Iran is Europe’s war too, argues Trump’s former national security adviser

COPENHAGEN — Former U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton has been at loggerheads with Donald Trump, but agrees with his old boss on at least one thing: Europe should get involved in Iran.

Bolton, a key figure in the first Trump administration until the president axed him, spoke to Anne McElvoy at the Copenhagen Democracy Summit for the Brussels Playbook Week Ender podcast. A long-standing Iran hawk who has pushed for regime change in Tehran, Bolton said European powers were wrong to disassociate themselves from the war.

“I think Trump made a big mistake not consulting European NATO allies before the war,” Bolton told the podcast. “But the European response made things worse.” Highlighting Europe’s greater geographic proximity to Iran and economic dependence on the stability of the Gulf, he added: “It’s wrong to say that this is not Europe’s war. It is Europe’s war.”

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz recently added to adverse comments from the U.K. government about the war’s progress, saying the U.S. is being “humiliated” by Iran’s leadership and that he could not see “what strategic exit the Americans will choose.”

In a swift reprisal, the U.S. president announced his intention to withdraw 5,000 American troops stationed in Germany.

Bolton knows better than most that going against Trump can carry consequences. In 2019, the president announced he was firing Bolton on social media, following several clashes over foreign policy, with Trump’s original America-first agenda not meshing well with Bolton’s hawkish views on Russia, Venezuela, Iran and North Korea.

Bolton said that Trump’s spat with Europe does not bode well for the transatlantic alliance, already fraying over how far to back Ukraine in its war with Russia.

“If they were thinking transactionally, like Trump, they would’ve said: ‘Okay, we’ll help you out. Now let’s talk about Ukraine simultaneously.’ But instead it developed into a kind of schoolyard back and forth with the threat to remove 5,000 troops, just another schoolyard taunt.” He added: “It just takes the intra-NATO dispute to a lower level than we need it to be.”

But Bolton also rebuked the Spanish foreign minister for the country’s refusal to allow air bases to be used in the conflict and suggesting that Europe be less dependent on America for its defense. “This is the moment of the sovereignty and independence of Europe. The Americans are inviting us to (do) that,” José Manuel Albares told POLITICO this week.

Bolton, who was also U.S. ambassador to the United Nations for President George W. Bush, was unimpressed. “He is wrong,” he retorted. “He (Albares) has also spoken about the need for a European Union army — to which all I can say is good luck with that.

“It’s not like Europe is filled with strong political leaders at the moment, or that the capability exists that they can handle a number of crises entirely on their own. It was a key Soviet goal during the Cold War to split the NATO alliance, and one reason among many that that didn’t work is that we didn’t let the divisions come between us. It would be a cruel irony if after the Cold War we did it to ourselves.”

Bolton also opined on what he sees as Europe’s lack of seriousness about China, as Trump arrived in Beijing for his long-awaited meeting with President Xi Jinping. 

“While Europeans worry about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, they worry less about China’s role supporting Russia, and they don’t worry so much about a potential Chinese attack on Taiwan, although I think the things are increasingly linked together — and I think the war in the Gulf right now with Iran is with a principal Russian-Chinese surrogate,” Bolton said. “I’m not sure that Europe as a whole thinks beyond the North Atlantic.”

Chrystia Freeland, the former Canadian deputy prime minister and current economic adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, also issued a warning about Europe’s posture on Trump’s visit to China.

In a separate interview at the summit, she told POLITICO that the rift in the relationship between the U.S. and its European allies “makes it that much harder for a collective position when it comes to China.” She added: “It’s very hard to do without the United States being part of that effort.”

Earlier this week, anti-corruption watchdogs in Ukraine charged Andriy Yermak, the former head of Zelenskyy’s office, with corruption and money laundering. Freeland admitted the  country had problems of graft to deal with, but cited the Yermak arrest as a sign of progress, after criticism that the government had been resistant to cleaning up cronyism.

“I actually think we need to see the work of the Ukrainian anti-corruption agencies as a sign of Ukraine’s health rather than of Ukraine’s illness,” she said.

Listen to the full interviews here on Brussels Playbook’s Week Ender podcast: https://pod.link/1244862657