The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir

by John Bolton

Ukraine seems an unlikely place as a battleground to imperil an American presidency, but that is exactly what happened in 2019, exploding literally just days after I resigned. My timing couldn’t have been better. Not only was I a participant in and witness to much of the debacle as it unfolded, but I also seemed poised, for good or ill, to figure in only the fourth serious effort in American history to impeach a President. Throughout my West Wing tenure, Trump wanted to do what he wanted to do, based on what he knew and what he saw as his own best personal interests. And in Ukraine, he seemed finally able to have it all. Ukraine is under intense Russian political and economic pressure. In 2014, Moscow orchestrated the illegitimate annexation of Crimea after intervening militarily, the first change in European borders due to military force since 1945. Russian troops remained deployed across the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, supporting and in fact directing separatist forces there. This major Russian-American dispute proves that failing to act earlier to bring Ukraine into NATO left this large, critically important country vulnerable to Putin’s effort to reestablish Russian hegemony within the space of the former Soviet Union. At NATO’s April 2008 Bucharest Summit, the Bush 43 Administration tried to put Georgia and Ukraine on a path to NATO membership, which the Europeans, especially Germany and France, opposed. The tragic consequences were made plain that August, when ...