The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir

by John Bolton

I left for the previously scheduled meeting in the Tank. Shanahan and Dunford wanted a strategic discussion on Iran, which I said was fine, but we were now looking at “an attack on the global oil market” we simply couldn’t ignore. The Quds Force was continuing up the escalation ladder, and why not? They certainly weren’t seeing the United States do anything in response. Nonetheless, we slogged through the usual Pentagon array of charts (called “place mats” because of the size of the paper used). They had lines and columns and arrows, all very artistic. Finally, I said our various policy priorities with Iran (nuclear, terrorism, conventional military aggression) could not be delinked, and we particularly could not separate Iran’s nuclear program from all its other malign behavior. This was precisely Obama’s mistake on the nuclear deal. Why return to his failed analytical framework? I argued again that, whether or not it was our declared “end state” (a favored bureaucratic term), there would be no “new” Iran deal and no “deterrence” established as long as Iran’s current regime remained. You could like it or not, but basing policy on some other reality would not get us to any “end state” we sought. Whether this discussion was productive or not, or whether it would just lead to another set of elaborate place mats, remained to be seen.