National security adviser John Bolton speaks in Lima, Peru, Aug. 6, 2019.
Photo: ho/Agence France-Presse/Getty ImagesDuring John Bolton’s 17 months as White House national security adviser, he headed a U.S. policy aimed at removing Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and restoring that country’s democracy. A chapter in his new memoir, “The Room Where It Happened,” is his version of what went wrong.
The book isn’t the “tell-all” it’s cracked up to be. The U.S. policy crackup in Venezuela is more than anything else a colossal intelligence failure. Either because he doesn’t understand that reality or, more likely, because writing about U.S. intel capabilities would have landed Mr. Bolton in legal trouble, he doesn’t go there.
Instead he trains his firepower on the lack of coordination of the interagency process and lays the blame on President Trump. The breakdown in intel is there—but you have to read between the lines to find it.
The president claims he fired Mr. Bolton in September 2019. Mr. Bolton says he quit. In either case they parted on bad terms and now Mr. Bolton is getting even. The 39 pages of his book devoted to Venezuela include juicy tidbits from private conversations and closed-door meetings that many argue he was honor-bound to withhold from the public at least until after Mr. Trump’s time in office.
Trump critics will delight in these vignettes, as they support charges that the president is an erratic decision maker with a short attention span and weird fixations. Mr. Maduro can be expected to make hay out of claims that Mr. Trump has been privately critical of interim Venezuelan President Juan Guaidó, at one point referring to him as “the Beto O’Rouke of Venezuela.”
The Venezuela mess predates the Trump presidency. President Obama was clueless about the threats that the military dictatorship in Caracas and its handlers in Havana pose to the region, and his policies weakened the democratic opposition by strengthening U.S. ties to the Castro regime. John Kerry, Mr. Obama’s secretary of state, even declared the end of the Monroe Doctrine. Mr. Bolton thinks his Venezuela policy failed because Mr. Trump wasn’t sufficiently committed to its success.
In January 2019 Venezuelans cheered when Mr. Guaidó, then-president of the National Assembly, made a constitutional claim on the presidency. “The revolution was on,” Mr. Bolton writes. He ordered his staff to issue a statement in support of the new government while Mr. Maduro refused to step aside.
The U.S. recognized Mr. Guaidó, and Mr. Bolton argued that Washington should move fast with biting sanctions on the Maduro regime. For that he needed leadership from Treasury and the State Department, and he says he got none.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin takes the sharpest criticism from Mr. Bolton, who says that Treasury resisted oil sanctions and financial sanctions every step of the way. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross explained to Mr. Bolton that Mr. Mnuchin was “more worried about secondary effects on U.S. companies than about the mission.”
The State Department wasn’t much help. In answer to Mr. Mnuchin’s objections to the oil sanctions, Secretary Mike Pompeo suggested that they be done “in slices,” a far cry from the shock and awe Mr. Bolton wanted.
Mr. Pompeo didn’t have a handle on the bureaucracy below him either. State’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs went into “open revolt against petroleum sanctions” on the grounds that they would “endanger embassy personnel.” Mr. Bolton writes that Mr. Pompeo one day called him, “uncertain about what to do about the bureaucracy’s resistance.”
Mr. Pompeo eventually went along with the oil sanctions, but Mr. Bolton worried that State personnel were simultaneously undermining coalition-building efforts in the region. Later, when Mr. Bolton announced in a meeting a plan to broaden and deepen the sanctions, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow, Commerce’s Mr. Ross and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen backed him. “Mnuchin was resistant” and “Pompeo was largely silent.”
“Disarray” at the State Department and “Treasury footdragging” were harmful to the sanctions cause, Mr. Bolton writes, insisting that “time lost in internal debate was equivalent to throwing Maduro a lifeline.”
Yet the elephant in the room—where it happened—is the glaring absence of human intelligence on the ground. Mr. Pompeo’s decision to close “Embassy Caracas and withdraw all U.S. personnel” because he feared “another Benghazi” was a devastating miscalculation. In particular, when Mr. Guaidó launched an effort to unseat Mr. Maduro on April 30, 2019, the U.S. was flying blind.
Mr. Bolton’s tactical maneuvers failed, but probably not for the reasons he gives. The U.S. is in a proxy war with Russia, Iran, China and Cuba in Venezuela, and Washington fails to assess adequately its enemies’ effectiveness in the areas of intelligence, propaganda and strategy. Mr. Bolton’s narrative takes revenge but does nothing to advance U.S. interests.
Write to O’Grady@wsj.com.
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