“Iraq was a waste of blood and treasure”.
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Last year, he wrote a detailed strategy in the National Review for quitting the Iran nuclear deal (which Trump is considering doing by a May 12 deadline). According to a source familiar with those negotiations, Bolton promised Trump “he wouldn’t start any wars” if he was selected.
“Bolton can and will clean house”, a former White House staffer said. “I think concluding the destruction of the weapons of mass destruction themselves will be important”.
“He’s also a leading hawkish voice on North Korea”. He bent to the advice of the Pentagon and McMaster in modestly escalating the war in Afghanistan, despite his great scepticism of the U.S. mission there.
Christopher Galdieri, associate professor at Saint Anselm College in the U.S. State of New Hampshire, told Xinhua that Bolton is far more hawkish on foreign policy questions than McMaster was, and shares with Trump a disdain for the idea of diplomacy as a solution to worldwide crises and conflicts.
In the approaching days, the United States Foreign policy for China is less likely to take a turn in the administration’s current approach, as much as it is to cement it with the Bolton-Pompeo elevation. When he was first elected, he acknowledged that he was initially taken aback by the scope and challenges of the presidency, and by the complexity of issues from North Korea to health care. Pompeo is certainly more that way than Tillerson. In January, Bolton described the deal as a “strategic mistake”.
The newly-nominated adviser will have to deal with the beginnings of talks with the North Korea regime. There, he impressed Mr. Trump with his muscular version of American power. Indeed, Bolton has been highly critical of South Korea’s attempt to make peace with the North, claiming that the South was “like putty in North Korea’s hands”.
“I thank General McMaster and his family for their service and wish them the very best”, Trump said. The leaks coming out of the National Security Council will end, Obama administration holdovers will be gone, and the team, chemistry and work product will all be improved.
Conservative hardliners have praised Mr Bolton for his tough stance on foreign policy but he is also seen as one of the most divisive figures in conservative circles.
Another notable impact of the new White House appointments is that Ambassador Bolton, for all his harsh words and scaremongering about Pakistan, is ironically likely to counsel restraint in the USA policy towards Pakistan.
Back in 1994 he was quoted saying the USA was the world’s “only real power”. Should the new Secretary of State Mike Pompeo not toe this line, he could also face the sack.
Bolton once argued that if the United Nations building in Manhattan “lost 10 stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference”. He will be the fourth man on the advisory job in just over a year. He has advocated for American exceptionalism, and opposed the U.S. joining the International Criminal Court.
Faced with that uncertainty, some American diplomats posted to the Middle East have been discussing among themselves the possibility of a war and how they could evacuate the region if needed. Viewed as part of that debate, Bolton may be extreme, but still advocates similar policies to neoconservatives (or indeed, to many liberal interventionists).
But critics on both sides of politics have slammed the appointment.
The job of the National Security Adviser is to consolidate the policy advice given to the president from various agencies. As of Tuesday night, Conor Lamb, a young, centrist Democrat who ran explicitly against his own party’s leadership in Washington, had a lead of five hundred and seventy-nine votes over Rick Saccone, a Republican state representative who supports Donald Trump and opposes labor unions-with several thousand absentee ballots still to be counted.
Two State Department officials and two Western diplomats in Washington said Friday that their offices are now operating under the assumption that Trump will nearly surely pull out of the Iran deal.
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“Too bad DT doesn’t agree with DT anymore.” tweeted one.
