The two online pundits I follow most often who write about foreign policy are the somewhat-Liberal Fred Kaplan and the somewhat-Conservative Daniel Larison. When they agree on something, as they sometimes do, I feel I have stumbled upon something that's as close to the truth as you're ever likely to find on the Internet.
The two men have both now reviewed John Bolton's new book, The Room Where It Happened, which contains the testimony he could have given under oath, transcribed and published to achieve profit and avoid cross-examination. It's less useful to the country that way but it's not without its value
Here's a bit of what Daniel Larison had to say…
Bolton thinks he is scoring a huge hit by saying that Mnuchin worried more about how a policy affects Americans than the "mission" of regime change, which just drives home how fanatical and bad for America Bolton's foreign policy obsessions are. If we learn anything from Bolton's book, it is that Bolton was a terrible and dangerous National Security Advisor, and the country is better off now that he will never again serve in government. But then, like most of the other things contained in the book, we already knew that.
And here's Fred Kaplan…
The Room Where It Happened (out Tuesday) is every bit the flame job that the advance news stories indicated. But it's also, unwittingly, an indictment of Bolton himself — as warmonger, self-aggrandizer, deceiver, at times a shrewd bureaucratic operator, at other times stunningly blind to the politics around him, and, in any case, a man that no future president should hire to walk his dog, much less help guard the nation.
Don't those two paragraphs sound like they were written by the same guy?
