John Bolton felt unimportant in the world of geopolitics because President Trump relied on the economic team of Secretary Mnuchin, Secretary Ross, USTR Lighthizer and Trade Advisor Peter Navarro to achieve national security objectives. Bolton was the knuckledragger at the end of the table, useful as leverage, where Trump could point to him and say lets make a deal to keep the warmongers like this guy out of the picture. Bolton’s biggest problem was with that Trump doctrine.
President Trump’s foreign policy doctrine is executed through the prism of using economics to achieve national security objectives.
This approach was so fundamentally foreign to Bolton that he couldn’t wrap his mind around how trade and economics could be used instead of dropping bombs.
Note Bolton’s own quote “I had the most futile role of all“.
He was futile because his DC neocon view to achieve national security through military is so far away from the successful strategic deployment of economics that he cannot fathom it.
Bolton had no way to open his mouth at the table because the economic team was speaking a foreign language.
The use of economics requires an entirely different set of skills. The strategic map is not looked at from the position of geographies; the map is viewed from the perspectives of wealth, currency exchanges, trade dynamics, tariffs, rules of commerce and other complex economic contracts that require a completely different frame of reference.
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