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Washington, US
Former US national security adviser John Bolton said on Tuesday (Dec 24) that a major international crisis is "much more likely" in US President-elect Donald Trump's upcoming term given his "inability to focus" on foreign policy.
Bolton, who was also a US ambassador to the United Nations, slammed Trump for his lack of knowledge, interest in facts, or coherent strategy.
John Bolton was also Trump's longest-serving national security adviser and served from April 2018 to September 2019.
He further described the president-elect's decision-making as driven by personal relationships and "neuron flashes" rather than a deep understanding of national interests.
He also dismissed Trump's claims he made during this year's presidential campaign, in which he said that only he could prevent a third world war while bringing a swift end to the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine.
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“It’s typical Trump: it’s all braggadocio,” Bolton told the Guardian. “The world is more dangerous than when he was president before. The only real crisis we had was Covid, which is a long-term crisis and not against a particular foreign power but against a pandemic."
“But the risk of an international crisis of the 19th-century variety is much more likely in a second Trump term. Given Trump’s inability to focus on coherent decision-making, I’m very worried about how that might look," he added.
He further recalled that earlier he believed that like other US presidents, the weight of the responsibilities, certainly in national security, the gravity of the issues that he was confronting, the consequences of his decisions, would discipline his thinking in a way that would produce serious outcomes.
“It turned out I was wrong. By the time I got there, a lot of patterns of behaviour had already been set that were never changed, and it could well be, even if I had been there earlier, I couldn’t have affected it. But it was clear pretty soon after I got there that intellectual discipline wasn’t in the Trump vocabulary," he continued.
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On Trump's relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Bolton said that he believed that he had a friendship with Putin.
“I don’t know what Putin thinks his relationship is with Trump but he believes he knows how to play Trump, that Trump’s an easy mark. Trump doesn’t see that at all," he said.
“If you put everything on the basis of personal relations and you don’t understand how the person you’re talking about on the other side views you, that’s a real lack of situational awareness that can only cause trouble," Bolton added.
(With inputs from agencies)