Trump fires Bolton, 3rd security chief to go

US President Donald Trump said yesterday he had fired national security adviser John Bolton, citing strong disagreements on a number of policy issues.

Trump tweeted that he told Bolton Monday night his services were no longer needed at the White House and said Bolton submitted his resignation yesterday morning. Trump said that he “disagreed strongly” with many of Bolton’s suggestions, “as did others in the administration.”

Bolton responded in a tweet of his own that he offered to resign on Monday “and President Trump said, ‘Let’s talk about it tomorrow’.”

Bolton’s ouster came as a surprise to many in the White House. Just an hour before Trump’s tweet, the press office announced that Bolton would join Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in a briefing.

Bolton was always an unlikely pick to be Trump’s third national security adviser, with a world view seemingly ill-fit to the president’s isolationist “America First” pronouncements.

He’s espoused hawkish foreign policy views dating back to the Reagan administration and became a household name over his vociferous support for the Iraq War as the US ambassador to the UN under George W Bush. Bolton even briefly considered running for president in 2016, in part to make the case against the isolationism that Trump would come to embody.

He advocated caution on the president’s rapprochement with the DPRK and against Trump’s decision last year to pull US troops out of Syria.

(AP)