proclivities, and nature will take its course.

And although May and Trump appear to differ on the Russia sanctions issue, this is neither new nor unusual in US-UK relations. Tony Blair was accused in Britain of being George W. Bush’s poodle during the second Iraq war, a charge that was unfair and untrue from the outset. Neither Theresa May nor Donald Trump are anyone’s poodles, and a new special relationship will be the stronger for it.

John R. Bolton, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, was the US ambassador to the United Nations from August 2005 to December 2006.