The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir

by John Bolton

The argument I pressed again and again, regarding all the “endless wars,” was that we hadn’t started the wars and couldn’t end them just by our own say-so. Across the Islamic world, the radical philosophies that had caused so much death and destruction were ideological, political as well as religious. Just as religious fervor had driven human conflicts for millennia, so it was driving this one, against America and the West more broadly. It wasn’t going away because we were tired of it, or because we found it inconvenient to balancing our budget. Most important of all, this wasn’t a war about making Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, or any other country nicer, safer places to live. I am not a nation builder. I do not believe what is, after all, an essentially Marxist analysis that a better economic way of life will divert people from terrorism. This was about keeping America safe from another 9/11, or even worse, a 9/11 where the terrorists had nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. As long as the threat existed, no place was too far away to worry about. The terrorists weren’t coming to America on wooden sailing ships. By the time I arrived, this debate had been through many iterations, so I did not face a clean slate. My first involvement was May 10, 2018 (later in the day after the post-midnight return of the hostages from Korea), when Zalmay Khalilzad, a friend I had known since the Bush 41 Administration, who had succeeded me as Ambassador to the UN in 2007, came to visit. “...