John Bolton memoir reveals UK's fragile relations with Trump

Donald Trump dashed British hopes that he would take a tougher line on Hong Kong, including by refusing to condemn the Tiananmen Square massacre, according to John Bolton’s book about his time as the US president’s national security adviser.

In one of many episodes in the book that reveal the fragile nature of the UK’s relations with the Trump administration, Bolton writes that the president said Tiananmen Square was decades ago and he did not want to jeopardise a potential trade deal with Beijing.

Bolton discloses that he started a social media campaign in mid-2019 in support of the pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong, and that the president had acknowledged that the size of the rallies on 12 June was “a big deal”.

But Trump then added: “I don’t want to get involved … We have human rights problems too.”

Bolton writes: “That pretty much ended my Twitter campaign pressing China to honour its deal with Great Britain, highlighting how little respect China paid to international agreements, for all those so excited at the prospect of a trade deal.”

The hawkish former adviser also reveals that during Trump’s UK state visit on 4 June last year, the 30th anniversary of Tiananmen Square, he refused to issue a White House statement of commemoration. He writes that the treasury secretary, Steve Mnuchin, told the president he was “worried about the effects of the draft statement on the trade negotiations and wanted to water it down. That was bad enough, but Trump said he didn’t want any statement at all. ‘That was 15 years ago,’ he said, inaccurately. ‘Who cares about it? I’m trying to make a deal. I don’t want anything.’ And that was that.”

The contrast with Trump’s current strong defence of Hong Kong’s rights is striking and underlines how the president will support his allies only if it happens to coincide with US economic or political interests.

Bolton reveals that Trump ranks Boris Johnson alongside the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, as the world leaders to whom he is closest, while he thinks that everything the French president, Emmanuel Macron, touches “turns to shit”.

Trump and Theresa May shared a mutual dislike, Bolton writes, partly born of the US president’s assessment that she had handled Brexit so disastrously that her strategy was “in freefall”.

Bolton also reveals that discussions with the UK about granting the Chinese firm Huawei access to 5G contracts had been “very difficult, although attitudes changed significantly once Johnson became prime minister and installed a new cabinet. But even then it was hard slogging because of the high level of dependence on Huawei that Britain had built up over an extended period.”

Bolton discloses a surprising sympathy for the UK dilemma, writing: “These legitimate worries should have led us to focus on rapidly getting new entrants into 5G markets, not how we would mitigate the consequences of continuing to patronize Huawei.”

Bolton also writes that as foreign secretary, Johnson did not raise many objections when he was told that the US planned to leave the Iran nuclear deal signed by Barack Obama in 2015. Bolton says Johnson “stressed that Britain fully understood the existing deal’s weaknesses, which would have surprised many supporters who still worshipped at its altar”. He also chastises the Johnson government for not holding firm with Iran after it released an Iranian oil tanker seized off Gibraltar, saying Iran had learned lessons from the UK’s lack of resolve.

Bolton complains that few in Washington apart from himself and Trump cared about Brexit. He writes: “Brexit was an existential issue for the UK, but it was also critically important to the US. Brexit’s fundamental impetus was the accelerating loss of citizen control over the Brussels-based mechanisms of the European Union. Bureaucracies were making rules that national parliaments had to accept as binding, and the loss of democratic sovereignty was increasingly palpable.

“We should have been doing far more to help the Brexiteers, and I certainly tried.”