Author: JOHN BOLTON

On the flight to Helsinki in 2018, as we prepared for one of the most consequential meetings of Donald Trump’s presidency—a summit with Vladimir Putin—I tried to brief the president on strategic arms control. These were issues that had consumed American statesmen for decades, the backbone of our nuclear deterrent posture. But I had to compete with a FIFA World Cup match on the television in his cabin aboard Air Force One. That image captures, in miniature, the problem with Donald Trump’s approach to foreign policy: a fixation on optics and spectacle over substance, and an indifference to the details…