Bolton stirs global ire with coup comment
When a former White House national security adviser and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations says he was involved in planning coups abroad, the world takes notice.
John Bolton told Jake Tapper on CNN’s “The Lead” on Tuesday that the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol wasn’t a “carefully planned coup d’etat” — and that he would know.
“As somebody who has helped plan coups d’etat — not here but, you know, other places — it takes a lot of work, and that’s not what (former President Donald Trump) did,” said Bolton, who was the top national security official in the Trump administration for 17 months before a bitter exit in 2019.
It was a passing reference, apparently meant as a stinging criticism of the former president rather than a bombshell admission of responsibility.
But clips of the remarks went viral online, drawing millions of views. Within hours, they had sparked official condemnation and unofficial speculation from foreign observers, especially in parts of the world where decades of U.S. intervention remain fresh memories.
Evo Morales, the former president of Bolivia who was ousted from office in 2019 by the military amid murky election claims, tweeted Wednesday that the remarks showed that the United States was “the worst enemy of democracy and life.”
Maria Zakharova, the spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Affairs Ministry, called for an international investigation into Bolton’s remarks.
“It is important to know in which other countries the United States planned coups d’etat,” Zakharova told Radio Sputnik.
“This is no surprise,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said at a daily news conference Thursday. “The admission simply shows that interfering in other countries’ internal affairs and overthrowing their governments have become the standard practice of the U.S. government.”
“This is very much part of the U.S. rule book,” Wang said.
Bolton has been supportive of coups in the past.
In a 2008 interview with Al Jazeera, he said that coups can sometimes be “a necessary way to advance American interest.”
Some former U.S. intelligence operatives also responded with derision to Bolton’s remarks.
“Bolton never touched a coup,” tweeted Milton Bearden, a former CIA station chief who oversaw U.S. covert operations in Afghanistan in the 1980s. “And anyone who thinks fomenting coups is a good idea just doesn’t get out enough.”