The DIY foreign policy president: Bolton ouster confirms it
WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump has said he doesn't mind if the U.S. is on its own in the world. Now, it seems he doesn't mind running American foreign policy on his own as well.
With the ouster of John Bolton as his national security adviser, the president has again pushed away an experienced hand in international affairs and a counter-weight to his DIY approach to Iran, North Korea, China and more.
Trump told reporters Wednesday that Bolton had made "some very big mistakes," did not get along with others in the administration and was out of step with him on policy. "John wasn't in line with what we were doing," the president said.
Bolton is a hardliner with well-known hawkish views, working for a president known more for improvisation than ideology. His departure, as world leaders prepare to converge on New York for the annual United Nations General Assembly this month, produces new uncertainty in international affairs already clouded by Trump's do-it-yourself instincts.
"The president doesn't have any fixed views on anything, so that people around him are constantly trying to get into his good graces by playing to his whims, and because his whims are all over the map, their policy positions end up being all over the map," said Stephen Biddle, a professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University.
Bolton is just the latest in a parade of seasoned foreign policy hands leaving the Trump administration as the president has grown more comfortable in his own decision-making and resistant to internal dissent. Bolton's ouster leaves Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at the top of the foreign policy chart, but he is only nominally at the wheel of an apparatus that is driven by the president alone and to which he accommodates.
With nearly all of the administration's international initiatives incomplete or...