Bolton on N. Korea: ‘Success’ Is Walking Away from a Bad Deal Rather Than Accepting a Bad Deal

RUSH EXCERPT:

MARGARET BRENNAN: Before the president went to Hanoi was the U.S. aware that North Korea would not allow anything beyond the Yongbyon complex? I mean the second uranium enrichment site that the president nodded to in his press conference. Did you know that was not on the table?

AMBASSADOR BOLTON: Well we don’t know what’s on the table from- from North Korea until it comes out of the mouth of Kim Jong Un, the chairman. He’s calling—

MARGARET BRENNAN: Well that’s the diplomats are supposed to be laying the groundwork for. So the president doesn’t walk away with a failure.

AMBASSADOR BOLTON: He- he didn’t walk away with a failure. Unless you’re prepared to say that it would be better to accept a bad deal than to walk away from no deal, to me that’s a success.

MARGARET BRENNAN: So you thought that nothing else was on the table. You were just testing the prospects by sending the president to Hanoi?

AMBASSADOR BOLTON: No, no, no. We- we honestly didn’t know. I mean it’s- it’s not unusual in these circumstances to find that there are additional concessions that the other side might make. But we’ve tried to make it clear to them- as again the president has said this repeatedly we’re not going to make the mistakes of past administrations. We’re not going to make the mistake that Obama made in the Iran nuclear deal. What we want is denuclearization broadly defined as the president himself laid out for Kim Jong Un in the paper that he gave him.

MARGARET BRENNAN: So- but you’ve tested this proposition now of what it’s like to negotiate top down?

AMBASSADOR BOLTON: Well we’ve had two- we’ve had two meetings.

MARGARET BRENNAN: This is now the- what- fourth commander in chief to try to do this? There’s a very different approach but the success rate hasn’t been anything more than in the past.

AMBASSADOR BOLTON: Well the success rate in the past was zero. So that’s not a hard bar to overcome. There’s a- there’s an argument that proceeding deductively rather than inductively makes a lot of sense. We’ve had two meetings. We-we’ll see what happens next.