that those that you can convert use it as one of. the keep in mind though as it would mean the pleasure. for. the headlines the u.s. justice department names fifty six year old says as the monday taking those suspicion of sending melbourne's to leading political figures and critics of donald trump. with the u.s. president's trade was showing no signs of a basic old foes to promise i'm trying to making the best of a bad situation signing new economic deals together. revelations that britain's energy minister held private to other towns talks with controversial

fracking firms sparking outrage. and italy refuses to back down over its budget plans despite them being rejected by a brussels one it's hardly and i mean he even used his shoe to demonstrate just what he thinks of the response. where you can find out about all of these stories on our website r.t. dot com we'll be back with the world news update in a round an hour in the meantime it's crosstalk. hello and welcome to cross like we're all things considered i'm peter lavelle after almost two years. in office many still question whether donald trump has

a coherent foreign policy the same cannot be said about the president's national security adviser john bolton when you think of bolton the word subtlety in diplomacy don't come to mind so is there now a bolton doctrine. ross talking bolton's foreign policy i'm joined by my guess could see an oxford he's a senior policy consultant at the british american security information council in san francisco we have john rainwater he is the executive director of peace action and in new york we cross to alice slater she is a member of the coordinating committee of world beyond war cross talk rules in effect everyone i'm going to go to john first in san francisco say i always go to the person that gets up early is for this and i'm very thankful that you did get up so early and i wouldn't be surprised if you had a coffee mug in your hand john let me go to donald trump was campaigning in after

he was elected everyone was saying that he was going to be an isolationist then he went through a few iterations of his foreign policy team and now with john bolton on the scene and apparently calling a lot of the shots what the fear of isolationism is really turned into the worry of unilateralism in a time when multi-lateralism is gaining pace your thoughts john go ahead well i think that's exactly right those who thought trump might have an anti and militarists streak are being very disappointed right now and you are seeing the influence of bolton and this attempt to pull out of the i.m.f. treaty but i think it goes beyond that to a lot of trump's advisers that are looking to stoke a new arms race and that's what's dangerous about what's going on right now is we're hearing a the rewind by. into the ninety's we were on constrained arms race the

type of which we haven't seen since the cold war and that's what we need to avoid here. i get the impression that's exactly what the trumpeting ministration wants or is threatening is an arms race we'll just bury them with all of our money spent on the military which is amazingly bloated right now i mean this is a threat isn't it. yes i mean wrote trump in so grand he's in this campaign thing i'm going to make a deal with me i'm going to make a deal with russia or i'm going to get rid of nato and the democrats came down on him. i think go high and go to defend himself you know they they actually voted in the congress not to allow the u.s. to get troops that in your career you have that. so you know this is

systematic corruption and influence of the military industrial complex in the united states and it's going to be an opportunity to really get everybody we should be we shouldn't be talking about maintaining this trading that's a ticket with one hundred twenty two nations just signed a treaty to prohibit nuclear weapons and banned them and make them unlawful the way we have the chemical. and rusher and the u.s. and china are in france and england you know the nonproliferation treaty now as they are boycotting it it's with sting i was not at that point it the language nashton me it's time to ban the bomb not just until another arms control i mean we will break control the e.u.'s with when we walked out of the a.b.m. treaty russia never kept complaining we never did a thing of that it well but russia said there would be concert. and susan i think

we're going to see that you know ted it seems to me you know with the advent of arms control agreements in the late sixty's all the way up to one gets a few days ago that was a nonpartisan issue they were almost like sacred cows that you really don't touch and it seems very quickly now the entire architecture of arms control and nonproliferation is it's turning into tatters in front of our eyes go ahead. thank you peter i would say having twenty six years of experience as an american diplomat most of that concerned with arms control with nonproliferation with the elimination of entire classes of weapons that what alice is talking about is the real danger in the real challenge here we're looking at a world where arms control may not be enough we're looking at the need for declaring first nuclear weapons are unlawful and having all of the powers sign on to that and then do something about reducing the thousands of active nuclear

weapons that are still out there ok we're down from you know scores of thousands to me or you know under twenty thousand now that's not good enough we have to bring it down into the low hundreds and then we have to get rid of them entirely and that's not going to be an easy process and it's not going to be a quick one but the problem with looking at the i.n.f. treaty in isolation is that what you've actually got is a massive hole where a european security architecture ought to be there's been divisions within the last few years in particular between western europe and the russian federation and that's on the healthy because russia is a european power in addition to being a global power obviously but the rest of europe needs to deal with russia on that basis and so talking about something like a dead letter like the i.n.f. treaty is like talking about the washington or the london naval treaties of the twenty's and thirty's it's irrelevant because what's actually broken is the entire architecture you know the issue of these treaties i mean we had the the iran new killer deal and now we have this but trump is always saying you know let's let's

come up with a new agreement here but i mean if in and we put yourself in the shoes of north korea would you sign an agreement with the united states when it comes to nuclear weapons i mean it's that credibility gap is growing wider and wider i mean why would any american president say i want to conclude agreements while he's breaking ones left and right go ahead john in san francisco. that's absolutely right and there's really nothing stopping trump or anyone else to go to the table with the russian again and then prove on the architecture that exists obviously it's flawed there are holes in it but that doesn't mean you throw out what you have that has been relatively successful up to now and you know when you're saying you're throwing out the iran agreement you're throwing out the i.m.f. it makes negotiating new agreements even more difficult the only thing trump has

left is to rename things like nafta give them a new name but that's not diplomacy and what's disappointing about the i.n.f. treaty in a lot of ways is that the u.s. could have gone to the table with russia there are technical ways of solving the problems that were there in terms of inspections reciprocal exhibitions those could have solved the problems that the two countries had instead of walking away from the table but what's scary is that these countries want to have an arms race and that makes banning these nuclear weapons all the more difficult when you're barreling one hundred eighty degrees in the opposite direction you know now and there's a lot of european take away the germans have come out against the americans walking away from the treaty i mean this creates the treaty came into effect to actually protect a europe with the americans walking away from it it creates an enormous amount of uncertainty right now and what directions the european money in western europe they

don't want american weapons of course maybe in eastern europe and in the baltics they might welcome them but the entire security architecture is listing right now because we don't know what the new realities are going to be and adding the new a range of weapons certainly doesn't create stability and making the kind of. claim or demand that china has to be part of this is a it's ridiculous. i mean china has these weapons or rand has these weapons. india is the developing these weapons here i mean a smart person interested in arms control would get all these countries that have these weapons or developing them and have a global pact but that's not part of john bolton's d.n.a. is it listen we already have but global pact in one nine hundred seven do we promise to get rid of all on nuclear weapons in the nonproliferation treaty oh

it's going to spend a trillion dollars over thirty years to new but on factory ridge and in was our most new submarine missile there playing xbox do small i guess smaller nuclear weapons it talking about as small a nuclear weapon is as big as what it hiroshima and nagasaki i mean we have to change the conversation we've got a climate. that if we don't mobilize the whole we're on to move immediately to solar and wind and geothermal we're going to have the earth is bands in the earth so how can we be wasting all these resources an i.q. points on new nuclear weapons and fix the little treaty that didn't get rid of them it's just step by step to know here we have to change this conversation to getting rid of all of this to attend to you know if you look at these postures security and

defense posture reports that have come out of the trump administration it is truly shocking if you read it carefully that they the u.s. wants to develop short range nuclear weapons and make them make it more possible to use them under a variety of circumstances i mean that shouldn't worry everyone about europe security and global security in general go ahead. well i want to pick up on a couple of things peter what john said about nafta was very important i would characterize it slightly differently but it's something we have to keep in the back of our minds what alice said about the nonproliferation treaty and the pledge by all nuclear powers to do away with nuclear weapons is also extremely important and there's a specific reason that we don't trust in stable nuclear deterrence anymore we can't afford to first off nafta has been renegotiated it was abrogated unilaterally people said this is ridiculous nafta took decades to negotiate it'll take decades

more to replace it it didn't it took a few months because basically what you're dealing with in donald trump is someone that that ghost wrote you know had ghost written for him the art of the deal ok this is how he operates he's looking at changing paradigms whenever he can to get an advantage either for himself personally or in this case for the united states he's done that with nafta i believe that's what he's up to with i.n.f. i'm not worried about john bolton john bolton was at the state department for all those years that i was he's a minor character at best he said some pretty outrageous things but if you've noticed john will trump his modus operandi include surrounding himself with people that say outrageous things what's important is what gets done in the end right now cannot arise helen helen let me jump in here right here but i've got to go to a hard break here after a short break we'll continue our discussion on bolton's foreign policy stay with our.

join me every thursday on the alex simon show and i'll be speaking to guests of the world of politics small business i'm show business i'll see that. prosecution will need to become almost this show. called where you push. this thread you'll find. somebody long as you do i mean me political pressure on the. security industry knows what the bundled up business models used by american corporations. he's sold on could lead to diseases you. know what he. said if.

he's up in association with. the new can he sell some of those it is just somebody he's going to take. an investigative documentary. ghost war on oxy. welcome back to crossfire we're all things are considered i'm peter remind you we're discussing the world according to john bolton. ok let me go back to ted in oxford you said something very interesting right before we went to the break here you characterized bolton is kind of a bit character but he seems it least in public in the way it's reported he seems to have an enormous amount of sway over donald trump donald trump came into office as being a hawk on iran well i don't think we need to explain to anyone watching this

program about john bolton's views of iran i worry very much about that it's two people with the same mind in having the same goal and not showing any kind of restraint matter fact just the opposite a lot of threats go ahead ted in oxford. ok i have to disagree peter and i basis not just on the twenty six years i spent as a foreign service officer but specifically on the years i spent in the u.s. mission to nato as the arms control advisor to then ambassador evo daalder who was himself a committed arms controller and this was under president obama you'll remember that obama went to prague in two thousand and nine early on in his administration and he talked about having a world free of nuclear weapons and then at nato for the subsequent years of my tenure there i left in two thousand and eleven i saw at the department of defense and the department of energy systematically dismantling any possibility of president obama's prague agenda being adopted first by our european allies and then

by anyone else ok obama was done in by his own cabinet by the department of defense and specifically by the department of energy and when we took military industrial complex people trying to get the people to design in the line nuclear weapons people like john bolton correct. no no no bolton has a hawkish attitude ok and he's useful sometimes for some things but he's not d.o.d.'s he's not deal we and those are the people you really have to worry about because they've got skin in the game they're the ones that make money for nuclear war and every other kind that's ok i absolutely agree with your let me go to go to john here but i still think the outlook in. and ideology foreign policy ideology that john bolton has is having an impression on donald trump i mean the fact that he would trumpet announces at a campaign rally all of the european allies were caught flat footed or didn't

expect that he would make that announcement so clear i mean everything is done backward that's why i said it in my introduction here i mean when you discuss the things that they are allies before you make a public statement and of course the statement about the i and amp was made completely out of context for the audience to understand so i mean that's why i started the program incoherent foreign policy though john bolton seems to know what he wants go ahead john. well as far as talking to the allies i mean we have to remember that this puts millions of lives in europe at danger and used when these weapons were there that the i.m.f. . work to ban you had millions of people in the streets in europe protesting against that gun that was put there had so of course you talk to the allies because it affects millions of people there i do think bolton's foreign policy is having a lot of influence right now but donald trump does listen to his own council mostly

and we don't know where this is going to had but you can see it and is iran policy which includes the horrific war in yemen that we need to bring to an end and you can see it in this approach to arms control as far as renegotiating treaties and arms control agreements i think tad's right that they don't have to take a long time e saw that it dawn of the arms control era with the limited test ban treaty but this is a little like repeal and replace when you're talking about replacing treaties but you're just getting rid of something without really having a clear demonstration of what it is you're going to replace it with so i'd be very cautious about getting too excited about what donald trump's going to bring forward in terms of arms control. that may come to pass because it would be a real feather in the cap of donald trump like with north korea he wants to be seen as a deal maker but we should believe it when we see it now and so we have the new start

treaty burma newland two thousand and twenty one. the american withdrawal from the i know it is how do you see. it because i agree with what ted and john it said i mean. it doesn't take a very long time it does take time to update an agreement and this is in the start new. start treaty is very important but they should be working on it now right but if they're not working on it now it looks like they're not going to pursue it again another very important element of the arms control on infrastructure is decaying in front of our eyes go ahead alice in new york i totally disagree ok this is really they stand being blocking. the treaty of the program titian a nuclear weapon one hundred twenty two people just nation just about. it's going through a ratification process. and this

is like talking about angst control and twenty first century it's so twentieth century neverwhere it wound up with oh darling you know said in his famous products you know i want to where there are nuclear disarmament and might not happen in my lifetime and then hillary misquoted him and said it might not happen in several lifetimes wrong i mean we have to literally change the conversation that took a bad little so i'm treating in the middle i am but on the right then i'm sure ok now if i have to disagree with you i mean we have to start somewhere let me go back to ted in the oxford let me go back to ted announcer. this is going to be an incremental process with the massive military buildup going on in the united states i don't expect russia to get rid of its nuclear weapons anytime soon particularly when american through nato american forces to nato on russia's borders right now

that is its guarantee to solve now if we have agreements where we incrementally lower the number of warheads that might be a logical start i would say go ahead ted. well i agree completely with alice and disagree completely with you peter here's why i find there are facts on the ground that we weren't aware of back in the one nine hundred eighty s. . when we were negotiating things like the i.n.f. treaty back in the one nine hundred eighty s. scientists looked at computer modeling of atmospheric dynamics in the event of nuclear war and they came up with the term nuclear winter which meant we thought back then that in the event of hundreds or possibly thousands of nuclear explosions up to and including the megaton range that we would have to worry about the cold in the dark taking over about ultraviolet radiation killing everything on the ground and in the ocean so people starving people burning simultaneously people freezing

all of that we thought was a problem and that was one of the things that led the leaders of the then soviet union in the united states of america to the negotiating table to get serious about reducing the obscene numbers of nuclear weapons that were lying around at that time now fast forward to two thousand and fourteen and modern computer science and this is because of climate modeling that we have computers and computer software this profound we now know it only takes about one hundred hiroshima size weapons and that's nothing that's an aggregate total of one and a half mega tons of nuclear explosive force if we pop that off we end civilization as we know it which means that there is no such thing as stable and reliable nuclear deterrence is an absurd concept in the face of what we now know about nuclear winter and that's exactly why alice is right the i.n.f. ain't enough new start ain't enough we've got to look at a whole new way of getting down below one and a half mega tons of global nuclear capability we have to do it we are under the gun

literally because right now if pakistan and india decided they don't like each other to the point where they will exchange nuclear weapons civilization ends ok john so if we continue the argument of alice and ted so who cares about nonproliferation because that's what's going to happen here ok then you've got to get a saudi arabia that's going to have nuclear weapon then you got to get a chip. pan that wants to do it and then maybe taiwan will get into the i guess i fundamentally disagree with ted in alice here i think you have to start somewhere to get to that point where i think all of us would agree but just saying i don't see what political force is going to make that complete. withdrawal for of nuclear weapons on this earth i don't see what political imperative will make that happen at this point in time go ahead john in san francisco well i don't think the two perspectives are mutually exclusive i think we need the urgency to realize it's too late these weapons can destroy humanity we need to ban them as soon as

possible that john has to be hollowed out how they are how do i do that john how do i agree with all of you how do we get there john you know i had no knowledge that john finishes up and that's what i was going to what i would say what i was going to say is that's not mutually exclusive from also having strong arms control agreements that move us in the right direction but but here in the united states we we should be putting pressure on our elected officials to embrace the treaty to ban nuclear weapons while at the same time we try to cut funding for new nuclear weapons in congress and we engage in nuclear diplomacy whether it's with north korea or with russia or with anybody else it has to be a holistic vision in which we can take incremental steps at the same time we have a very clear vision that we are working to ban nuclear weapons as quickly as

possible i don't think those two things are mutually exclusive if we get away get rid of the arms control regime and we allow the amount of states to spend a trillion dollars a trillion and a half dollars rebuilding the nuclear infrastructure we're never going to be able to ban nuclear weapons so we have to bring it all together ok out alice in new york at the last word go ahead we have. have a project through the i can network then sort of speed ahead of the adoption of the treaty don't bank on that we're working on the united states here in new york city we're getting our city council to go to the control and that's when best a nuclear weapon i mean there are a lot of things we can do with the nuclear weapons day but you are ignoring this avalanche coming down now and the climate catastrophe i mean within the next couple years that we don't do anything the bloodshed the storms and the droughts and the refugee. movement that's going to draw our attention away

from clear weapons and war we have to have a war to make sure we get one hundred percent so there and when and hydro and efficiency and that's something all other countries could be doing to the benefit of everybody and that's another conversation instead of war we need a war on climate catastrophe and that's where the boy should be that's where the money in the energy we have a mobile ok to jump in here i wish it would be a war on the military industrial complex and then all would be in agreement that's all the time we have many thanks from my guests in new york san francisco and in oxford and thanks to our viewers for watching us here on our p.c. you next time and remember.

what holds and you should. put themselves on the line to get a job. the reject. so when you want to be president. for something i want. you to do right to be precise this is what before three in the morning can't be good. i'm interested always in the why. this should. run. to the best out of the jaws of. the high says it was plain to perform i had to actually prepare myself to die.

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