The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir

by John Bolton

Ironically, although the media painted Trump as viscerally anti-Muslim, he never grasped—despite repeated efforts by key allied leaders in Europe and the Middle East and his own advisors to explain it—that Erdogan was himself a radical Islamicist. He was busy transforming Turkey from Kemal Ataturk’s secular state into an Islamicist state. He supported the Muslim Brotherhood and other radicals across the Middle East, financing both Hamas and Hezbollah, not to mention being intensely hostile toward Israel, and he helped Iran to evade US sanctions. It never seemed to get through.

In fact, there was very little progress diplomatically, even as the effects of sanctions and the obvious split with the United States over Brunson and other issues (such as buying Russia’s S-400 air defense system) continued to wreak havoc across Turkey’s economy. Turkey, urgently needing more foreign direct investment, was rapidly moving in the opposite direction, which eventually affected its decision-making. Its judicial system ground its way to yet another hearing on Friday, October 12, in Izmir, where Brunson had been under house arrest since July. With strong indications the court was working toward releasing him, the Defense Department prepared to stage a plane in Germany in case it was needed to retrieve Brunson and his family. Bizarrely, the court convicted Brunson of espionage and related crimes (which was ridiculous), sentenced him to five years in jail, and then decided because of time served and other mitigating factors, he was free to go. This outcome showed that the political fix was in: Erdogan’s claim Brunson was a spy had been “vindicated” for his domestic political purposes, but Brunson went free.

Shortly thereafter, Trump flipped again on Erdogan and Turkey. With the Brunson matter now six weeks behind us, the two leaders met bilaterally on December 1 at the Buenos Aires G20 summit, largely discussing Halkbank. Erdogan provided a memo by the law firm representing Halkbank, which Trump did nothing more than flip through before declaring he believed Halkbank was totally innocent of violating US Iran sanctions. Trump asked whether we could reach Acting US Attorney General Matt Whitaker, which I sidestepped. Trump then told Erdogan he would take care of things, explaining that the Southern District prosecutors were not his people, but were Obama people, a problem that would be fixed when they were replaced by his people. Of course, this was all nonsense, since the prosecutors were career Justice Department employees, who would have proceeded the same way if the Halkbank investigation started in the eighth year of Trump’s presidency rather than the eighth year of Obama’s. It was as though Trump was trying to show he had as much arbitrary authority as Erdogan, who had said twenty years earlier as mayor of Istanbul, “Democracy is like a streetcar. You ride it to the stop you want, and then you get off.”14 Trump rolled on, claiming he didn’t want anything bad to happen to Erdogan or Turkey, and that he would work very hard on the issue. Erdogan also complained about Kurdish forces in Syria (which Trump didn’t address) and then raised Fethullah Gulen, asking yet again that ...

On December 14, Trump and Erdogan spoke by phone. I briefed Trump beforehand on the situation in Syria, and he said, “We should get the hell out of there,” which I feared he would also say directly to Erdogan. Trump started by saying we were getting very close to a resolution on Halkbank. He had just spoken to Mnuchin and Pompeo, and said we would be dealing with Erdogan’s great son-in-law (Turkey’s Finance Minister) to get it off his shoulders. Erdogan was very grateful, speaking in English no less. Then he switched to Syria. He said Trump knew Turkey’s expectations regarding the YPG (a Syrian Kurdish militia, part of the Opposition Syrian Defense Forces) and the FETO (Gulenist) terrorist network, which Erdogan characterized as threats to Turkish national security which were poisoning bilateral relations between Washington and Ankara. Nonetheless, whined Erdogan, contrary to fact, America was continuing to train YPG forces, including up to 30–40,000 new recruits. He complained of the discrepancy between Trump’s political will and US military activities on the ground, which were causing questions in his mind. Turkey, said Erdogan, wanted to get rid of ISIS and the PKK, although, in my view, by “PKK” he was really referring to Kurdish fighters generally.

Turkey could do the rest and we would just get out. Erdogan promised his word on that point, but said his forces needed logistical support. Then came the painful part. Trump said he would ask me (I was listening in to the call, as was customary) to immediately work on a plan for US withdrawal, with Turkey taking over the fight against ISIS. He said I should work it out quietly but that we were leaving because ISIS is finished. Trump asked if I could speak, which I did, saying I had heard his instructions. As the call came to an end after further discussion on Halkbank, Trump said Erdogan should work with me on the military (telling me to do a good job) and Mnuchin on Halkbank. Erdogan thanked Trump and called him a very practical leader. Shortly thereafter, Trump said we should craft a statement that we had won the fight against ISIS, we had completed our mission in Syria, and we were now getting out.15 There was little doubt in my mind that Trump had seized on withdrawing from Syria as another campaign promise, like Afghanistan, he was determined to say he had kept.

This was a personal crisis for me. I felt that withdrawing from Syria was a huge mistake, because of both the continuing global threat of ISIS and the fact that Iran’s substantial influence would undoubtedly grow. I had argued to Pompeo and Mattis as far back as June that we should end our piecemeal policy in Syria, looking at one province or area at a time (e.g., Manbij, Idlib, the southwest exclusion zone, etc.), and focus on the big picture. With most of the ISIS territorial caliphate gone (although the ISIS threat itself was far from eliminated), the big picture was stopping Iran. Now, however, if the US abandoned the Kurds, they would either have to ally with Assad against Turkey, which the Kurds rightly considered the greater threat (thereby enhancing Assad, Iran’s proxy), or fight on alone, facing almost certain defeat, caught in the vise between Assad and Erdogan. What to do?

Those were clear warning signs of an advanced case of “clientitis,” a chronic State Department affliction where the foreign perspective becomes more important than that of the US.20 Pompeo, Shanahan, Dunford, and I agreed to draft a one-page “statement of principles” on Syria to avoid misunderstandings, which Defense thought was particularly important.

Ironically, the next day, the Washington Post reported unhappily that Trump and I were actually on the same page on Syria25—unhappily because the Post was contradicting its own story from the day before.26 All this confused press coverage reveals both the inconsistencies within Trump’s own thinking, and reporting based on second- and third-hand sources, exacerbated under a President who spent a disproportionate share of his time watching his Administration being covered in the press. It is difficult beyond description to pursue a complex policy in a contentious part of the world when the policy is subject to instant modification based on the boss’s perception of how inaccurate and often-already-outdated information is reported by writers who don’t have the Administration’s best interests at heart in the first place. It was like making and executing policy inside a pinball machine, not the West Wing of the White House.

I continued to explain this approach in Syria to Trump. In the Oval for another issue on January 9, Dunford made a more detailed presentation on why an international force in a buffer zone south of Turkey’s border was doable, allowing us to extricate ourselves without profoundly endangering the Kurds and our other anti-ISIS allies, not to mention our international reputation. Dunford now vigorously defended staying in At Tanf, which Jordan’s King Abdullah had also pressed on Pompeo during his visit, noting that the longer we stayed in At Tanf, the more secure Jordan was against the risk of the conflict in Syria’s spilling across the border into his country. Trump was pleased the “two-to-four-week plan” was under way, although he still expected results in two weeks, which wasn’t happening. He seemed satisfied, but it didn’t stop a long digression on Mattis’s failure to win in Afghanistan and Syria. Then he was off wondering why, after having fought the Korean War in the 1950s, we were still there, as well as critiquing the freeloading and ingratitude of sundry allies around the world. Just for the record, I did discuss with Trump several times the history of the “temporary” 1945 division of the Korean Peninsula, the rise of Kim Il Sung, the Korean War and its Cold War significance—you know, that old stuff—but I obviously made no impact. We endured this cycle repeatedly, always with the same outcome. Every few days, someone would inadvertently press a button somewhere, and T...

All these negotiations about our role in Syria were complicated by Trump’s constant desire to call Assad on US hostages, which Pompeo and I thought undesirable. Fortunately, Syria saved Trump from himself, refusing even to talk to Pompeo about them. When we reported this, Trump responded angrily: “You tell [them] he will get hit hard if they don’t give us our hostages back, so fucking hard. You tell him that. We want them back within one week of today, or they will never forget how hard we’ll hit them.” That at least took the Trump-Assad call off the table. We didn’t act on the talk about striking Syria.

When Trump finally erupted on October 6, 2019, and again ordered a US withdrawal, I had left the White House nearly a month earlier. The result of Trump’s decision was a complete debacle for US policy and for our credibility worldwide. Whether I could have averted this result, as happened nine months before, I do not know, but the strongly negative bipartisan political reaction Trump received was entirely predictable and entirely justified. To have stopped it a second time would have required someone to stand in front of the bus again and find an alternative that Trump could accept. That, it seems, did not happen. There was some good news, however: after years of effort, on October 26, the Pentagon and the CIA eliminated ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in a daring raid.

Trump opposed a continuing US military presence in Afghanistan for two related reasons: first, he had campaigned to “end the endless wars” in faraway places; and second, the sustained mishandling of economic and security assistance, inflaming his instinct against so much frivolous spending in federal programs. Besides, Trump believed he had been right in Iraq, and everyone now agreed with him. Well, not everyone.

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.

Trump said, “Let Russia take care of them. We’re seven thousand miles away but we’re still the target, they’ll come to our shores, that’s what they all say,” said Trump, scoffing. “It’s a horror show. At some point, we’ve got to get out.” Coats offered that Afghanistan was a border-security issue for America, but Trump wasn’t listening. “We’ll never get out. This was done by a stupid person named George Bush,” he said, to me. “Millions of people killed, trillions of dollars, and we just can’t do it. Another six months, that’s what they said before, and we’re still getting our asses kicked.” Then he launched into a favorite story, about how we helicoptered schoolteachers every day to their school because it was too dangerous for them to go on their own: “Costs a fortune. The IG was right,” he said, veering off into a report about the construction of “a billion-dollar Holiday Inn” and saying, “This is incompetence on our part. They hate us and they shoot us in the back, blew the back of the guy’s head off, arms and legs and things [referring to a recent “green-on-blue” attack where a Utah National Guardsman was killed].31 India builds a library and advertises it all over.”

In early June 2018, for example, Kelly tried a new tactic on Trump’s schedule, beginning each day in the Oval, at eleven a.m., with “Chief of Staff” time, hoping to minimize the rambling lectures he delivered during his twice-weekly intelligence briefings. Of course, what most people found striking was that Trump’s “official” day didn’t start until almost lunchtime. Trump was not loafing during the morning. Instead, he spent considerable time working the phones in the Residence. He talked to all manner of people, sometimes US government officials (I spoke with him by phone before he arrived in the Oval nearly every day due to the press of events he needed to know about or I needed direction on), but he also spoke at length to people outside the government. It was an anomaly among contemporary Presidents by any definition.

would have thought I had died and gone to heaven to have had such an orderly approach to preparing for an upcoming day. As it was, Trump generally had only two intelligence briefings per week, and in most of those, he spoke at greater length than the briefers, often on matters completely unrelated to the subjects at hand. Trump’s schedule was the easiest anomaly to deal with. One of the hardest was his vindictiveness, as demonstrated by the constant eruptions against John McCain, even after McCain died and could do Trump no more harm. Another example of his vindictiveness was Trump’s August 15 decision to revoke former CIA Director John Brennan’s security clearance. Now, Brennan was no prize, and during his tenure the CIA became more politicized than at any other time in its history. He denied any improper behavior, but Trump was convinced Brennan was deeply implicated in abusing the FISA surveillance process to spy on his 2016 campaign, all of which was exacerbated by his constant presence in the media criticizing Trump after he took office.

During the controversy over McCain’s funeral, Trump tweeted that White House Counsel Don McGahn was leaving at the end of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation battle. Although McGahn had often joked to me, “We’re all only one tweet away,” this was a classic example of Trump’s announcing something already decided, without giving McGahn a chance to announce it first. I should have paid closer heed. As Kelly confirmed to me later, tensions between Trump and McGahn had become unsustainable because of McGahn’s (truthful) testimony to, and cooperation with, Mueller’s investigation. Even though Trump’s outside attorneys had approved McGahn’s role, they were all reportedly surprised by just how candid he was. In any event, the search for a replacement was immediately on.

My personal view was that America would benefit from far more legal, controlled immigration, whereas illegal immigration was undermining the foundational sovereignty principle that the US decided who was allowed in, not the would-be immigrants. I was clear on one thing: Nielsen’s effort to bring in the UN High Commissioner for Refugees to help us decide who to admit to the US was badly flawed. We could hardly cede such basic sovereign decisions to an international body.

Kelly asked Pompeo what he thought, and he responded slowly, likely knowing little about what Nielsen was saying. I jumped in (and Pompeo happily receded) to point out that the High Commissioner had no real role in this kind of immigration processing work; that its budget and personnel were already overstrained by, among other things, the Venezuelan refugee crisis; and that in any case, the US shouldn’t subcontract decisions on admission to the US to the United Nations. Nielsen couldn’t answer these points, so I continued to probe on what the refugee agency’s role would be as she stumbled through her responses. Kelly asked, “Well then, what’s your plan, John?” Of course, my plan was something I had no intention of discussing in a stadium-sized crowd before I had even shown it to Trump. I simply said, “Yes, I have a plan, which he [Trump] asked for, and which I will discuss with him.” That caused Nielsen to do a flounce and turn her back on me, saying “Huh!” or something like that. I said, “That’s exactly why I want to see the President alone.”

We debated whether Trump himself would read the statement from the White House podium or whether we would just release the text. “This will divert from Ivanka,” Trump said. “If I read the statement in person, this will take over the Ivanka thing.” (The “Ivanka thing” was a flood of stories about Ivanka’s extensive use of her personal e-mail for government business, which the White House was trying to explain was actually quite different from Hillary Clinton’s extensive use of her personal e-mail for government business.) “Goddamn it, why didn’t she change her phone?” Trump complained. “What a mess we have because of that phone.”

In hard-nosed geopolitical terms, Trump’s was the only sensible approach. No one excused Khashoggi’s murder, and few doubted it was a serious mistake. Whether or not you liked Saudi Arabia, the monarchy, Mohammed bin Salman, or Khashoggi, we had significant US national interests at stake. Withdrawing support would immediately trigger countervailing efforts by our adversaries in the region to exploit the situation to our detriment. Putin had earlier put it to me most bluntly in Moscow (see Chapter 6) on October 23, saying Russia could sell arms to the Saudis if we didn’t. Trump wasn’t necessarily deciding on the basis of geostrategic reality, but on the US jobs generated by the arms sales, and he ended up in more or less the right place. This approach was exactly Jeane Kirkpatrick’s conclusion in her iconic 1979 essay, “Dictatorships and Double Standards”2: “Liberal idealism need not be identical with masochism, and need not be incompatible with the defense of freedom and the national interest.”

One week later, however, when I was in New York for the annual opening festivities of the UN General Assembly, Kelly called me to say the First Lady wanted Ricardel fired because her staff complained she had been uncooperative in preparing for FLOTUS’s upcoming trip to Africa. I found this stunning, and Kelly said it was “not clear how it got to this level.” He then characterized the First Lady’s staff as a bunch of catty, gossipy sorority types. No one said anything further to me, and I thought it had died away. Kelly was still in Washington because of “this Rosenstein thing,” meaning the stories about whether Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had ever proposed invoking the Twenty-Fifth Amendment against Trump, or that he wear a wire into the Oval to gather evidence to that end. This was also a first in presidential management history.

The press turned canceling the cemetery visit into a story that Trump was afraid of the rain and took glee in pointing out that other world leaders traveled around during the day. Of course, none of them were the President of the United States, but the press didn’t understand that rules for US Presidents are different from the rules for 190 other leaders who don’t command the world’s greatest military forces.

“Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism. Nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism by saying: ‘Our interest first. Who cares about the others?’ ” Trump said he didn’t hear Macron’s rebuff because his earpiece cut off at the critical point.

Many candidates, inside and outside, vied for the Chief of Staff role, but Trump tweeted on December 14 that Mick Mulvaney, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, would be Acting Chief of Staff once Kelly left. Kushner came by that afternoon to say he was delighted at the decision and that the “acting” part of the title was just a charade. As I pieced things together later, there were no real negotiations between Trump and Mulvaney over the terms of the job, so the decision struck me as somewhat impulsive. Pompeo thought Mulvaney would do essentially whatever Ivanka and Kushner wanted him to do, which worried both of us philosophically. The handover from Kelly to Mulvaney was effective January 2.

Maduro’s autocratic regime was a threat due to its Cuba connection and the openings it afforded Russia, China, and Iran. Moscow’s menace was undeniable, both military and financial, having expended substantial resources to buttress Maduro, dominate Venezuela’s oil-and-gas industry, and impose costs on the US. Beijing was not far behind. Trump saw this, telling me after a New Year’s Day 2019 call with Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi that he worried about Russia and China: “I don’t want to be sitting around watching.” Venezuela hadn’t topped my priorities when I started, but competent national-security management requires flexibility when new threats or opportunities arise. Venezuela was just such a contingency. America had opposed external threats in the Western Hemisphere since the Monroe Doctrine, and it was time to resurrect it after the Obama-Kerry efforts to bury it.

I explained why military force was not the answer, especially given the inevitable congressional opposition, but that we could accomplish the same objective by working with Maduro’s opponents. I subsequently decided to turn a spotlight on Venezuela, giving a widely covered speech in Miami on November 1, 2018, in which I condemned the Western Hemisphere’s “troika of tyranny”: Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua. I announced that the Administration, in its ongoing reversal of Obama’s Cuba policy, would impose new sanctions against Havana, and also carry out a new Executive Order sanctioning Venezuela’s gold sector, which the regime used to keep itself afloat by selling gold from Venezuela’s Central Bank. The “troika of tyranny” speech underlined the affiliations between all three authoritarian governments, laying the basis for a more forward-leaning policy. Trump liked the phrase “troika of tyranny,” telling me, “You give such great speeches”; this one, as I pointed out, had been written by one of his own speechwriters.

The big bang in Venezuela came on Friday, January 11. The new, young President of the National Assembly, Juan Guaidó, announced at a huge rally in Caracas that the Assembly believed Maduro’s manifestly fraudulent 2018 reelection was illegitimate, and therefore invalid. Accordingly, the Assembly, Venezuela’s only legitimate, popularly elected institution, had declared the Venezuelan presidency vacant. Under the vacancy clause of Hugo Chavez’s own Constitution, Guaidó said he would become Interim President on January 23, which was the anniversary of the 1958 military coup that overthrew the Marcos Perez Jimenez dictatorship, and oust Maduro to prepare new elections.3 The US had only late word the National Assembly would move in this direction. We played no role encouraging or assisting the Opposition. They saw this moment as possibly their last chance. It was now all on the line in Venezuela, and we had to decide how to respond. Sit and watch? Or act? I had no doubt what we should do. The revolution was on. I told Mauricio Claver-Carone, whom I had recently chosen as NSC Senior Director for the Western Hemisphere, to issue a statement of support.

Under Chavez and now Maduro, Venezuela’s revenues from petroleum-related exports had dropped dramatically, as production itself fell, from approximately 3.3 million barrels of oil pumped per day when Chavez took power in 1999 to approximately 1.1 million barrels per day in January 2019. This precipitous decline, dropping Venezuela to production levels not seen since the 1940s, had already substantially impoverished the country. Driving the state-owned oil monopoly’s production as low as possible, which the Opposition fully supported,8 might well have been enough to crash Maduro’s regime. There were many other sanctions necessary to eliminate the regime’s illicit income streams—especially drug trafficking with narco-terrorists operating primarily in Colombia, with safe havens in Venezuela—but striking the oil company was key.

On January 14, I convened a Principals Committee in the Sit Room to consider our options for sanctioning the Maduro regime, especially the petroleum sector. I thought it was time to turn the screws and asked, “Why don’t we go for a win here?” It rapidly became clear that everyone wanted to take decisive action except Treasury Secretary Mnuchin. He wanted to do little or nothing, arguing that if we acted, it risked Maduro’s nationalizing what little remained of US oil-sector investments in Venezuela and raising international oil prices. Mnuchin essentially wanted a guarantee we would succeed, with Maduro overthrown, if we imposed sanctions. That, of course, was impossible. If I have one memory of Mnuchin from the Administration—and there were many carbon copies of this one, Mnuchin opposing tough measures, especially against China—this is it. Why were our sanctions often not as sweeping and effective as they might have been? Read no further. As Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross (a renowned financier, much more politically conservative than Mnuchin, who was basically a Democrat) said to me in April, “Stephen’s more worried about secondary effects on US companies than about the mission,” which was completely accurate.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized the decision on political recognition was more important now than the oil sanctions. First, US recognition would have major implications for the Federal Reserve Board, and therefore banks worldwide. The Fed would automatically turn control over Venezuelan government assets it possessed to the Guaidó-led Administration. Unfortunately, as we were to find, Maduro’s regime had been so proficient at stealing or squandering those assets, there weren’t many left. But the international financial consequences of recognition were nonetheless significant, since other central banks and private bankers weren’t looking for reasons to be on the Fed’s bad side. Second, the logic of sanctioning the country’s oil monopoly, and other measures Mnuchin and Treasury were resisting, would become unanswerable once we endorsed Guaidó’s legitimacy. To that end, I scheduled an eight a.m. meeting on January 22 with Pompeo, Mnuchin, Wilbur Ross, and Kudlow.

“This may be the last chance,” and that success would be “a big foreign-policy win.” During the meeting, they explained that the National Assembly believed many Russian and Chinese business deals had been procured through bribes and corruption, making them easy to invalidate once a new government was installed.14 The discussion was very helpful, and Trump agreed unequivocally to recognize Guaidó, which Pence, who was attending the meeting, was fully prepared to do. Trump later added unhelpfully,

The next day, Defense Minister Padrino and an array of generals held a press conference to declare loyalty to Maduro, which was not what we wanted, but which to this point was not reflected in actual military activity. The Opposition believed that 80 percent or more of the rank and file, as well as most junior officers, whose families were enduring the same hardships as Venezuela’s civilian population generally, supported the new government. While the percentage figure cannot be confirmed given the authoritarian nature of the Maduro regime, Guaidó frequently contended he had the support of 90 percent of Venezuela’s population overall.18 Top military officers, like those at the press conference, however, were likely still too corrupted by years of Chavista rule to break ranks. On the other hand, they had not ordered the military out of their barracks to crush the rebellion, likely fearing such an order would be disobeyed, which would be the end of the regime. UK Foreign Minister Jeremy Hunt, in Washington for meetings, was delighted to cooperate on steps they could take, for example freezing Venezuelan gold deposits in the Bank of England, so the regime could not sell the gold to keep itself going.19 These were the sorts of steps we were already applying to pressure Maduro financially. I urged Pompeo to have State more fully support the effort against the state-owned oil company, where I still worried Mnuchin was holding out, which he agreed to do. Pompeo was also disturbed...

The next morning, I called Pompeo to tell him how Trump had all but jumped ship on Venezuela and to make sure Pompeo wasn’t about to follow. Fortunately, I heard exactly the opposite reaction, Pompeo saying “we should go to the wall” to get Maduro out. Encouraged, I later asked Claver-Carone to follow up with Guaidó’s people to ensure that they were getting out letters, the sooner the better, to the International Monetary Fund, the Bank for International Settlements, and similar institutions announcing that they were the legitimate government.21 Pompeo thought there was a way forward on the safety of US personnel in Caracas, thus allowing us to retain a slimmed-down mission, which he wanted to do. I explained how State often became so hung up on safety issues that it made concessions on policy issues, arguing it was required to protect official staff. I certainly wasn’t arguing for ignoring risks to our people, but I did believe it was better to withdraw them rather than make substantive concessions to governments like Maduro’s.

Unfortunately, the State Department was in a tizzy over the assurances it wanted from Maduro about the safety of our diplomatic personnel. This was not about the substance of ensuring Venezuela’s government provided adequate protection, but about how to exchange “diplomatic notes,” completely oblivious to the broader political context. State had also held up notifying the Federal Reserve we had recognized a new government in Caracas, which was stunning. By Monday, State’s Western Hemisphere Affairs bureau was in open revolt against petroleum sanctions, arguing, as I had feared, that so doing would endanger embassy personnel. Western Hemisphere Affairs Assistant Secretary Kim Breier wanted a thirty-day delay in the sanctions, which was palpable nonsense.

In the afternoon, we were to unveil the sanctions in the White House briefing room, but I got diverted to the Oval first. Trump was very happy with how “the Venezuela thing” was playing in the press. He asked if we should send five thousand troops to Colombia in case they might be needed, which I duly noted on my yellow legal pad, saying I would check with the Pentagon. “Go have fun with the press,” Trump said, which we did, when my note, picked up by cameras, produced endless speculation. (A few weeks later, Colombian Foreign Minister Carlos Trujillo brought me a pack of legal pads like the one I had in the briefing room, so I didn’t run out.) Substantively, we believed that the oil sanctions were a major blow to Maduro’s regime, and many asserted that it was now just a matter of time before he fell. Their optimism was high, fueled in substantial part because they believed Maduro loyalists like Diosdado Cabello24 and others were sending both their financial assets and their families abroad for safety, hardly a vote of confidence in the regime.

At one thirty p.m., I met with American executives of the Citgo Petroleum Corporation, which is majority-owned by Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, to tell them we supported their efforts, and those of the Venezuelan Opposition, to keep control of Citgo’s refineries and service stations in the United States, thereby shielding them from Maduro’s efforts to assert control. (As I explained to them and others, we were also providing advice to Guaidó at his request in his efforts to nominate people to the oil company’s various boards of directors which, through subsidiaries, ultimately held Citgo’s ownership.) I referred the executives to Wilbur Ross, whom they met the next day, for advice on avoiding the effects of a Russian government lien on Venezuela’s oil company stock that might lead to a loss of control over the US assets, which was right down his alley. (From Moscow, we learned that Putin was allegedly very concerned about the roughly $18 billion Venezuela owed to Moscow; the estimates of the actual amounts owed varied widely, but they were all substantial.) The US executives told me that, earlier in the day, Venezuelans loyal to Maduro, having tried unsuccessfully to divert corporate assets before they left, had fled the US with one of Citgo’s corporate jets, headed for Caracas. I was sure we could expect more of this in the days ahead.

Using an analogy from the 1956 Suez Canal Crisis, I said we had Maduro by the windpipe and needed to constrict it, which made Mnuchin start visibly. He was worried that steps in the banking sector would hurt Visa and Mastercard, which he wanted to keep alive for “the day after.”39 I said, as did Perry and Kudlow, there wouldn’t be any “day after” unless we increased pressure dramatically, the sooner the better. This wasn’t some academic exercise. As for Mnuchin’s concern for the harm we would cause the Venezuelan people, I pointed out that Maduro had already killed over forty during this round of Opposition activity, and hundreds of thousands risked their lives every time they went into the streets to protest.40 They weren’t thinking about Visa and Mastercard! The poorest people didn’t have Visa or Mastercard, and they were already crushed by Venezuela’s collapsed economy. Really, there was a revolution going on, and Mnuchin worried about credit cards!

we had word of massive power outages across Venezuela, exacerbated by the decrepit state of the country’s power grid. My first thought was that Guaidó or someone had decided to take matters into their own hands. But whatever the cause or the extent or duration of the outage, it had to hurt Maduro, emblematic as it was of the overall disaster the regime represented for the people. Reporting on the effects of the outage came slowly because almost all Venezuelan domestic telecommunications had been knocked out. What we learned as each day passed confirmed the devastation. Almost the entire country was blacked out, the Caracas airport was closed, the security services seemed to have disappeared, there were reports of looting, and the cacerolazos started again, showing sustained popular dissatisfaction with the regime. How bad was the damage? Some months later, we learned, a visiting foreign delegation concluded the country’s electricity-generating infrastructure was “beyond repair.” The regime tried to blame America, but people generally understood that, like the disintegration of Venezuela’s petroleum industry, the national power grid had also deteriorated over two decades of Chavista rule, because the government had failed to undertake necessary maintenance and new capital investment. And where had the money gone that was required for the state-owned oil company and the national power grid? Into the hands of the thoroughly corrupt regime. If this wasn’t the stuff of popular ...

Unfortunately, there was also disarray within the US government, particularly at the State Department. Coupled with Treasury foot-dragging, each new step in our pressure campaign against Maduro’s regime took far more time and bureaucratic effort than anyone could justify. Treasury treated every new sanction decision as if we were prosecuting criminal cases in court, having to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. That’s not how sanctions should work; they’re about using America’s massive economic power to advance our national interests. They are most effective when applied massively, swiftly, and decisively, and enforced with all the power available. This did not describe how we approached Venezuela sanctions (or most others in the Trump Administration). Instead, even relatively minor enforcement decisions could require Stakhanovite efforts by NSC staff and supporters in other agencies, all the while providing Maduro a margin of safety. The regime obviously wasn’t sitting idly by. It was constantly taking measures to evade sanctions and mitigate the consequences of those it couldn’t escape. Our slowness and lack of agility were godsends to Maduro and his regime, and its Cuban and Russian supporters. Unscrupulous global traders and financiers took advantage of every gap in our pressure campaign.

One ploy we considered to send signals to key figures in the regime was delisting from the sanctions people like wives and family members, a common practice in US policy to send signals to influence the behavior of selected individuals or entities. Such actions would likely get little public attention but would be powerful messages to regime officials that we were prepared to ease their paths either out of Venezuela entirely or into the arms of the Opposition as co-conspirators rather than prisoners. In turn, if they then cooperated in facilitating Maduro’s ouster, they could be delisted themselves. In mid-March, the issue came to a head when Treasury flatly refused to delist certain individuals, despite the unanimous support of the other affected players. Pompeo called Mnuchin, once again reaching him in Los Angeles, and told him to fulfill Treasury’s administrative role and stop second-guessing his department. Nonetheless, Treasury persisted, asking questions about Opposition negotiations with Maduro regime figures, second-guessing the State Department on whether delisting would produce the results desired. This was intolerable. It suggested that we should move the entire sanctions operation out of Treasury and put it elsewhere. Finally, Mnuchin said he would accept the State Department’s guidance if I would send him a note saying it was acceptable to me. This was nothing but “cover your ass” behavior, but I was happy to send a brief memo to Pompeo, Mnuchin, and Barr lay...

We were simultaneously squeezing Havana. State reversed Obama’s absurd conclusion that Cuban baseball was somehow independent of its government, thus in turn allowing Treasury to revoke the license allowing Major League Baseball to traffic in Cuban players. This action didn’t endear us to the owners, but they were sadly mistaken if they didn’t grasp that their participation in professional baseball’s scheme meant they were sleeping with the enemy. Even better, the perennial presidential waivers of key provisions of the Helms-Burton Act were coming to an end. Helms-Burton allowed property owners with assets expropriated by Castro’s government and sold to others, to sue in US courts, either to retrieve the property or to receive compensation from the new owners, but those provisions had never been deployed. Now they would be. Consistent with his public threats of a “full and complete embargo” on Cuba because of the oil shipments between Venezuela and Cuba, Trump also repeatedly asked the Defense Department for concrete options on how to stop such shipments, including interdiction.44 Although military force inside Venezuela was a nonstarter, using force to slice Cuba’s oil lifeline could have been dramatic. The Pentagon did nothing.

the New York Times understood the problem, running a major story on March 17 recounting how Cuban “medical assistance” had been used to shore up Maduro’s support among Venezuela’s poor and held back from those unwilling to carry out Maduro’s orders.45 The article demonstrated the extent of Cuba’s penetration of Maduro’s regime and how bad conditions in Venezuela were. In addition, a top Venezuelan General who defected to Colombia described publicly later in the week the extent of the corruption inside the country’s medical program, adding further evidence of the rot within the regime.46 The Wall Street Journal carried an article shortly thereafter detailing Maduro’s loss of support among Venezuela’s poor, something we’d believed since the outset of the rebellion in January.

What now stands primarily in the way of freeing Venezuela is the Cuban presence, critically supported by Russian financial resources. If Cuba’s military and intelligence networks left the country, the Maduro regime would be in serious, probably terminal, trouble. Everyone understands this reality, especially Maduro, who many believe owes his position as President to Cuban intervention in the struggle for control after Chavez’s death.62 Looking back, it’s clear to me that Havana saw Maduro as the more malleable of the leading contenders, and time has proven this thesis accurate.

But make no mistake: this rebellion came very close to succeeding. To believe otherwise ignores the reality that, as further information comes to light in the years ahead, will only become clearer. In the aftermath of the April 30 failure, the Opposition continued to oppose, and American policy should continue supporting them. As Mitch McConnell said to me in early May, “Don’t back down.” All credit to those who risked their lives in Venezuela to free their countrymen, and shame on those who second-guessed them. Venezuela will be free.

First, those who supported these developments believed China would be changed irreversibly by the rising prosperity caused by market-oriented policies, greater foreign investment, ever-deeper interconnections with global markets, and broader acceptance of international economic norms.

Second, proponents of the benign view of China’s rise argued that, almost inevitably, as China’s national wealth increased, so too would democracy. Nascent patterns of free elections, which observers saw in isolated local village elections in rural China, would spread to other locales, and then rise to the provincial level, and then finally to the national level. There was a strong correlation, they said, between the growth of economic freedom and the emergence of true middle classes, on the one hand, and political freedom and democracy on the other. Then, as China became more democratic, the consequences of the “democratic peace” theory would kick in: China would avoid competition for regional or global hegemony, the world would thereby avoid the “Thucydides trap,” and the risk of international conflict, hot or cold, would recede.

Instead of adhering to existing norms, China gamed the organization, successfully pursuing a mercantilist policy in a supposedly free-trade body. Internationally, China stole intellectual property; forced technology transfers from, and discriminated against, foreign investors and businesses; engaged in corrupt practices and “debt diplomacy” through instruments such as the “Belt and Road Initiative”; and continued managing its domestic economy in statist, authoritarian ways. America was the primary target of these “structural” aspects of China’s policy, but so were Europe, Japan, and virtually all industrial democracies, plus others that are neither but were still victims. Moreover, China sought politico-military benefits from its economic activity that free-market societies simply do not contemplate. It did so through purportedly privately owned companies that are in fact tools of China’s military and intelligence services,2 by fusing its civil and military power centers,3 and by engaging in aggressive cyber warfare that targeted foreign private interests as much or more than government secrets.

giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.” Trump in some respects embodies the growing US concern about China. He appreciates the key truth that politico-military power rests on a strong economy. The stronger the economy, the greater the capacity to sustain large military and intelligence budgets to protect America’s worldwide interests and compete with multiple would-be regional hegemons.

Trump approached trade and trade deficits as if reading a corporate balance sheet: trade deficits meant we were losing, and trade surpluses meant we were winning. Tariffs would reduce imports and increase government revenues, which was better than the opposite. In fact, free-traders, and I consider myself one before, during, and after my time with Trump, scoffed at such arguments. Still, trade deficits often indicated other problems, such as the enormous benefits China reaped from intellectual property theft, which in turn allowed it to compete more successfully against the very firms it had stolen the intellectual property from. Compounding the problem, Beijing subsidized its businesses to lower their prices internationally. Major decreases in US manufacturing jobs resulted from lower labor costs of production in China and other developing countries. It was therefore trade deficits as symptoms of other problems, not as problems in themselves, that warranted more attention, whether Trump fully understood or not.