The real villain of John Bolton’s Trump book is John Bolton

Heather Hurlburt was quoted in a Vox article about John Bolton's book.

Let that sink in for a moment. The most irrational thing Bolton says he ever saw a president do wasn’t, for example, invade Iraq over weapons of mass destruction it didn’t have (Bolton was in the State Department at the time as the undersecretary of arms control and international security). No, he saves that designation for Trump’s decision not to put Iranian lives in danger over a downed pilotless aircraft.

Granted, striking Iranian military sites may not have directly led to an all-out fight, but it certainly would’ve made one more likely. Trump clearly saw that danger; Bolton didn’t. “In the places where those two men parted, it seems clear to me that Trump got it right,” said Justin Logan, a US foreign policy expert at Catholic University.

Of course, Bolton does have a bit more leeway to advocate for conflict. At the end of the day, Trump’s name would be the one tethered throughout history to a war — not Bolton’s.

“If that Iran attack had gone ahead, Trump would deservedly have shouldered the blame,” Heather Hurlburt, a US foreign policy expert at the New America think tank, told me. But, she noted, “Trump deserves very little credit for pulling back after having dismantled so many off-ramps and gotten himself to the brink in the first place.”

Still, what these episodes — and Bolton’s book writ large — make clear is that despite his predilection for very publicly ramping up tensions with other countries, Trump isn’t the one most hungry for armed conflict in his White House. Veterans of Washington’s foreign policy world are.

That’s a troubling insight.