Iran nuclear deal U-turn was worth the pain for man who planned war to protect US from attack
AS HE moves out of his White House office, down a hall from the Oval Office, John Bolton will take with him an item that had pride of place on his wall.
In a frame sits a copy of the executive order that Donald Trump signed last year withdrawing the United States from the Iran nuclear deal.
For Mr Bolton, that single act by the president will have been worth any disagreements he encountered during his tenure as national security adviser.
According to one person who knows him, Mr Bolton’s first thought when he wakes up in the morning is how to protect America from nuclear attack.
He has long advocated pre-emptive strikes against Iran and North Korea, and remained confident that the Iraq war was “correct”, arguing that Saddam Hussein would have gone on to pursue weapons of mass destruction.
Mr Bolton, 70, the son of a Baltimore firefighter, ascended to the highest echelons of more than one Republican administration via a scholarship to boarding school, and then law school. He developed a contempt for “elites” along the way.
Six months before the Sept 11 terrorist attacks in 2001 he became undersecretary of state for President George W Bush. He backed vice president Dick Cheney’s subsequent vision for a muscular display of US military might.
Mr Bolton argued that Cuba should be added to Mr Bush’s “Axis of Evil” of rogue nations, and became one of the most vocal proponents of a hawkish, militaristic, unilateralist US foreign policy. Mr Bush appointed him US ambassador to the United Nations in 2005 and as a diplomat he was an iconoclast, having famously said that if the 88-floor UN building in New York lost 10 floors it “wouldn’t make a difference”.
Later, he was one of Barack Obama’s fiercest critics, appearing on Fox News to lambast him for negotiating with Iran, accusing him of “fecklessness” in the face of a “deadly global menace”.
In 2014, Mr Bolton said: “We have only two very unpleasant choices: either Iran gets nuclear weapons in the very near future, or pre-emptive military force.”
The following year he summarised his position as “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran.”
In 2016, Mr Bolton was said to be considering a White House run himself but it did not materialise. On entering office Mr Trump had considered him for secretary of state.
When he was appointed national security adviser in April 2018 various former US officials and anti-nuclear groups criticised the move as a harbinger of use of US military force abroad.
Outlining his philosophy at the time, Mr Bolton said: “As the ancient Romans used to say: Si vis pacem, para bellum – if you want peace, prepare for war.”
Shortly before entering the administration Mr Bolton had called for a preemptive strike on North Korea, arguing that it would soon be able to hit the US with nuclear weapons. But Mr Trump continued on an alternate path, developing a friendship with Kim Jong-un.
Under the Bush administration, the North Koreans called Bolton “human scum” and refused to speak to him.
The final disagreement with Mr Trump came over the president’s decision to invite the Taliban to peace talks, which Mr Bolton vehemently opposed. As Mr Bolton put it on taking the job: “When you enter government, you know that you aren’t going to win everything.”