The Duce wants to be a war president

He picked the right guy.

McMaster is out and Bolton is in.

Yes, John Bolton Really Is That Dangerous

The good thing about John Bolton, President Trump’s new national security adviser, is that he says what he thinks.

The bad thing is what he thinks.

There are few people more likely than Mr. Bolton is to lead the country into war. 

. . . .

Coupled with his nomination of the hard-line C.I.A. director, Mike Pompeo, as secretary of state, Mr. Trump is indulging his worst nationalistic instincts. 

Mr. Bolton, in particular, believes the United States can do what it wants without regard to international law, treaties or the political commitments of previous administrations.

He has argued for attacking North Korea to neutralize the threat of its nuclear weapons, which could set off a horrific war costing thousands of lives. 

At the same time, he has disparaged diplomatic efforts, including the talks planned in late May between Mr. Trump and the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un. 

He not only wants to abrogate the six-party deal that, since 2015, has significantly limited Iran’s nuclear program, he called for bombing Iran instead. 

He has also maligned the United Nations and other multilateral conventions, as Mr. Trump has done, favoring unilateral solutions.

. . . .

While Mr. Trump’s criticism of the Iraq war during the campaign raised the possibility that he might take a less aggressive stance on foreign policy, no one was a more vociferous proponent of that disastrous invasion than Mr. Bolton, a position he has not renounced. 

At the time, Mr. Bolton said Iraqis would welcome American troops and the United States’ military role would be over quickly as Iraqis exercised their new freedom from Saddam Hussein and established a democracy. It was the sort of simplistic and wrongheaded position he takes on most policies.

. . . .

Bringing on the fiery Mr. Bolton now, at a delicate moment with North Korea, is a terrible decision. While Mr. Trump has often threatened North Korea with military action, he accepted Mr. Kim’s invitation to a summit, brokered by South Korea’s president, who is eager for a diplomatic solution to the nuclear crisis.

Mr. Bolton, by contrast, told Fox News earlier this month that talks would be worthless and has called South Korean leaders “putty in North Korea’s hands.” 

On February 28, he insisted in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that “it is perfectly legitimate for the United States to respond to the current ‘necessity’ posed by North Korea’s nuclear weapons by striking first.”

Last summer he wrote in the Journal, “The U.S. should obviously seek South Korea’s agreement (and Japan’s) before using force, but no foreign government, even a close ally, can veto an action to protect Americans from Kim Jong Un’s nuclear weapons.”

On Iran, Mr. Bolton and the president are in sync, with both arguing that the United States should withdraw from the nuclear agreement by a May deadline. 

In March 2015, he argued in a New York Times op-ed that only military action like Israel’s 1981 attack on Saddam Hussein’s Osirak reactor in Iraq or its 2007 destruction of a Syrian reactor “can accomplish what is required.”

‘The Whole World Should Be Concerned’

“Bolton is relentless, intelligent and effective,” said François Heisbourg of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, who as a French military analyst dealt with Mr. Bolton during the administration of George W. Bush. 

“But he’s not a neoconservative and has no interest in democracy promotion. He is a man of the Trumpian world — no allies, no multilateralism.”

Stephen Bush of the center-left British magazine New Statesman said that Mr. Bolton was “the man who makes neoconservatives say, ‘Steady on, old chap.” ’

Nigel Sheinwald, a former British ambassador to Washington and to the European Union, also dealt with Mr. Bolton on Iran and arms control.

“He tried to push Bush policy in a much more extreme direction,” Mr. Sheinwald said. 

“Given that the U.S. and the U.K. had so much at stake together, he was oddly deaf to the idea that America had allies and was very critical of the U.K. in almost everything we did,” especially over Iran.