John R. Bolton, former ambassador to the United Nations, has been selected by President Trump to fill the role of outgoing National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster. Lieutenant General McMaster has been described as honorable and capable, which were both necessary attributes considering that Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to a felony connected to his work for the president. McMaster may have been more hawkish than I would ideally prefer, but he was a sigh of relief in such a dysfunctional administration. John Bolton offers no such relief.
McMaster, to his credit, was a prolific officer during the Second Iraq War, commanding the third Armored Cavalry Regiment and pioneering counter-insurgency tactics, which brought long-awaited success to U.S forces. Bolton, on the other hand, only donned a uniform in the Maryland National Guard, dodging the Vietnam War. He once commented: “I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy,” saying that by 1970 he considered the war already lost. Yet he spent his four years at Yale delivering a full-throated endorsement for the war, a course of action that represents the foundation on which he currently lies: he is a chickenhawk.
Chickenhawk is a pejorative portmanteau, combining chicken and hawk to denote someone willing to send other people’s sons and daughters to war but unwilling to go themselves. Bolton is the quintessential chickenhawk, a man totally comfortable with blatant hypocrisy. The Atlantic’s James Jeffrey called McMaster “one of the biggest hawks in the Trump Administration,” but at least if he called for a preemptive strike on North Korea, you could believe he’d be willing to go. To replace him with Bolton, who not only supports a preemptive strike on North Korea but also insists on a swift exit of the Iran Deal, is a major disservice to the American people.
John Bolton represents also the antithesis of Donald Trump’s only foreign policy during his campaign: The Second Iraq War was bad. Trump spent much of the campaign arguing about exactly when he said he was against the Iraq War, citing Hillary Clinton’s vote for the war as evidence that he was less hawkish than her.
Whether or not that is true (it isn’t), John Bolton is perhaps the last man standing who still believes the Iraq War was the right course of action. On the campaign trail, Trump said “We’ve spent $4 trillion trying to topple various people […] We have done a tremendous disservice not only to the Middle East—we’ve done a tremendous disservice to humanity.” Like a broken clock, Trump is also right, though probably not as often as twice a day.
As late as 2015, Bolton reaffirmed that overthrowing Saddam was correct and stated the 2011 withdrawal was the biggest mistake of the war. These two men are diametrically opposed, yet Bolton is likely more willing than McMaster to make the president like him. As we’ve seen, favor with the president is more important than any ideological preference, so it is likely Bolton will have more success implementing his more hawkish positions than McMaster could’ve ever imagined.
To understand just how hawkish Bolton is, look no further than the articles he’s recently written: “How to Get Out of the Iran Nuclear Deal,” “The Legal Case for Striking North Korea First,” and “How to Defund the U.N.” The country is now stuck with a man that not only still supports the Iraq War, but also wanted to invade Cuba under the same false pretenses. He’s bad for America, but he’s also bad for Donald Trump, the man too smart for “stupid” wars. Maybe Bolton is more closely aligned with Hillary. After all, they both volunteered for Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign.