In what may be the most satisfying display of bureaucratic comeuppance since Senator McCarthy’s censure, John Bolton—the perma-tanned, mustachioed prince of neoconservatism—is reportedly set to plead guilty in a classified documents case. The irony is almost too delicious: a man who built his career on indicting others for insufficient zeal now finds himself on the wrong side of a security clearance. British intelligence, ever watchful of its cousins across the pond, has quietly reviewed its own protocols, lest any of its own spooks develop similar proclivities for taking souvenirs home.
Bolton’s fall from grace is a quintessentially American tragedy, or farce, depending on one’s patience for melodrama. He spent decades warming the benches of Republican administrations, offering unsolicited advice on how to bomb countries that hadn’t yet been invented. His memoir, “The Room Where It Happened,” was a tell-all that revealed precisely nothing we didn’t already suspect: that the Trump White House was a circus run by clowns and oligarchs. Now the man who accused Hillary Clinton of mishandling emails will likely end up in the same penitentiary where he imagined sending her.
The classified documents saga has become a recurring motif in contemporary American politics. It is as though the nation’s leaders have collectively decided that state secrets are a form of interior decoration, like potpourri or throw pillows. Bolton, a man who once argued strenuously for the inviolability of executive power, is hoist by his own petard. The lesson is clear: if you live by the surveillance state, you die by the surveillance state.
British intelligence, for its part, is doing what it does best: furrowing its brow and checking the locks. The review of protocols is a sensible precaution, though one suspects MI5’s greatest worry is not that their agents will write tell-all memoirs but that they will sell secrets to the Chinese, as they have occasionally done. Still, the Bolton case serves as a useful cautionary tale about the dangers of treating classified information as a chattel for one’s memoirs.
The deeper lesson here is about the rot of institutional trust. Bolton’s entire career was built on the premise that the United States must maintain absolute credibility as a global power. Now that reputation rests on whether a man who looked like a cartoon villain can be trusted not to spill the beans on foreign policy decisions made over scotch and resentment. One cannot help but chuckle.
This is the end of the line for a certain kind of intellectual decadence: the belief that rules apply only to others. Bolton imagined himself a Bismarck, but he was always more of a Blücher—scarcely competent, rhetorically inflated, and ultimately shelved. The classified documents case is not just a legal proceeding; it is a metaphor for a political class that has forgotten that secrecy is a sacred trust, not a luxury good.
Britain should take heed. We have our own nest of retired generals and spooks who publish memoirs that blur the line between disclosure and exhibitionism. If the Bolton debacle teaches us anything, it is that the modern security state is a fragile house of cards. One breath from a disgruntled former official, and the whole edifice wobbles. Whether this review of protocols will be anything more than bureaucratic theatre remains to be seen. But if I were a betting man, I’d put my money on the same old farce, just with cleaner desks.
Let us raise a glass, then, to the downfall of a man who embodied the very excesses he purported to abhor. John Bolton, the bomb thrower, has finally felt the blast.
