The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir

by John Bolton

By early September, attacks on the US embassy in Baghdad and the US consulate in Basra, undoubtedly, in my view, by Shia militia groups acting at Iran’s behest, revealed new tensions within the Administration, as many in State and Defense resisted forceful responses.18 The unwillingness to retaliate, thereby raising the costs to the attackers and hopefully deterring them in the future, reflected the hangover of Obama-era policies. Even twenty months into the Trump presidency, new appointees and new policies were not yet in place. If it were still early 2017, the problem might have been understandable, but it was sheer malpractice that bureaucratic inertia persisted in such critical policy areas. The debate over responding to these sorts of attacks lasted right through my tenure, because of obstructionism and Trump’s impulsive desires to reduce America’s troop presence in the region, leading uniformly in a more passive direction. For all that Trump hated about the Obama Administration, it was no small irony that his own idiosyncratic views simply reinforced the bureaucracy’s existing tendencies, all to the detriment of US interests in the Middle East more broadly. I was also troubled by Treasury’s unwillingness to bear down on Iran’s participation in the global financial messaging system known as SWIFT. There was considerable interest among congressional Republicans in stopping Iran’s continued connection to the system, but Mnuchin and Treasury objected. They had understand...