The Room Where It Happened

Trump wants desperately to pull out of “endless wars” in Afghanistan and the Middle East. The trouble is, the author writes, the president has no plan to address the aftermath of withdrawal, as key allies are left abandoned and terrorism is allowed to spread unchecked.

Before launching into Trump’s failed attempts to leave Syria and Afghanistan, Bolton describes a very telling phone conversation between Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan regarding the release of Andrew Brunson, an evangelical preacher living in Turkey whom Erdogan arrested as a political dissident. At Erdogan’s urging, Trump instructs Pompeo and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin to interfere with a US investigation into Halkbank, a state-run Turkish bank with close ties to Erdogan and his family. In return, Erdogan may release Brunson. To Bolton, this reflects Trump’s willingness to obstruct justice for political purposes—after all, the release of an evangelical preacher from a majority Muslim nation would appeal greatly to his base. Because the case is being handled by the Southern District of New York, which enjoys a measure of autonomy from the federal government, the gambit falters. Yet this dynamic of viewing foreign policy through a strictly electoral lens emerges again before the book’s end.