I DON’T have a back garden, but if I had, then last week would have been as good a time as any to start digging a bomb shelter in it. Had I done so, my incentive for such a drastic, if useless course of action was the news that John Bolton had been appointed as the new US national security adviser by president Donald Trump.
So preoccupied were we here in the UK with Russian threats and Brexit that almost unnoticed Mr Bolton, enfant terrible and Uber-Hawk, was ushered into the US administration with little more than a murmur of concern this side of the pond.
As readers of a certain vintage will no doubt already be aware, Mr Bolton has form when it comes to doing scary. War, it would seem, is his answer to just about everything. Not that he himself of course was ever likely to be crushed in any rush to the recruiting office, far from it.
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Like so many loathsome politicians of his type, among them some Iraq War armchair comrades-in-arms like George W Bush, Dick Cheney and now of course Donald Trump, Mr Bolton has always been able to avoid hearing the real time sound of a cannonball rolling.
Whether it be a result of daddy’s connections, opting for the then comparative safety of the National Guard, being a first-time father or in Mr Trump’s case having bad feet, these US bellicose glory boys wouldn’t know a frontline from a soda fountain. Not for them the blood-filled paddy fields of Vietnam, best to leave that to other young Americans for whom the protection of privilege was unimaginable. That, however, would not for a moment stop Mr Bolton sending everyone else’s children to do his bidding on overseas battlefields.
That Mr Bolton took over as National Security Adviser from Lt Gen HR McMaster, a highly respected soldier, who had seen active service in Iraq, only adds to the sense of now having the wrong man in the job. It was back in 2005 that I met the then Colonel McMaster while embedded with his US 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment during their deployment in the infamous Islamist insurgency stronghold of Tal Afar in the north of Iraq.Then, like now, he was no dove, but he knew the true cost of war and was more than eloquent at articulating this as the “warrior-thinker” his reputation has bestowed on him. Where Lt Gen McMaster is cautious, Mr Bolton is reckless.
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The new national security adviser is a man who relishes his confrontational reputation, and is more than happy to indulge in pre-emptive, interventionist military action in pursuit of what he perceives to be America’s near God given right to supremacy.
“Audacity, and more audacity, and always audacity, and the nation will be saved,” reads the quote from the French revolutionary, Georges Danton, at the beginning of Mr Bolton’s memoir, the title of which, by the way, is Surrender Is Not An Option. One wonders if even for an instant the irony of calling his book this crossed his mind. Frankly, given his track record of arrogance it’s doubtful, and right now it’s the rest of the world that’s more likely to need saving from Mr Bolton’s America.
As one US political commentator put it the other day, in replacing Lt Gen McMaster and Rex Tillerson, who until recently was Secretary of State, President Trump has got rid of the “grown-ups” in his administration. Where Lt Gen McMaster and Mr Tillerson did what they could to limit the damage that President Trump has done to America’s international reputation and critical alliance partnerships, Mr Bolton’s particular penchant as a “diplomat” seems to have been finding creative new ways to offend America’s friends and allies.
This is a man who, like Mr Trump, shares a disregard for international agreements, and disrespect for multilateral organisations such as the UN and the European Union. This too is reflected in his memoir where traditional foreign policy views are referred to as “high-minded accommodationists” and EU bureaucrats repeatedly called “EUroids.”
So what then does Mr Bolton’s appointment mean for the Washington administration and how will his presence manifest itself on the global scene? Suffice to say we can expect a massive shake-up at the National Security Council as he goes about purging staff, starting with any of those held over from the Obama. administration. Let’s not forget that as national security adviser, Mr Bolton doesn’t need Senate confirmation and can get on with what he wants to do.
In that regard what happens next in terms of overseas should concern us all. Along with Mr Bolton’s appointment and that of the equally bellicose Mike Pompeo heading the State Department and Gina Haspel, who ran a torture site under President George W Bush, heading the CIA, there is a sense that perhaps, just perhaps, the Trump administration is now gearing up for war. In the cross hairs most likely would be North Korea and Iran. Less than four weeks ago, writing in an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal, Mr Bolton made the case for a pre-emptive strike on North Korea. Yes, just when one thought that Mr Trump’s embrace of diplomacy with North Korea might have indicted a new, more peaceful direction in US policy, Mr Bolton’s entrance to the White House disabused everyone of that notion.
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He also desperately wants to scuttle the Iran nuclear deal. In yet another article entitled “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran” and written even before the deal was in place he made his warmongering position clear.
It would be a dangerous mistake to brush off Mr Bolton’s provocative and bellicose remarks as mere rhetoric. Let’s not forget that that under the Bush administration he cooked intelligence to fit the case for the Iraq War, and to this day still defends what was the greatest foreign policy debacle since Vietnam –- the war he so conveniently managed to avoid being drafted into.
Already the United States has a reckless, impulsive president. But over the last few weeks Mr Trump has brought the most extreme and unreconstructed of hawks into the White House and Mr Bolton is among the most ferocious. There have been many moments of concern since Donald Trump came to power, but in the appointment of John Bolton his presidency has taken a foreboding turn. Dangerous times lie ahead I fear.
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