"Who Is John Bolton?" -- The Guardian

Ed Pilkington writes this for The Guardian as a way of introducing to readers John Bolton, President Trump's choice for his third National Security Adviser, a job that is supposed to be a gatekeeper for the president.  It does not require Senate confirmation.

His job is to receive reports and recommendations from all the different agencies having to do with national security, sort through them and prepare a summary or synthesis of the options and recommendations, so that the president can be informed and make good decisions on such matters.

Of course, NSAs often have their opinions, but they are ideally chosen to be able to present options rather than agendas.   John Bolton, by history, does not seem to fit that mold.   He is a man with a definite agenda.   He favors aggressive military action;  he has in the past advocated taking preemptive military strikes on both Iran and North Korea.   Here is Pilkington's take on him:

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"John Bolton, the incoming national security adviser, will have the ear of Donald Trump at a perilously fraught moment in world affairs.

"A notorious hawk who advocates the unilateral wielding of US might, Bolton is dismissive of international diplomacy, and has called for the bombing of both Iran and North Korea.

"The departure of HR McMaster, who was credited by some as being a  moderating force on the president, and his replacement by one of the most aggressive thinkers in the world of US foreign policy, will spread fear in diplomatic circles that the Trump administration could be poised to take a dramatic hawkish turn.

'The shuffle comes as Washington is already bracing itself for the potential of imminent face-to-face talks between Trump and the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un over he regime's development of nuclear weapons.

"Bolton, who will leave his post as a senior fellow at the rightwing American Enterprise Institute to join the White House on 9 April, has made clear his preference for how to deal with North Korea -- bomb it.   Last month he wrote an opinion column for the Wall Street Journal in which he made a legal case for a pre-emptive strike. . . .

 "The former ambassador [actually he was the US Ambassador to the United Nations only be a recess appointment by George W. Bush;   the Senate would ot confirm his appointment] whose basic approach to diplomacy is summed up in the title of his book Surrender is Not an Option, has made a similarly combative case for Iran.   He was scathing of Barack Obama's attempt to deal with Tehran's nuclear program through negotiations, writing in the New York Times in 2015 that only bombing by the US and Israel would take out Iran's uranium-enrichment installations and prevent disaster. . . . 

"Bolton's arrival in the Wolff revealed in his inside account of the White Housse, Fire and Fury, that Trump's former senior counselor Steve Bannon had urged the president to hire Bolton.   So too did the late Fox New executive, Roger Ailes.  'He's a bomb thrower,' Ailes said last year, according to Wolff.  And a strange little fucker.   But you need him.'

"Trump seems now to have come round to that way of thinking."

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