The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir

by John Bolton

I spoke later with Pompeo, then traveling in the Middle East, who listened to the Abe and Moon calls from there. The Moon call especially had been “a near-death experience,” I said, and Pompeo responded, “Having cardiac arrest in Saudi Arabia.” After a few more gyrations, we settled on Singapore for the summit meeting on June 12 and 13. On Monday morning, Trump called me about my appearances on two of the Sunday talk shows, where much of the discussion concerned North Korea. I had been “very good on television,” he said, but I needed to praise him more because “there’s never been anything like this before.” After all, Moon said he would recommend Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. Trump said, however, that he didn’t like my reference to the “Libya model” for denuclearizing North Korea because of Muammar Qaddafi’s overthrow seven years later during the completely unrelated Middle East Arab Spring. I tried explaining that the “model” for nonproliferation analysts was completely removing Libya’s nuclear program, not Qaddafi’s subsequent unpredictable demise.