Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton declared President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel was “exactly the right move to make.” Following are quotes from an interview Bolton gave to Breitbart SeriusXM radio interviewer Raheem Kassam:
“Israel is one of the very few, maybe the only country in the world where the American embassy is not in its capital city,” Bolton pointed out. “From the American point of view, let’s start with us, it only makes sense to put our embassy where the institutions of government are located, in the country to which our diplomats are accredited. If we found, for whatever reason we came across a European country we didn’t have an embassy in – a new country was created, for example – we wouldn’t put our embassy in a city 50 miles away from the capital.”
“Why Israel should be different than any other country in the world, no one has been able to explain. What Trump has done is not extraordinary. It simply conforms Israel to the other 190 or so countries that we have diplomatic relations with. It is, from an efficiency and an effectiveness point of view, good for the United States,” he said.
President Trump was very careful yesterday to say that that obviously the embassy is going to be in West Jerusalem, which nobody has ever claimed would go back to Palestinians under any conceivable settlement, so it doesn’t prejudice the final status of Jerusalem,” he noted.
Bolton said recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel “breaks so many illusions that people have been holding.” [bolding is mine]
“If there’s no capital city for Israel, some believe that maybe Israel won’t exist much longer either,” he said. “That punctures that. It punctures the idea of U.N. supervision over Jerusalem from a U.N. resolution in 1947. I think it therefore also makes several other related resolutions dead letters, like the resolution on the so-called ‘right of return’ of the so-called ‘Palestinian refugees’ who are now four generations removed from that event.”
“I think this is actually a positive contribution to the Middle East peace process,” he proposed. “You cannot build a durable peace on soap bubbles. I think by eliminating a lot of these illusions you’ve actually really pushed people to say, ‘Okay, let’s look at the situation as it is now and bargain from reality, not from ideology.’”
Bolton credited Trump for making a bold move “on the international stage, and on the domestic stage as well.” In the latter case, he said Trump is building a reputation for keeping campaign promises such as recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
“In contemporary American politics, that’s revolutionary, because normally politicians say whatever it takes to get elected and then promptly forget about it,” he said wryly. “It’s one of the things that marks Trump as a very different kind of contemporary American leader.”
“And it has the same or maybe even a bigger impact internationally,” he continued. “You’ll notice that in the commentary around the world, you get what you’d expect from a lot of the Middle Eastern countries, but where you really get the ire is from our so-called European allies who just don’t want to be put in a difficult position.”
“This is the sort of action by the president that actually constitutes American leadership in the world. American leadership does not consist, as Barack Obama thought it did, of doing what the Europeans want. It consists of doing what we think is right for the country and bringing the others along. I think that’s what Trump did yesterday,” he said.
Bolton noted that most other countries base their foreign policy on their own national interests, but the United States is “the country that seems to succumb most often to ideas that are not really necessarily in our direct national interest.”
“What Trump did yesterday, I think, was show he was a force to be reckoned with. He’s not a conventional politician. He’s certainly not Barack Obama. I think Arab leaders respect that kind of integrity and strength. It’s something they’ve missed for the eight years under Obama. They want American leadership. They don’t like to say it publicly, but they know that they live in a much more dangerous world if we’re not being leaders,” he said.
Bolton said it was very important for Trump to “carry through on what he said yesterday, and that means looking at where the real opposition to moving the embassy lies – and that’s in the U.S. State Department.”
“In the Near East bureau, in the Legal Adviser’s office, and other bureaus, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find anybody who in his or her own personal view thinks this was a correct decision,” he explained. “Somebody needs to stay on the State Department day-by-day to make sure that what the president said, getting architect and engineers and planners started to create the new embassy. Otherwise, three years from now we’ll find they haven’t even picked a site for it.”
Turning to another significant difference of opinion between the foreign policy apparatus and the Trump White House, Bolton said he is a very strong supporter of NATO, which he described as “the most successful politico-military alliance in history,” but agreed with Trump’s campaign criticism that America’s allies have not been “pulling their weight, by and large.”