Trump’s replacement for John Bolton is also a hawk

In some ways President Donald Trump’s new national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, seems like the opposite of the man he will replace, John Bolton.
His current job in government is special envoy for hostage affairs, meaning he has had to negotiate with the sorts of rogues Bolton shunned. Earlier this year he negotiated the release of US citizen Danny Burch from Yemen. In April he said that a necessary step for Syria to rejoin international community would be for it to help find and free the journalist Austin Tice.
O’Brien’s personal style — quiet and lawyerly — also differs from Bolton’s pugnacity. A senior administration official told me that O’Brien pitched himself to the president and his top advisers as someone who would make the National Security Council functional again and largely keep his head down. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who was Bolton’s biggest rival in Trump’s cabinet, endorsed him for the post because of his understated approach.
But O’Brien’s low-key style should not be confused with a softness on foreign policy. Trump disagreed with Bolton on Iran, Afghanistan and North Korea. His new national security adviser has a long history of conventional Republican Party hawkishness on all of those issues. He advised Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, and in 2016 worked with Governor Scott Walker and Senator Ted Cruz.
And way back in 2005, the so-called “anti-Bolton” worked for the man himself when Bolton was US ambassador to the United Nations.
It’s easy to see why Bolton liked it. O’Brien’s essay on the 2015 Iran nuclear deal is titled, “Obama’s Folly.” In the preface, he writes about his experience in Afghanistan when “some young Afghan patriots, who chose to side with us after the 9/11 attacks, asked me if we would abandon their country as we had abandoned Iraq.” O’Brien identifies “Russian aggression” as one of the primary threats Obama’s successor must address to restore US leadership in the world.
This is good news for America. There was a real risk that Trump would choose a national security adviser who would indulge the president’s worst instincts on foreign policy, arranging for flashy summits with the world’s most loathsome leaders. That is the kind of guidance he gets from people like Senator Rand Paul, who has tried to be an intermediary for Trump with Russia and Iran. And it’s the kind of advice he hears from Tucker Carlson of Fox News, who often sounds like a progressive activist when railing against neoconservatives.
The danger, of course, is that Trump is capable of changing his mind in a flash. A year ago, it was Bolton who had the president’s ear and trust. A year later, Trump announced his firing on Twitter. Now it will be O’Brien’s turn to advise a mercurial president on how to lead a world in crisis.
—Bloomberg