Trump’s Next National Security Adviser, John Bolton, Is As Dangerous As You Remembered

[Amica Nostra 4,803]

WASHINGTON — John Bolton, who President Donald Trump said on Thursday will replace H.R. McMaster as his national security adviser on April 9, is a polarizing pick, even by Trump administration standards. 

Bolton is a notoriously hawkish former United Nations ambassador whose views don’t even align with the isolationist foreign policy platform on which Trump campaigned ― although it is difficult to tell what the president actually believes. 

Bolton has had Trump’s ear, both as an informal adviser and as a commentator on Fox News, for a while. As a presidential candidate, Trump called Bolton “a tough cookie [who] knows what he’s talking about” (although the president apparently is not a fan of his mustache).

Here is a brief history of the new national security adviser’s career in foreign policy: 

Bolton fiercely advocated for the Iraq War and promoted the false justification for it.

While serving as a top State Department official under President George W. Bush, Bolton was a chief promulgator of the administration’s justification for the Iraq War: that U.S. intelligence showed evidence of Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction. Famously, this claim later turned out to be false.

But Bolton continued to insist that he was right in calling for war, even years later. 

“I still think the decision to overthrow Saddam [Hussein] was correct,” he told the Washington Examiner in 2015. “I think decisions made after that decision were wrong, although I think the worst decision made after that was the 2011 decision to withdraw U.S. and coalition forces. The people who say, ‘Oh, things would have been much better if you didn’t overthrow Saddam,’ miss the point that today’s Middle East does not flow totally and unchangeably from the decision to overthrow Saddam alone.”

“You can’t assume if he had stayed in power, sweetness and light would prevail in the Middle East today,” he added.

 

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/john-bolton-foreign-policy-history_us_5aaa8f31e4b045cd0a6f7926

[Amica Nostra 4,803]

 

[Jacque67 7,328]

https://www.npr.org/2018/03/22/595897412/john-boltons-curious-appearance-in-a-russian-gun-rights-video

this guy?

(Rosenstein to make announcement tomorrow ...things getting stormy for Stone and Guccifer)

[Amica Nostra 4,803]

12 minutes ago, Jacque67 said:

https://www.npr.org/2018/03/22/595897412/john-boltons-curious-appearance-in-a-russian-gun-rights-video

this guy?

(Rosenstein to make announcement tomorrow ...things getting stormy for Stone and Guccifer)

Yup that guy.