FRANCE 24 spoke to John Bolton, who served as national security adviser to Donald Trump from 2018 to 2019. He has since become an outspoken critic of the 45th US president. Bolton said his former boss "admires" strong leaders like Russia's Vladimir Putin and China's Xi Jinping, and that both of them see Trump "as an easy mark". Explaining that Putin "knows how to deal with" Trump, he warned that if the latter is reelected, "unfortunately, he (Putin) would get from Trump a very satisfactory solution from Russia's point of view in Ukraine".
Speaking to FRANCE 24 from Washington, Bolton also expressed concern that if reelected, Trump would accept Xi Jinping's terms on US-Chinese trade differences "in a heartbeat". "China would again try to take advantage of us (Americans), as they did in earlier negotiations," the former diplomat added.
Despite his legal troubles, Trump is barrelling towards the Republican nomination to face off once again with Joe Biden in November's presidential election.
Pulling the US out of NATO?
Were Trump to win, "it's highly likely that he will withdraw" the US from NATO, Bolton said. In his 2020 book, "The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir", he claimed that this was already Trump's intention back in 2018.
As the brutal war between Israel and Hamas approaches its eighth month, there is an assumption that the Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is hoping Trump will be reelected so he can continue his deadly war in Gaza.
"People think Trump would be very pro-Israel, as he was in in his first term," Bolton noted. But "Trump doesn't like Bibi (Netanyahu) personally; he thinks he was too nice to Biden when he called him after the 2020 election to congratulate him".
As a result, "if Netanyahu is still in office and Trump is inaugurated, I would not guarantee there that Trump's policy on Israel would be the same in his second term," Bolton concluded.
