John Bolton,
President Donald Trump’s new national security adviser, has a style that could be an issue in the White House.
WASHINGTON — John Bolton, President Donald Trump’s new national security adviser, has a take-noprisoners approach that may prove problematic in a White House riven by leaks and defections.
Known for his brash style and bushy mustache, Bolton has been an informal adviser to Trump, a frequent commentator on Fox News and a longtime hawk on Iran, North Korea and other U.S. adversaries.
He is best known for his 16 months’ service as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations — an organization he frequently said shouldn’t exist — from mid-2005 until the end of 2006. President George W. Bush named him as a recess appointment because the White House knew Bolton was too toxic to win Senate confirmation.
Some State Department officials accused him of being so abrasive at the U.N. that he undermined U.S. policies.
More recently, Bolton, 69, has advocated hard-line, some would say extreme, positions on foreign policy challenges that have roiled the Trump administration.
He has vigorously opposed the Iran nuclear deal, and no doubt will back Trump’s threats to withdraw from the landmark accord.
Before it was signed in 2015, he suggested bombing Iran to quash its nuclear ambitions.
He also has called for a military attack on nucleararmed North Korea. Six months ago, as Trump and North Korean ruler Kim Jong Un traded insults and threats, Bolton said the solution was to topple the Pyongyang government and have South Korea take over the North.
Bolton now will backstop Trump’s agreement to conduct a summit with Kim.
Unlike Trump, Bolton is a staunch critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s military incursion in Ukraine, although it’s not clear whether he agrees with Trump’s skepticism of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
Bolton’s defenders include the most conservative members of the Republican establishment. Some welcomed him as national security adviser after H.R. McMaster, whom they saw as more moderate and more inclined to try to block some of Trump’s suggestions.
“Obviously, I think Bolton’s world view is more muscular” than McMaster’s, said Lanhee Chen, a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution who was Mitt Romney’s chief policy adviser in 2012. “But there clearly are similarities and actually more similarities than people might see at first blush.”
Chen said both men favor an engaged America around the world, a contrast to how many conservatives initially viewed Trump’s “America First” policy as isolationist.
“Some will try to portray him as being out of the mainstream, particularly detractors of the administration, but I don’t actually think that’s where Bolton is,” he said.
Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said via Twitter, “A national security adviser must be an honest broker, ensuring the (president) considers all points of view. Second, he is a counselor with his own views. … The obvious question is whether John Bolton has the temperament and the judgment for the job.”
But many in the foreign policy, global democracy and human rights communities were appalled.
Bolton “generally disparages international law,” Amnesty International said in a statement.
The “McMaster ouster means no more adults in the room — except (Defense Secretary James) Mattis, who now has no allies,” said Charles Stevenson, a former State Department official.
McMaster, Mattis and outgoing Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, whom Trump fired earlier this month, were seen as forces who could sometimes rein in the president.
“McMaster was no dove. But Bolton falls into an entirely different category of dangerous uber-hawk,” Colin Kahl and Jon Wolfsthal, national security officials in the Obama administration, wrote Friday in Foreign Policy.
“Bolton’s views on Iraq, North Korea, Iran, and other issues reveal a general pattern of thought: a tendency toward worst-case thinking; a pattern of warping and misusing intelligence to build the case for war with rogue states; a disdain for allies and multilateral institutions; a blind faith in U.S. military power and the benefits of regime change; and a tendency to see the ends as justifying the means, however horrific.”
If another of Bolton’s tasks is to impose discipline on a fractious staff, his track record is not favorable there, either.
In his various government jobs, Bolton was known as hot-tempered and volatile and quick to belittle employees.
He has been a consistent flame-thrower, critics and supporters agree. When he left a position at the U.S. Agency for International Development in the late 1980s, colleagues presented him with a special gift: a bronzed hand grenade.