The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir

by John Bolton

The G7 opening plenary sessions were contentious, with Trump under siege for his trade policies, until he fired back: the G7 should abolish all tariffs, all non-tariff trade barriers, and all subsidies. That subdued the Europeans in particular, who had no intention of doing any such thing. The discussion really showed the rampant hypocrisy of international trade talks, where free trade was invariably good for everyone else but not for favored domestic sectors, particularly farmers in places like France and Japan, not to mention the US and Canada.

Trump also complained about China and many other WTO members that called themselves “developing” in order to take advantage of more favorable trade treatment.

Korea was not hurting economically and believed they were a nuclear-weapons state. Trump replied that he had taken a long flight for a short meeting. Balakrishnan said the US had already given away three things: first, having the meeting to begin with, a “give” that everyone except Trump saw; second, the difficulty in returning to our “maximum pressure” campaign, also obvious to everyone but Trump; and third, to China, because we were focusing on North Korea when China was the real strategic game.

Trump said he knew he and Kim were going to get along almost immediately. In response, Kim asked how Trump assessed him, and Trump answered that he loved that question. He saw Kim as really smart, quite secretive, a very good person, totally sincere, with a great personality. Kim said that in politics, people are like actors. Trump was correct on one point. Kim Jong Un knew just what he was doing when he asked what Trump thought of him; it was a question designed to elicit a positive response, or risk ending the meeting right there. By asking a seemingly naïve or edgy question, Kim actually threw the burden and risk of answering on the other person. It showed he had Trump hooked.

Then came the catch, perfected by Joseph Stalin in his wartime summits with Franklin Roosevelt, when “hardliners” were first discovered in the Soviet Politburo. Kim “confessed” that he had domestic political hurdles he could not easily overcome, because there were hardliners in North Korea as well as America. Kim needed a way to build public support in North Korea, he said, actually maintaining a straight face, and he bored in on the South Korean–US joint exercises, which, he said, got on people’s nerves. Kim wanted us to reduce the scope or eliminate the exercises altogether. He said he had raised the military exercises with Moon in their first Summit (which produced the Panmunjom Declaration), and Moon had said that only the US could make the decision. Trump answered exactly as I feared, reiterating to Kim his constant refrain that the exercises were provocative and a waste of time and money. He said he would override his generals, who could never make a deal, and decide that there would be no exercises as long as the two sides were negotiating in good faith. He said brightly that Kim had saved the United States a lot of money. Kim was smiling broadly, laughing from time to time, joined by Kim Yong Chol. You bet. We certainly were having fun. In later US press coverage, there were leaks, obviously from DoD, that Mattis was displeased he was not consulted before Trump made this concession. Of course, neither were Kelly, Pompeo, nor I, and we were sitting right there. Trum...

Kim congratulated himself and Trump for all that they had accomplished in just one hour, and Trump agreed that others couldn’t have done it. They both laughed. Trump then pointed to Kim, and said he was the only one that mattered. Kim agreed he was doing things his way, and that he and Trump would get along. Trump returned to the military exercises, again criticizing his generals, whom he was overruling to give the point to Kim at this meeting. Kim laughed again. Trump mused that six months earlier, he was calling Kim “little rocket man,” and asked if Kim knew who Elton John was. He thought “rocket man” was a compliment. Kim kept laughing. At this point, Trump asked that we play the Korean-language version of the “recruitment” film, which the North Korean side watched very intently on the iPads we gave them. When it ended, Trump and Kim wanted to sign the joint statement as soon as possible, but it turned out that translation inconsistencies were holding it up, so the conversation continued. Kim repeated that they had had a good discussion, saying he was glad that he and Trump had agreed to follow the “action for action” approach. Somehow, I had missed Trump making that concession, but those were indeed magic words, exactly the ones I wanted to avoid, but which Kim thought he was walking away with. Kim asked if UN sanctions would be the next step, and Trump said he was open to it and wanted to think about it, noting that we had literally hundreds of new sanctions poised to...

I also made briefing calls, speaking particularly to Pence to discuss the “war games” point, which congressional Republicans were already criticizing. Pompeo, stuck in Singapore because his plane had engine problems, said Mattis had called him, quite worried about the concession. Pompeo and I agreed the two of us, Mattis, and Dunford should talk once we all returned to Washington, to think through what to do to avoid dangerous impairments to US readiness on the Peninsula. Our approach should be, “Don’t just do something; sit there,” until we assessed what was necessary. This point was proven when I was in Trump’s Air Force One office with him watching Fox News. A reporter, citing an unnamed Pentagon spokesman, said planning for exercises was continuing as before, sending Trump through the roof. Trump wanted me to call Mattis and have him stop everything, but I instead asked Mira Ricardel, also on Air Force One, to call others at the Pentagon to tell them to avoid public statements until told otherwise.

I also spoke with Mattis regarding the “war games” and explained how I thought we should proceed. Mattis said his Japanese and South Korean counterparts were already calling him, understandably very concerned. He also said, which I had not heard before, that six months earlier, Trump had also almost canceled the exercises because Russia and China complained about them, which was disturbing, to say the least.

Trump wanted to meet Kim, and he didn’t want to hear anything contrary, which is probably why he didn’t want to hear me explaining that another meeting soon was a bad idea: “John, you have a lot of hostility,” he said, to which I replied, “The letter is written by the dictator of a rat-shit little country. He doesn’t deserve another meeting with you until he has met with Pompeo, as he agreed to just a couple of weeks ago.” “You have such hostility,” said Trump, “of course, I have the most hostility, but you have a lot of hostility.” On we went, until, out of nowhere, Trump said, “I want the meeting the first week after the election, and Mike should call today and ask for it. You should say the [Kim] letter is extremely nice. The President has great affection for Chairman Kim. He wants to release the letter because it’s so good for the public to see the strength of the relationship, and he wants to have a meeting after the election. Where would he like to meet?”

When I told Trump about going there to lay the groundwork for his trip, he asked, “Do you have to go to Russia? Can’t you do this in a telephone call?” Ultimately, he didn’t object when I explained why reviewing the issues in advance would help in our preparations. Shortly thereafter, I asked Kelly why Trump was complaining, and Kelly said, “That’s easy. He’s worried you’re going to upstage him.” This would sound preposterous for any President other than Trump, and while it was flattering, if true, it was also dangerous. What exactly was I supposed to do now to overcome the problem? I obviously did not come up with a good answer.

Putin took a very hard line on Ukraine, discussing in detail the conflict’s political and military aspects. Moving to a more confrontational tone, he said US military sales to Ukraine were illegal, and that such sales were not the best way to resolve the issue. He refused even to discuss Crimea, dismissing it as now simply part of the historical record.

Did NATO have problems? Of course. Not for nothing was Henry Kissinger’s famous 1965 work entitled The Troubled Partnership: A Reappraisal of the Atlantic Alliance. The list of NATO deficiencies was long, including, after the Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse, the feckless abandonment by several European members of their responsibility to provide for their own self-defense. Under President Clinton, America suffered its own military declines, as he and others saw the collapse of Communism as “the end of history,” slashing defense budgets to spend on politically beneficial domestic welfare programs. This “peace dividend” illusion never ended in much of Europe, but it ended in America with the September 11 mass murders in New York and Washington by Islamicist terrorists. NATO’s future has been intensely debated among national-security experts for decades, with many urging a broader post–Cold War agenda. Barack Obama criticized NATO members for being “free riders,” not spending adequately on their own defense budgets, but, typically, had simply graced the world with his views, doing nothing to see them carried out.

said. At the meeting, various governments described their domestic political woes, as if we should feel sorry for them or didn’t have any domestic political woes ourselves. Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte made the most telling point, stressing that he had consistently said that Trump was right, and that he had instilled a sense of urgency since he took office. By contrast, as the Europeans now understood, said Rutte, with Obama the 2 percent target it had been entirely pro forma. Times had changed. He had clearly gotten the message. The most inane comment came from the Czech Prime Minister, who said he was making every effort to get to 2 percent by 2024, but their GDP was rising so fast, he was unsure defense spending could keep up. In effect, this was saying they were getting rich too fast to defend themselves adequately. Trump jumped on it, saying he had a similar, actually much bigger, problem because of US economic growth. He said the situation was unfair and unsustainable, and needed to be brought to a conclusion, where the allies stepped up to their responsibilities, or there would be problems. Trump explained that the Nord Stream story was the biggest story in Washington. People were saying Germany had surrendered to Russia (and certainly that’s what he had, in effect, said). How could we defend ourselves from the Russians, Trump wondered, if the allies wouldn’t pay for it? Trump said he liked Hungary and Italy, but it wasn’t fair to the United States that they were...

Trump was bargaining in real time with the other leaders, trapped in a room without their prepared scripts. It was something to see. Some leaders said they couldn’t accept what Trump asked for on defense expenditures because it contradicted the earlier-adopted communiqué, which I communicated to Stoltenberg would be a real mistake. He agreed and helped head off that problem, but it was clear things were in dire straits. Canada’s Trudeau asked, “Well, John, is this one going to blow up too?” I answered, “Plenty of time left, what could go wrong?” and we both laughed. I gave Trump a note about reducing US Common Fund spending, which he passed to Stoltenberg, who blanched when he saw it. But at least that was now also on the table. With a few more comments from the crowd, the meeting ended, and we went off to prepare for Trump’s closing press conference, which was restful compared to Singapore. Trump gave a positive spin to the day’s events. The outcome was unmistakable: the United States expected its NATO allies to live up to the commitments they had made on defense spending. How unremarkable that should have been, but how much effort it had taken to get to something so banal. Indeed, this was definitely not the Obama presidency. Trump stopped off at the resumed leaders’ conference on Afghanistan to give some prepared remarks, noting as well the great spirit he thought was developing at NATO.

Brexit was an existential issue for the UK, but it was also critically important to the US. Brexit’s fundamental impetus was the accelerating loss of citizen control over the Brussels-based mechanisms of the European Union. Bureaucracies were making rules that national parliaments had to accept as binding, and the loss of democratic sovereignty was increasingly palpable.

For the Brits, ironically, Brussels was the new George III: a remote (politically if not physically), unaccountable, oppressive machine that a majority of British voters rejected in 2016, reversing forty-three years of EU membership. Yet implementing the vote had been disastrously mishandled, thereby threatening political stability in Britain itself. We should have been doing far more to help the Brexiteers, and I certainly tried. Unfortunately, apart from Trump and myself, almost no one in the Administration seemed to care. What a potential tragedy.

I asked May why the Russians did it, and Trump said he had asked the same question the night before at Blenheim, thinking it might be intended as a message. May thought the attack was intended to prove Russia could act with impunity against dissidents and defectors, to intimidate them and like-minded others. She stressed to Trump that, in Helsinki, he should go into the meeting from a position of strength, and Trump agreed, claiming that Putin asked for the meeting (the opposite of the truth), and assured her he would not give anything away. (I had learned earlier that the Justice Department was making public Mueller’s indictments against twelve Russian GRU officers for election interference,10 which I thought better announced before the summit, for Putin to contemplate.)

After taking Marine One back to Winfield House, we helicoptered out to Windsor Castle for the Trumps to meet Queen Elizabeth, which brought another display of pageantry, and lots more red coats and military bands. Trump and the Queen reviewed the honor guard, and they (and FLOTUS) met for almost an hour. The rest of us had tea and finger sandwiches with members of the royal household, which was very elegant but hard on some of us ill-schooled colonials. Then it was back on Marine One, heading to Stansted and boarding Air Force One for Scotland, to stay at the Trump Turnberry golf resort.

until someone flying an ultralight vehicle, more like a bicycle with wings attached to it (a Greenpeace demonstrator, as we learned later), came peddling by flying a banner calling Trump “below par.” The Secret Service hustled Trump inside, along with everyone else except Kelly and me, who for some reason stayed outside to watch as this ungainly contraption flew ever closer. The Service finally decided Kelly and I should go inside as well. It was quite a breach of security, but fortunately only entertainment.

told Trump he should get at least three names from the Defense Department for all important military command and staff positions. The practice when I arrived was for Mattis to send over one name for each position, which I thought reflected a significant decline in civilian control over the military, an issue I pursued throughout my tenure as National Security Advisor with only mixed success.

Ultimately, Trump decided not to use the document. He wanted me to raise election interference, which I said I would do in the scheduled working lunch, but obviously I wouldn’t be in the one-on-one with Putin he wanted so much.

The substantive discussion we did have centered on Russian election meddling. Trump remained, as he had been from the beginning, unwilling or unable to admit any Russian meddling because he believed doing so would undercut the legitimacy of his election and the narrative of the witch hunt against him.

We sweated out a stunningly long, just-under-two-hour one-on-one meeting. Trump emerged at about four fifteen and briefed Kelly, Pompeo, Huntsman, and me. Most of the conversation was on Syria, with particular emphasis on humanitarian assistance and reconstruction (which Russia wanted us and the West generally to fund), and getting Iran out. Trump said Putin spent a lot of time talking, and he listened, which was a switch. In fact, the US interpreter told Fiona Hill and Joe Wang later that Putin had talked for 90 percent of the time (excluding translation); she also said Trump had told her not to take any notes, so she could only debrief us from her unaided memory. It was clear, said Trump, that Putin “wants out” of Syria, and that he liked Netanyahu. Trump also said Putin didn’t seem to care much one way or the other about our leaving the Iran nuclear deal, although he did say Russia would stay in. On China trade issues, Putin commented on the tough US stance, and Trump had replied that he had no choice. Putin wanted the US to do more business in Russia, noting that the EU did twenty times more than America. The key point was there were no agreements on anything, no concessions, no real change in substantive foreign policy. I was delighted. And relieved. No successes, but that didn’t trouble me at all, since I had long seen this entire summit as one massive exercise in damage control.

Unfortunately, Putin had a curveball ready, offering to try in Russia the just-indicted GRU agents (how thoughtful), under an unspecified treaty, saying further he would let Mueller’s investigators come in to do their work, so long as there was reciprocity with respect to Bill Browder, a businessman whose lawyer in Russia, Sergei Magnitsky, had been arrested and killed by the Putin regime. Browder’s grandfather Earl Browder had been General Secretary of the US Communist Party for many years in the 1930s and ’40s, marrying a Soviet citizen. The capitalist grandson, now a British citizen, had done well financially in Russia, but Magnitsky’s murder and the actions taken against his investments moved him to launch an international campaign against Moscow. He persuaded Congress to pass a law that enabled the US to sanction Russian human-rights violators; several other countries followed suit. The way Putin saw it, Browder had given Hillary Clinton’s campaign, foundation, and other parts of the Clinton galactic empire some $400 million that he had basically stolen from Russia, which got Trump’s attention.

Worryingly, however, Putin also said he wanted Trump to win the 2016 election “because he talked about bringing the US-Russian relationship back to normal,” a significant deviation from the standard public line that countries don’t interfere in others’ internal politics and would work with whomever was elected. That in turn paled before the Trump response near the end of the press conference, when Trump said, “My people came to me—Dan Coats came to me and some others—they said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin; he just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be, but I really do want to see the server. But I have—I have confidence in both parties… So I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.” Kelly and I, sitting next to each other in the audience, were almost frozen to our seats by Trump’s answer. It was obvious that major corrective action would be needed because of this self-inflicted wound, but what exactly that would be was far from evident. The immediate media coverage was catastrophic.

Dan Coats had been trying to reach me, and I called him immediately after we were airborne. He was, to say the least, upset. “Shock waves are rolling across Washington,” he said, and the intelligence community wanted a statement from him to prevent the community from being totally undermined. Coats had prepared something that in his view was necessary to defend the community, and I asked him to hold off issuing it for just a few minutes until I could talk to Kelly. I did not detect any hint that he was thinking of resigning, but his sense of urgency was palpable. I hung up and found Kelly, who thought a statement might be helpful if Coats talked about Trump Administration anti-meddling efforts, which were far greater than what Obama had done.

The next day, the entire senior White House communications team conferred with Trump in the Oval. Still surprised at the negative reaction, he had reviewed the press-conference transcript and decided he had misspoken. In the line where he said “I don’t see any reason why it would be,” meaning, “I don’t see any reason why it would be Russia,” he had meant to say “would not be [Russia],” thereby reversing the sentence’s meaning. Trump was renowned for never backing away from something he said, in fact usually digging in when challenged, so this was a surprising turnaround. Of course, that change alone did not eliminate the problem of his other statements accepting moral equivalence between Putin’s view and our own intelligence community’s view. But for the press office people, Trump’s making any kind of corrective statement was progress. Stephen Miller drafted prepared remarks, which Trump delivered in the early afternoon.

Russia had been violating the INF Treaty for years, while America stayed in compliance and watched it happen. Barring missiles and launchers with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers (310 to 3,420 miles), the Reagan-Gorbachev agreement between the US and the USSR was intended to prevent a nuclear war being fought in Europe. Over time, however, the INF’s fundamental purpose was vitiated by persistent Russian breaches, changed global strategic realities, and technological progress. Even before Trump took office, Russia had begun actual deployment of missiles violating the INF’s prohibitions in the Kaliningrad exclave on the Baltic Sea, laying the basis for a substantial threat to NATO’s European members. Moreover, and of even greater long-term consequence, the treaty bound no other countries (apart from, in theory, other USSR successor states), including many of the biggest threats facing the US and its allies. China, for example, had the greatest proportion of its large, growing, already-deployed missile capabilities in the INF-forbidden range, endangering US allies like Japan and South Korea, as well as India and Russia itself, a fine irony. Iran’s intermediate-range ballistic-missile force threatened Europe and was poised to expand, as were North Korea’s, Pakistan’s, India’s, and those of other would-be nuclear powers. Finally, the INF Treaty was outdated technologically. While it forbade ground-launched missiles within its prohibited ranges, it did not forbid sea- and...

The real bottom line was that the INF Treaty bound only two countries, and one of them was cheating. Only one country in the world was effectively precluded from developing intermediate-range missiles: the United States. It made no sense today, even if it did when adopted in the mid-1980s.

On returning to Washington, I spent the next months preparing for the dramatic step of INF withdrawal. To prevent leaks that would agitate the press and foreign-policy establishment, I thought we should pursue a quiet, low-profile, but expedited approach, rather than endless meetings among staffers who had lived with the INF Treaty their entire government careers and couldn’t bear to see it die. Trump, I believed, was on board, although I was never certain he understood the INF Treaty did not regulate nuclear weapons as such, but only their delivery vehicles. I wanted to launch US withdrawal from the treaty (which would be an important signal to China, among others), or possibly even mutual withdrawal, before my next meeting with Patrushev, in Moscow, in late October. Experience taught me that without action-forcing deadlines, bureaucracies could resist change with incredible tenacity and success.

I immediately called Sanders in Washington, who hadn’t heard Trump’s remark, and suggested we quickly draft a statement to embody his comment, with which she agreed. I then called Pompeo, who said it was “horrific” Trump could make an announcement as significant as withdrawing from the INF just in response to a reporter’s question, a rare occasion of Pompeo’s being explicitly critical of something Trump did.

On Syria, Putin emphasized that Russians had no need of an Iranian presence, and that the right thing for both of us to do was to incentivize them to leave. He mentioned that he had discussed the topic with Netanyahu. I pointed out that having withdrawn from the Iran nuclear deal, the US was reimposing sanctions on Iran, which we expected to bite sharply, and they were not tradable just to get Iran out of Syria. Putin said that he understood our logic, and acknowledged our view that the people of Iran were tired of the regime. He cautioned, however, that if we declared war against them economically, it would consolidate support for the regime. I explained why we didn’t see it that way, and why strong sanctions would reduce support for the regime, which was already under enormous stress. Putin also acknowledged that we each had our theories about how to deal with Iran, and we would see which one worked out. Putin joked at our expense over Saudi Arabia and the Khashoggi murder, saying Russia would sell the Saudis arms if we didn’t, which was undoubtedly correct, and underscored why Trump didn’t want to renounce our pending arms sales. We ended at about 7:05, after an hour and three-quarters. (Putin subsequently told Trump at the November 11 Armistice Day centenary in Paris that he and I had a nice conversation in Moscow, and that I was very professional and specific, not that that had any impact on Trump.) As we were shaking hands good-bye, Putin smiled and said he saw that ...

Trump also unsigned the Paris Agreement on climate change, a move I supported. That deal had all of the real-world impact on climate change of telling your prayer beads and lighting candles in church (which someone will try to forbid soon because of the carbon footprint of all those burning candles). The agreement simply requires signatories to set national goals but doesn’t say what those goals should be, nor does it contain enforcement mechanisms. This is theology masquerading as policy, an increasingly common phenomenon in international affairs.

The list of other agreements to discard is long, including the Law of the Sea Convention and two others from which the US should be immediately unshackled. The 1992 Treaty on Open Skies (which only entered into force in 2002) in theory allows unarmed military surveillance flights over the territories of its thirty-plus signatories but has been contentious since its inception.7 It has proven a boon to Russia8 but is outdated and essentially valueless to the United States because we no longer need to overfly their territory. Withdrawing the US would clearly be in our national interest, denying Russia, for example, the ability to conduct low-altitude flights over Washington, DC, and other highly sensitive locations. When I resigned, consideration was under way regarding leaving Open Skies, and press reports indicated these efforts, which I still fully support, were continuing.

the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty should be a priority, so the United States can once again conduct underground nuclear testing. We have not tested nuclear weapons since 1992, and while we have extensive programs to verify the safety and reliability of our stockpile, there is no absolute certainty without testing. We never ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, but we are caught in “international law” limbo. Article 18 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, arguably based on “customary international law,” provides that a country that has signed but not ratified a treaty is prohibited from taking actions that would defeat “the object and purpose” of the treaty. Unsigning the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty would make it clear the US will make future judgments on underground nuclear testing based on its own national interests. Ironically, the US has signed but never ratified the Vienna Convention, and the applicability of “customary international law” is subject to heated debate.10 Other nuclear powers like China and India have either not ratified or not signed the treaty, which is why it has still not entered into force. The US has unsigned other treaties, most notably under Bush 43 when we unsigned the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court.

During the 2016 campaign, I called Russian efforts to interfere in the elections an “act of war” against our constitutional structures,12 and I watched with dismay reports of Putin’s meeting with Trump at the 2017 G20 meeting in Hamburg, Germany, where Putin flatly denied any Russian interference.

There was a long-simmering struggle under way between those who favored the Obama Administration’s approach, believing that only defensive cyber efforts, with the rarest of exceptions, were sufficient, versus the more robust view that offensive capabilities were crucial. Obama’s strategy rested on the fallacy that cyberspace was relatively benign, even unspoiled, and that the best approach was to smooth over the problems and not risk making things worse. I didn’t understand why cyberspace should be materially different from the rest of human experience: initially a state of anarchy from which strength and resolve, backed by substantial offensive weaponry, could create structures of deterrence against potential adversaries that would eventually bring peace. If, as we knew with increasing certainty, Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and others were contesting us in cyberspace,14 it was time to fight back. Such a strategy was not designed to increase conflict in this new domain but restrain it. In reality, a defense-only strategy guaranteed more provocations, more conflict, and more damage, to both businesses and other private entities as well as to the US government.

We needed to do two things: first, we needed a Trump Administration cyber strategy, and second, we needed to scrap the Obama-era rules and replace them with a more agile, expeditious decision-making structure. Considerable work had already been done by the time I arrived, but it still took an enormous effort to make the last few bureaucratic first downs to achieve finality. I often thought that if our bureaucrats struggled as hard against our foreign adversaries as they did against each other when “turf issues” were at stake, we could all rest a lot easier. Despite considerable hard slogging, it still took five months, until September 20, before we could make the new cyber strategy public.15 Although our determination to enable offensive cyber operations got the headlines, the overall strategy was comprehensive, thoughtful, and a good beginning.16 Even an Obama Administration cyber expert said, “This document shows what a national strategy can look like on an issue that truly is nonpartisan. It strikes a good balance between defensive actions and seeking to impose consequences on malicious actors. Further, it’s clear that this strategy is a reflection of a strong policy development process across administrations.”

The interagency process was frozen solid. The Department of Homeland Security and others wanted to keep a stranglehold on the Defense Department, as did the intelligence community. The Pentagon didn’t want oversight from anyone, including the White House, and took an “all or nothing” approach in negotiations that only infuriated everyone else involved.

Over the next few days of detailed negotiations, Mattis remained obdurate and there was some backsliding by elements of the intelligence community, which was jealous of the National Security Agency’s authority. This reflected a long-standing, almost existential, CIA-Pentagon tension.

We also drafted a new Executive Order, under existing presidential authorities, making it easier to carry out sanctions against foreign efforts to interfere with elections.18 This avoided obtaining new legislation, which almost certainly would have been gridlocked in partisan wrangling. Even some Republicans, fearful of Trump’s weak responses to Russian provocations, wanted to pursue legislation, but we patiently explained why our Executive Order would actually be more effective, without the partisan sniping any legislation would inevitably produce. Most important, there was no guarantee Congress could even get its act together before the 2018 election, and the imperative had to be moving quickly.

By the end of September, we had a substantial election-security policy framework in place, and we could accelerate our efforts to safeguard the November 2018 elections, not that we hadn’t already been hard at work on defenses well beyond cybersecurity alone.

Unable to criticize the adequacy of the overall effort, the media therefore turned to saying Trump was following one policy and we were following another.19 Unfortunately, there was something to that, as Trump repeatedly objected to criticizing Russia and pressed us not to be so critical of Russia publicly.

The Trump Administration had imposed substantial new economic sanctions on Russian citizens and entities in 2017, related to the Crimea annexation, adding to what Obama had done, as well as extending other sanctions; closed the Russian consulates in San Francisco and Seattle; expelled more than sixty Russian intelligence agents (operating in the US as “diplomats”) after Moscow’s attack on the Skripals;20 imposed sanctions for violating the Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act, also required by the attack on the Skripals; sanctioned Russia’s Internet Research Agency, an arm of Russia’s cyber-offense machinery; and penalized over three dozen Russian officials for violations of US Syria-related sanctions.21 As new violations were uncovered, further sanctions were imposed on each person and corporate entity involved.

Trump touted these as major achievements, but almost all of them occasioned opposition, or at least extended grumbling and complaining, from Trump himself. One example involved the sanctions related to the chemical-weapons attack on the Skripals. This statute had only recently been used for the first time, after Kim Jong Un ordered his half brother murdered in Malaysia via chemical weapons, and after the Assad regime’s chemical-weapons attacks in Syria. There was criticism that the sanctions imposed were not sweeping enough, but Trump objected to having any sanctions at all. Trump finally approved sanctions before the Helsinki summit but postponed announcing them until the summit ended. We explained to Trump that these sanctions were only the first in what was likely a series, since the applicable statute provided for ever-more-stringent sanctions if the accused nation did not provide convincing evidence it had given up chemical and/or biological weapons, including allowing international inspectors to verify compliance. No one believed Russia would do so. When Helsinki concluded, State announced the sanctions, since no new decision was required. Trump, upon hearing the news, wanted to rescind them. I wondered if this entire crisis was caused by Rand Paul’s recent visit to Moscow, which generated significant press coverage for him and where the Russians doubtless stressed that they were very unhappy about the sanctions. This was ironic, with libertarian politicians like Pau...

Trump stopped an anodyne statement criticizing Russia on the tenth anniversary of its invasion of Georgia, a completely unforced error. Russia would have ignored it, but the Europeans noticed its absence and became even more concerned about American resolve. This was typical of Trump, who in June 2019 also blocked a draft statement on the thirtieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacres and criticized the State Department for a press release issued before he knew about it. Trump seemed to think that criticizing the policies and actions of foreign governments made it harder for him to have good personal relations with their leaders. This was a reflection of his difficulty in separ...

After our April retaliation for Assad’s chemical-weapons attack on Douma, Syria reemerged indirectly, through Turkey’s incarceration of Pastor Andrew Brunson. An apolitical evangelical preacher, he and his family had lived and worked in Turkey for two decades before his arrest in 2016 after a failed military coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Brunson was a bargaining chip, cynically charged as conspiring with followers of Fethullah Gulen, an Islamic teacher living in America, once an Erdogan ally but now an enemy obsessively denounced as a terrorist. Just after Trump’s return from Helsinki, Erdogan called to follow up on their brief encounter at NATO (and later phone call) about Brunson and his “relationship” to Gulen. Erdogan also raised another favorite subject, frequently discussed with Trump: the conviction of Mehmet Atilla, a senior official of the state-run Turkish bank Halkbank, for financial fraud stemming from massive violations of our Iran sanctions.

This ongoing criminal investigation threatened Erdogan himself because of allegations he and his family used Halkbank for personal purposes, facilitated further when his son-in-law became Turkey’s Finance Minister.2 To Erdogan, Gulen and his “movement” were responsible for the Halkbank charges, so it was all part of a conspiracy against him, not to mention against his family’s growing wealth. He wanted the Halkbank case dropped, unlikely now that US prosecutors had their hooks sunk deep into the bank’s fraudulent operations. Finally, Erdogan fretted about pending legislation in Congress that would halt the sale of F-35s to Turkey because Ankara was purchasing Russia’s S-400 air defense system. If consummated, that purchase would also trigger mandatory sanctions against Turkey under a 2017 anti-Russia sanctions statute. Erdogan had a lot to worry about.

Trump had finally found someone he relished sanctioning, saying “large sanctions” would ensue if Brunson wasn’t returned to the US. On August 2, Treasury sanctioned Turkey’s Justice and Interior Ministers,3 and two days later, Turkey sanctioned their counterparts, Sessions and Nielsen, in response.4 Although we had discussed these measures with Trump, he told me later that day he thought it was insulting to Turkey to sanction Cabinet officials. Instead, he wanted to double the existing steel tariffs on Turkey to 50 percent, which appalled the economic team. Trump had imposed worldwide steel and aluminum tariffs on national-security grounds in March 2018, under the authority of section 232 of the 1962 Trade Expansion Act, a little-known statute that found great favor in Trump trade policy. The “national security” grounds were gauzy at best; the 232 tariffs were classically protectionist. To use them now for political leverage to obtain Brunson’s release violated any known statutory rationale, however worthy the cause. Trump, of course, sensed no one was going to challenge him in these circumstances. Away we went.

We had a problem with multiple negotiators on both sides. Haley was conducting conversations with Turkey’s UN Ambassador, which the Turks said they didn’t understand. Neither did we. Pompeo said grimly he would resolve this problem by telling Haley to stop making unauthorized contacts with the Turks, confusing further what was already confused enough. Fortunately, this time it worked. Diplomatic efforts, however, produced nothing on Brunson. Trump allowed the negotiations to continue, but his instinct on Erdogan proved correct: only economic and political pressure would get Brunson released, and here at least Trump had no problem applying it despite Mnuchin’s happy talk. Erdogan went almost instantly from being one of Trump’s best international buddies to being a target of vehement hostility.