Time:

As President Donald Trump prepared in recent weeks to meet in person with Taliban negotiators at Camp David and with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in New York later this month, National Security Advisor John Bolton grew increasingly frustrated. And on Monday, during a conversation between Bolton and the President, the two men reached their limit with one another.

In his 520 days as Trump’s third National Security Advisor, Bolton, a life-long hawk, had tried to steer the President toward a hard-line foreign policy. As Trump embraced the idea of meeting with two of America’s most ardent adversaries, Bolton objected increasingly vocally, according to several administration sources familiar with their discussions.

Then on Monday, Trump and Bolton spoke to try to clear the air. Bolton brought up the fact that he was left out of a meeting on the Afghanistan negotiations, a U.S. official who was briefed on the conversation tells TIME. As the discussion progressed, it began to spiral outward into Bolton’s broader questions about Trump’s willingness to meet with Iran’s president. “It was supposed to be a very, very limited,” discussion, the U.S. official says, “About how Bolton had been left out of a meeting on Afghanistan and it became a ‘Why are you meeting with Rouhani?'” conversation instead.

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By the end, Bolton had reached his limit. “Bolton was screaming about the Taliban meeting,” says a national-security expert with close ties to White House officials. Bolton thought a meeting on U.S. soil would legitimize the Taliban and considered it tone deaf to schedule the summit so close to the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. The meeting was Trump’s idea, and he bristled that Bolton objected to it internally, this expert and other officials say.

Trump had already tired of Bolton’s hard-line ideas on Iran and Bolton’s internal revulsion to Trump’s stated willingness to meet with Rouhani, the expert says. While the Taliban Camp David meeting collapsed, Trump remains open to meeting Rouhani in New York later this month, and preliminary planning is already underway in case such a meeting comes through, according to a U.S. official familiar with the discussions.
 

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