The room where it happened: a White House memoir

This book provoked a press frenzy when it was published and the text was hurriedly filleted by journalists for evidence of President Donald Trump's unsuitability for high office. But what does John Bolton's memoir tell us about United States foreign policy during his brief tenure as national security advisor (NSA)? I was ready for tales of Washington's foreign policy dysfunction. I had witnessed interdepartmental discord during numerous trips to the US capital to discuss Angola and Nicaragua in the 1980s, South Africa and counterterrorism in the 1990s and Afghanistan in the early 2000s. And yet from all this confusion, the national security advisor would somehow construct a coherent policy behind which the Washington machine would consolidate. To create order from chaos the NSA has to be a conciliator, but John Bolton is an ideologue and a zealot, and delights in his hawkish reputation. Few people win his approval and he...