Mother Jones - This Is the Scariest News of the Trump Presidency
He’s gone full neocon with John Bolton as his new national security advisor.
DAN FRIEDMANMAR. 22, 2018 8:29 PM
President Trump announced Thursday night that he is replacing National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster with former Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton—a step that puts a man famous for advocating preemptive wars in a position to help start one. Following Trump’s nomination of CIA Director Mike Pompeo to be Secretary of State, Bolton’s appointment means Trump has handed national security policy to the hawks.
McMaster has been known for restraining Trump’s bellicose tendencies. There is little sign Bolton will do the same. Just last month he urged a preemptive military strike by the United States on North Korea. “It is perfectly legitimate for the United States to respond to the current ‘necessity’ posed by North Korea’s nuclear weapons by striking first,” he wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.
Bolton was a leading advocate of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and served in the George W. Bush administration, first as an undersecretary of state for arms control and nonproliferation, where he opposed international arms control and nonproliferation efforts. He was then a UN Ambassador who opposed international organizations like the very one he was working in.
Since leaving government he has positioned himself as a Republican political operative—and he mulled 2012 presidential bid—as well as a reliable supporter for war. In 2009, Bolton, in a speech at the University of Chicago, seemed to call for Israel to launch a preemptive nuclear attack on Iran: “Unless Israel is prepared to use nuclear weapons against Iran’s program, Iran will have nuclear weapons in the very near future.” In a 2012 speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, he joked about a nuclear attack on Chicago, President Obama’s hometown. The crack was part of a riff in which he accused Obama of lacking a backbone in dealing with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Obama “put us in a greatly weakened position” with Russia, Bolton said.
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https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/03/this-is-the-scariest-news-of-the-trump-presidency/
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