Josh Rogin - Chaos Under Heaven

Shortest Asia Trip Ever

Bolton and Pence had a quiet but close alliance on foreign policy matters during Bolton’s tenure as national security adviser, a relationship neither side saw any benefit in advertising. Bolton was not actually a neocon like Pence. Ideologically, he was more of a conservative hawk, like Pompeo. (The difference between neocon and conservative hawk—often overlooked even in DC—had to do with how much one felt the values of democracy, freedom, and human rights should factor into America’s foreign policy and its use of hard power. That distinction most often surfaced when policy makers were talking about bad governments that the United States worked with, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Neocons wanted them to change; conservative hawks wanted them to stay close allies.) Pence and Bolton shared staff and worked together on foreign policy, but they stayed quiet about their cooperation. They were both establishment Republicans viewed skeptically by the Make America Great Again crowd and the officials inside the White House who viewed the old GOP as the enemy.

On China, Pence and Bolton were two peas in a pod. While neocons and conservative hawks may disagree on how hard to push our values on our allies, they come together in agreeing we should push our values on our adversaries. Both Pence and Bolton had a long record of speaking out about China. In a speech at the Daniel Morgan Graduate School in DC, given just before he became national security adviser, Bolton called for Washington to lead the whole region to push back against Chinese aggression across the board. “Without effective American resistance, the countries of ASEAN [the Association of Southeast Asian Nations], the Southeast Asian countries, obviously don’t have the strength to deal with China individually, and I don’t think we’ve provided adequate leadership,” he said. “For two decades now, we have not had an effective China strategy . . . We’ve got to do what we can, or we will simply be outmaneuvered time and time again.”

Bolton was committed to traveling to Asia as much as possible to try to manage alliance relationships Trump was damaging, so he planned to join Pence in Singapore (the second leg of our Asia trip) for the ASEAN summit and the East Asia Summit—the national security adviser was so excited that he flew directly to Singapore from the ceremony celebrating the seventy-fifth anniversary of D-Day in Normandy, France. Bolton intended to then travel on with Pence to the APEC CEO Summit in Papua New Guinea, with a short stopover in Australia. But he ended up attending zero of those events.

On Bolton’s first night in Singapore, there was a crisis back in Washington involving his deputy, Mira Ricardel. A longtime GOP foreign policy hawk, Ricardel had kept out of politics during the campaign and had held several Trump administration positions over the years. Famously sharp-elbowed, she was Bolton’s enforcer and, as such, battled with several administration factions during her short months as the NSC’s number two official.

But Ricardel’s mountain of bad will was built beginning in the transition, when she was the head of the White House personnel office for the Defense Department. There, she immediately clashed with Mattis. Mattis was putting forth not only career Foreign Service officers like Ambassador Anne Patterson for senior Pentagon jobs but outright Democrats like Michèle Flournoy, who was assumed to be a top contender for the defense secretary job if Hillary Clinton had won.

Ricardel wanted to be the Pentagon’s number three official, undersecretary of defense for policy. Mattis blocked her, but not before she had blocked several of his picks and soured much of the White House on Mattis. Ricardel eventually got a posting at the Commerce Department as a consolation prize. But she returned to the White House in April 2018 as Bolton’s right-hand woman, with a mandate to get the Pentagon under control.

But before she would do that, Ricardel ran afoul of the powerful Trump family faction, when she told Melania Trump’s staff that if they wanted NSC officials to help the First Lady on her four-country tour of Africa, they would have to be allotted seats on Melania’s plane. It seemed reasonable to Ricardel that her people shouldn’t have to follow the First Lady’s entourage from African country to country on commercial flights. But Melania’s staff wouldn’t budge. It became a test of wills, and in the Trump White House, the president’s family wins those battles almost always. Melania’s staff appealed to John Kelly, who ordered Ricardel to comply, which she did.

But even though they had prevailed, Melania’s staff couldn’t let it go. They waited until it was 3 a.m. in Singapore (so Bolton was asleep) and released a statement from the Office of the First Lady bashing Ricardel as undeserving of working in the White House. The East Wing was openly attacking the West Wing in a bizarrely public way. Privately, Melania’s staff was also leaking that Ricardel was an angry, lying, leaking woman.

A few hours later in Singapore, Bolton and his traveling staff got on a plane back to Washington to deal with the Ricardel mess. The national security adviser missed all the meetings with our Southeast Asian allies because of the factional infighting back in DC. Ricardel resigned shortly thereafter.

Tantrum Diplomacy

Pence moved on to Papua New Guinea without Bolton, but with Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan, Pottinger, and his own national security adviser, retired general Keith Kellogg, a perfectly nice but inconsequential official who had been a policy adviser on the campaign and had hung around ever since. This was the main event of the trip. Xi Jinping had arrived a week earlier for an official state visit. China had a plan to dominate the event or, if not, at least make sure they spoiled any chance the United States would gain any benefit from it.

The signs of China’s influence on the small third-world island were everywhere. In advance of the conference, China had ceremoniously opened a huge highway through the middle of Port Moresby they had built for no money down (debt trap to come later). The road led up to the sparkling new and quite stunning parliament building, also built and paid for by Chinese firms working on government orders. The new Supreme Court building, another gift (with strings) from China to Papua New Guinea, was visible but still under construction.

In honor of Xi’s state visit, the Chinese delegation had lined the new highway with Chinese flags. As the other national delegations poured in, the Papua New Guinea government asked the Chinese delegation to take the flags down. They refused. Pressed further, they finally took down the Chinese flags—but then replaced them with solid red flags that looked like the Chinese flags from any distance. But that was only the beginning of their weird and aggressive bullying over those few days.

When Xi hosted the leaders of the eight Pacific Islands that don’t have diplomatic relationships with Taiwan for dinner at his hotel, all the international journalists who showed up to cover it were thrown out. When it came time for the awkward group photo where all the leaders stand together on rafters wearing brightly colored island shirts, Xi made the other leaders wait for him by delaying his arrival, a power move.

Inside the meetings, the Chinese delegation complained loudly that the United States was “scheming” against China and dragging these other Asian countries into it to their detriment. Pottinger was in charge of negotiating a joint statement that was supposed to represent the consensus of the twenty-one countries. The Chinese delegation objected to language about combatting unfair trade practices, a vague enough line that said, “We agree to fight protectionism including all unfair trade practices.”