Former US national security adviser John Bolton makes predictions for Trump's second term

Estimated read time: 6-7 minutes

OREM — Former U.S. national security adviser John Bolton, who served in the Trump administration from 2018 to 2019, expressed concern about the president-elect's "philosophy of national security" while visiting Utah Thursday.

Bolton was visiting Orem to deliver a keynote address to business owners and community members during the fourth annual Growth and Prosperity Summit at Utah Valley University, speaking along with Gov. Spencer Cox, Sen. Mike Lee, former Gov. Gary Herbert, UVU President Astrid Tuminez and others.

Bolton, a former United Nations ambassador from 2005-2006, replaced Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster as national security adviser to former President Donald Trump; McMaster had replaced Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn in the national security post in 2017. McMaster and Bolton have both released memoirs about their time holding that position.

Bolton described the former president's policy decisions in his book "The Room Where It Happened," as "chaotic" and driven by "personal whim and impulse."

He told the crowd gathered in the large ballroom of the UVU student center that while "there were no crises in international affairs that really threatened us very seriously" in Trump's first administration, "I don't think we can count on that in a second term."

In order to maintain America's national security, "You need to think strategically; you need to think broadly about objectives and matching needs to objectives and to consider very carefully what each individual decision needs in a very complex and increasingly threatening and challenging world," Bolton said, "and that's just not the way Trump operates."

Bolton later confessed, "I didn't vote for either (Donald Trump) or Kamala Harris on Tuesday. I live in Maryland where you can write in people, so I wrote in Mike Pence."

Before his public address, Bolton met with KSL.com. He was serious and precise, his Yale class ring flashing on the hand he used to periodically adjust gold wiry glasses, and a wedding band on the other.

Previously vocal about Russian and Chinese interference in the 2016 and 2020 elections, Bolton said that whether or not bad actors are manipulating social media for one candidate or another, their bigger agenda is working to "undercut American citizen confidence in their own government and to question the legitimacy of voting, vote counting and the whole political process.

"If you can undercut civil society, which is based on trust, based on belief that our governmental institutions are fair, then you can put the entire society in danger. And I think that's really what they're after."

Despite Bolton's 17 months of experience working under Trump, he says the next term is "hard to predict."

"There's a risk that Trump will withdraw support from Ukraine and will not come to Taiwan's defense," Bolton said, adding that he "doesn't appreciate the reliance we have on the chip technology, in particular from Taiwan."

The world "is a more dangerous place" than it was in 2019, according to Bolton. "You can see the cooperation between China and Russia, and now North Korea in the Ukraine war. You can see the conflict in the Middle East. You can see the threats that China's making against Taiwan and South China Sea along its periphery."

In a "fireside chat" with Ryan Vogel, a former senior policy adviser in the Office of the Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon, Bolton said, "10,000 North Korean troops are fighting with the Russians in Kursk Oblast to push Ukrainians out of Russian territory."

"Somebody can correct me if I'm wrong," Bolton said. "I don't think Asian troops have been fighting in Eastern Europe since Genghis Khan. This is the kind of transformation of the world that's underway as we watch."

China is "building up their nuclear weapons capability; they're building a blue water navy for the first time in 600 years; they've developed weapons in space and satellite weapons in particular," Bolton told KSL.com. "China has been stealing intellectual property from the United States, Europe, Japan, really all over the world for decades, and neither we nor any of the other victims of this have ever effectively dealt with it."

"The way you avoid falling into conflict is to have a strong enough military capability that your adversaries are deterred," he said.

Vogel, who is also a faculty member at UVU, told KSL.com that Bolton's intellectual property theft concerns are especially applicable to Utah companies "because we have a very robust defense industry sector here, in addition to a tech sector and innovation sector."

"Utah is one of the focal points, in many ways, of the intellectual property theft approach," according to Vogel, "because we do all the things that are valuable for a country like China to try to steal from."

Utah businesses, and others nationwide, are fighting this theft by simply avoiding "new capital investment into China," Bolton said. "It's a gradual process. They're not just pulling up stakes, but the trend is very clear." The shift in the supply chain is happening "at an increasingly rapid pace," he said, and will most likely result in "almost no cost to the American consumer."

The former national security adviser proposed a number of policy solutions for a world of heightened tensions. First, he believes the U.S. needs to increase the defense budget. "I'm a deficit hawk, so it's a matter of arithmetic," he said, reducing domestic spending to balance keep deficits down.

Bolton wants to see "more creativity" and innovation in the technology and defense industries while "protecting what creative people produce from being stolen."

The current defense contracting program needs an overhaul, according to Bolton. "The system is overladen with regulations and inhibitions, and it stymies creativity," he said. "It's intended to produce fair results and so on, but it really produces much more inefficiency than anything else."

Vogel agreed with Bolton, in part, arguing that the larger issue is not the size of the defense budget but what it is being used for. "The number is not really as much of a concern as whether we're getting what we need out of that," Vogel said.

"The defense budget is already pretty big. We need to look at the defense budget in the same way that we look at other things, which is — are we getting the return on the investment on everything that we're funding?" he asked.

Bolton has his views, but they are just one side of a debate that he believes citizens are not having. "We need people to think more about what it takes to make America safe," he said.

"For 35 years, we have not had political leaders who were capable or even interested in addressing the American people about the threats that we face and what we need to do to protect ourselves," according to Bolton. "The national security of the country has almost fallen out of the dialogue."

Though he is not the only one, Bolton said, "Trump is perhaps the best, or worst if you want to look at it that way, example of our failure to think about foreign defense policy more consistently."

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Collin Leonard

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Collin Leonard is a reporter for KSL.com. He covers federal and state courts, northern Utah communities and military news. Collin is a graduate of Duke University.