MAGA owes a lot to his vision for American foreign policy.
L ong before President Trump stitched Make America Great Again onto a red cap, John Bolton had stitched it into conservative American foreign policy. Without Bolton, the Trump Doctrine would not be what it is today: a coherent strategy that helped unite the coalition that won the 2024 elections. If not for Bolton’s intellectual influence, wielded over decades, it might be Trump who would be sitting at home writing his memoirs, not Bolton.
Nevertheless, the administration has chosen to persecute Bolton, who served as national security adviser in the first Trump term and has since become an outspoken critic. In late August, the FBI searched Bolton’s Maryland home and Washington, D.C., office, reportedly for evidence of classified information. They seized laptops, smartphones, memory drives, boxes of his “printed daily activities,” a white binder labeled “Statements and Reflections to Allied Strikes,” and folders marked “Trump I–IV.” As seems to mysteriously happen with the FBI and political cases — including the August 2022 FBI search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home — television news crews quickly appeared on scene to provide breathless coverage.
For all the drama, the Justice Department had offered no official explanation for the raid. But on Friday, the FBI released the affidavit that supported its application for a search warrant. It revealed that investigators partly based their case on years-old intelligence suggesting that a foreign adversary — most likely Iran — had hacked Bolton’s AOL email account while he was in office. Although large portions of the affidavit are blacked out, the visible portions point to foreign espionage — not any allegation of misconduct by Bolton.
Most unredacted portions of the affidavit focus instead on the old fight over Bolton’s 2020 memoir, The Room Where It Happened. It refers to exchanges between a career national security staffer and Bolton’s counsel about modifying passages that might have contained classified information. The NSC staff cleared the manuscript, but a political appointee tried to keep it secret. Bolton went to court (as the law permitted) and prevailed. A federal judge approved the publication. Its portrayal of a president uninterested in and unknowledgeable about foreign affairs — except when they served his personal interests — quickly became a bestseller.
Whether presidential advisers should write memoirs about a sitting president is a question of prudence, not criminal law. Bolton certainly did not paint Trump in the best light in his 2020 book and has remained critical since. He has charged that Trump “saw foreign policy decisions as opportunities for personal gain” and “was not fit to be president.” Trump, while disclaiming any responsibility for ordering the search, gave as good as he got by calling Bolton “a real lowlife,” “not a smart guy,” and even “unpatriotic.”
Trump could leave his feud with Bolton there. Being the target of unflattering, harsh criticism is an inevitable part of the presidency. But even after the first Trump administration lost in court, it still launched a criminal investigation of Bolton for mishandling classified information. Upon taking office, the Biden administration closed the investigation. To relaunch it is to relitigate what the courts effectively settled. Instead of a righteous investigation of a spy or threat to national security, the FBI search appears to amount to score-settling with a trusted-ally-turned-political critic.
Considering Bolton an enemy, not a friend, ignores his central role in developing what has become MAGA foreign policy. Commentators often label Bolton a “hawk” who favors war for its own sake, but that caricature grossly misrepresents his thought. Bolton was talking about sovereignty before it was cool and was attacking globalization before JD Vance was even thinking of writing his own memoirs. As an assistant secretary in the Reagan State Department, Bolton resisted efforts to cede power to supranational bodies. He insisted that the United States should use its military, political, and economic power to defend its own security and pursue its own interests. He fought against the United Nations, not only because it created an illusion of global security, but also because it had been captured by anti-American opponents. “There is no United Nations,” Bolton declared in 1994. “There is an international community that occasionally can be led by the only real power left in the world, and that’s the United States, when it suits our interests and when we can get others to go along.”
As undersecretary of state under President George W. Bush, Bolton waged his greatest campaign in defense of American sovereignty. He persuaded the Bush administration to “unsign” the Rome Statute, which claimed the power to put American soldiers and officials on trial before the International Criminal Court. “My happiest moment at State was personally ‘unsigning’ the Rome Statute that created the ICC,” Bolton later recalled in his 2007 memoir. He then spent years leading a global diplomatic campaign to strike over 100 bilateral agreements guaranteeing that no country would surrender Americans to the Hague. Congress reinforced his work in 2002 with the American Servicemembers’ Protection Act, which authorized “all means necessary and appropriate, including force,” to prevent ICC prosecution of U.S. personnel. (As an official in the Bush Justice Department, I participated in the negotiations over the bill.) Once in the Trump administration, Bolton declared sanctions on ICC officials for conducting investigations into U.S. military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Setting the stage yet again for another core element of Trump’s foreign policy, Bolton has led as one of the fiercest defenders of Israel. “There is no rationale for the United States to pressure Israel into ‘peace agreements’ with its remaining Arab neighbors, or to believe that ‘dialogue’ on such issues will have any material effect on the Middle East’s numerous other conflicts,” Bolton wrote in his 2007 book, Surrender Is Not an Option. “The United States has no interest in precipitating such decisions.” Bolton has long supported the right of Israel to defend itself, and he reportedly left the first Trump administration for proposing strikes on the Iranian nuclear program. His warnings on the dangers posed by the mullahs in Tehran look prescient in 2025, after Trump carried out the very strikes that Bolton advocated.
Bolton’s vision of self-reliant sovereign states radically changed arms-control policy, too. Bolton foresaw earlier than most that new technology and the end of the U.S.-USSR rivalry would render obsolete the arms-control orthodoxies of the 1970s. As a result, he pressed for an end to agreements that were retarding America’s right to defend itself with the latest military innovations. In the Bush administration, for example, he prevailed over moderates in the White House and the State Department to terminate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (another issue on which we worked). The treaty, which prohibited only Washington and Moscow from deploying anti-missile defenses, made no sense in a world where rogue states such as North Korea and Iran were developing nuclear weapons and missiles capable of reaching the United States. Bolton freed the United States to deploy the existing national missile defense system and to develop the technologies that will now become Trump’s “Golden Dome” anti-missile shield for America.
Bolton carried this fight forward in the Trump White House. He led the effort behind the 2019 withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which had prohibited the U.S. and the USSR, and then Russia, from deploying medium-range nuclear missiles. He had warned that Russia’s violations rendered America the only nation honoring those terms — “the ultimate arms-control absurdity.” Once again, Bolton demanded that the United States, as a sovereign nation, remain free to defend itself against the threats of today and tomorrow, rather than pay homage to the shibboleths of international cooperation.
Behind these battles sits a larger understanding of America’s place in the world that formed the intellectual framework for Trumpian foreign policy. Bolton warned that the drive for international governance, and reduction in national sovereignty, proceeded from the “seductive and debilitating” approach of Europe: globalist, statist, and bureaucratic. He saw it as offering only the illusion of stability while undermining national self-determination. He countered with borders, territorial control, and unilateral freedom of action as the hallmarks of national strength — principles that have become core tenets of Trumpism. He distrusted intelligence agencies before it was fashionable on the right and rejected arms-control or trade agreements that constrained American autonomy. “Republicans and Democrats should agree on one thing when it comes to military force: An international agreement’s renunciation of the use of American force manifestly limits U.S. sovereignty, with enormous effects on national security,” Bolton and I wrote in a joint piece for National Review more than a decade ago. Bolton’s career stood for putting America first.
The Bolton I know, who has devoted his life to defending America’s national security, would not casually mishandle America’s dearest secrets. And yet, even after the affidavit’s release, the government’s rationale for the search remains unclear. If there is new evidence of wrongdoing, the Trump administration should state it plainly. Otherwise, Bolton’s persecution reeks of reprisal, not the rule of law.
The administration’s treatment of Bolton will only harm the nation and Trump himself. The First Amendment protects the right of insiders to write books, testify, and criticize once they leave government. Although understandably uncomfortable for presidents, this flow of information gives the government the feedback necessary to improve national security and provides voters with important details about the performance of our leaders. But if a president can direct the FBI to investigate a former adviser for an unflattering book, government will become more opaque. We will also find ourselves served by mediocre officials. Who will want to serve — let alone speak candidly in the Situation Room — if a policy dispute today could lead to a search warrant tomorrow? Raiding a former national security adviser, and now holding an investigation over his head for nebulous reasons, may deter figures of experience, wisdom, and high intellect from serving this president and his successors and giving them the benefit of all arguments and options.
A presidency staffed by courtiers is less likely to produce the disruptive achievements that Trump has promised. MAGA was a vow to put American sovereignty and interests first; Bolton translated that promise into an effective foreign policy. Score-settling won’t advance the Trump administration’s vision of redefining America’s role on the world stage.