NEW: John Bolton on letters to Pres. Trump he believed to be from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un: 'I think Kim Jong Un gets a huge laugh out of this...Yet, the president has looked at them as evidence of this deep friendship.'
: Yeah. Well, it was clear that in the trade talks with China, which involve extraordinarily important structural issues, as we call them, China's theft of not just American intellectual property, but intellectual property from all the developed countries, forced technology transfers, discrimination against foreign investment and trade.
And that kinda conversation almost never took place. There were successes, as, for example, when the Defense Department budget was significantly increased over wholly inadequate defense spending levels in the Obama administration. But not in anything in the president's mind connected to what those resources were for, their deterrent capabilities, where we still needed improvements.
So I was happy to take the correct decisions when I could get them. I thought they were consistent with broad mainstream Republican Party foreign policy. But there were many others that were just out of nowhere. And it's the inconsistency and the back and forth that makes it hard to accomplish long-term American national interests.: Really? Well, how can anybody call himself a stable genius? It's hard for me to imagine somebody who would say that.
You know, the motto of our forces in the Pacific and in South Korea in particular is"fight tonight," meaning we have to be ready. We don't get to decide when the hostilities start. And to pull down these engagements, these exercises, because they displeased Kim Jong Un, I just thought was an act of folly.
It's a very dark quotation, where he says,"People simply will not take the steps that are necessary when the threat is small, and the risk is low. And they wait and they wait until the threat is large and the risk is high." And Churchill talked about the confirmed unteachability of mankind. That's what we saw in the Trump administration Korea policy.: And take us inside that room. You talked about the press being there. We saw that historic handshake.
But again, if the president's reelected, he will come back not from the harsh rhetoric about China we've seen in the past couple months, he will come back to the great white whale of the Trump administration, the big trade deal with China. And there's no telling what the terms of that deal will be.: Just a month before that summit, I interviewed you. And you praised the president's skill, saying he would size Kim up, and that he has got an outstanding ability to do that.
I wrote a 500-page book. And even that's not a complete picture. If Simon and Schuster had given me 500 more pages, I could have filled that too. But it's important for people to look at these facts spread out over a range of issues to see what actually happened. Not to listen just to the rhetoric and the hoopla, but look at the facts. And I hope they do, and they'll make up their own decisions.
Bob Gates wrote a book about his tenure as secretary of defense. And he was criticized for writing the book in the middle of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign while President Obama was still in office. I think he did exactly the right thing. I wrote a book review of his book back in 2014. I don't think the North Koreans slowed down one bit during these two years of negotiations. So like the eight years of Obama, we just lost another two or three years. And the North Korea and the Iranian and other rogue state capabilities continue to advance.: So on a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate Trump's ability to make a deal on North Korea?: Well, I think it turned out, clearly at this point, to be zero.
And I viewed this before I joined the administration. I viewed it while I was there, and I view it today. These are attacks on the constitution itself. These are acts of war against the United States. And we need to take them seriously. I think we took steps to get our cyber offensive capabilities into better shape during the administration, during my service there. I think that was a very important step forward.
Now, I don't believe that. But I think that from Cold War days right until the present, Moscow has tried to interfere in American politics. In the '40s and '50s they were tryin' to take over the movie industry. They've tried it in a whole variety of ways. It shouldn't surprise anybody they're trying it now.
But he wanted a probe of Joe Biden in exchange for delivering the security assistance that was part of the congressional legislation that had been passed several years before. So that in his mind, he was bargaining to get the investigation, using the resources of the federal government, which I found very disturbing.
And it would be much more difficult in those circumstances. But there wasn't any doubt. And I point out in the book he said it to me directly that that's what he had in mind. And I'll say again, I think it was widely understood at senior levels in the government that that's exactly what his objective was.: Well, I think Secretary Pompeo understood. I think the Pentagon understood. I think the intelligence community understood. I think people in the White House understood.
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