Democrats attack Trump’s choice John Bolton as ‘reckless partisan’

John Bolton’s appointment as US National Security Adviser should have been impossible, if Donald Trump’s tweets were set in stone.

In a statement yesterday accepting his appointment as national security adviser, Mr Bolton said: “I look forward to working with President Trump and his leadership team in addressing these complex challenges in an effort to make our country safer at home and stronger overseas”.

There are still plenty of those who support Bolton as the flawless pick to steer the President’s foreign policy agenda and Bolton, it seems, played the long game brilliantly. On paper, these appointments go well beyond any we’ve seen in past Republican administrations.

Let’s take these points in order.

“President Trump is continuing to appoint true friends of Israel to senior positions”. As the shake up continues, Trump inarguably has an aggressive foreign policy team that will led with him on his worldwide agenda. He bent to the advice of the Pentagon and McMaster in modestly escalating the war in Afghanistan, despite his great scepticism of the USA mission there.

No surprise, Bolton totally downplays the consequences of trashing the deal, which would leave Tehran free to immediately advance toward nuclear breakout capacity. And Trump has been known to overrule even the consensus of his aides in the past.

One now gets the sense that Trump is done with this approach.

Every Republican in Congress and some Democrats opposed it. He is a familiar figure in Washington, with a walrus-like moustache and hard-charging views on many global challenges.

The prospect of packing more hardliners into the administration has caused an outcry that a confrontational foreign policy would mean more volatility for the United States.

Candidate Trump appeared on “Meet the Press” in the summer of 2015 just weeks after announcing his run for president. In 2003, on the cusp of multilateral talks about Pyongyang’s furtive uranium enrichment program after the collapse of the 1994 Agreed Framework, North Korea slammed Bolton for calling then-North Korean leader Kim Jong-il a “tyrannical dictator”. And so Trump is now creating an internal climate more in line with his views. Coupled with his nomination of the hard-line Central Intelligence Agency director, Mike Pompeo, as secretary of state, Mr Trump is indulging his worst nationalist instincts.

You know, the Iran nuclear deal has been mentioned as one of the controversial issues that Pompeo and Bolton don’t support, but let’s remember the Iran nuclear deal was incredibly controversial.

Trump’s definition of “America First” has always been somewhat nebulous, although he’s stressed the importance of U.S. sovereignty, limited overseas intervention and burden-sharing among allies so that Washington doesn’t disproportionately foot the bill.

Bolton isn’t the unthinking warmonger critics sometimes imagine. And now he occupies perhaps the most important advisory position in the national security establishment. Instead, the future national security adviser says that all his past comments are “behind” him.

A second former White House official offered a blunt assessment of former Obama officials now detailed or appointed to the NSC: “Everyone who was there during Obama years should start packing their shit”.

Last year, he wrote a detailed strategy in the National Review for quitting the Iran nuclear deal (which Trump is considering doing by a May 12 deadline).

Several sources told CNN that the decision came after months of personal tension between McMaster and Trump.

Beyond their conservative politics, Trump, Bolton and Cambridge Analytica all share a patron: the Mercer family of Long Island, New York, whose patriarch, Robert Mercer, made a fortune at the helm of a top-yielding hedge fund. Tillerson was a bureaucratic ally – albeit a fairly weak one. Bolton’s pick rounds out a team that in Trump’s second year will compromise nearly entirely hawks whose public views on national security veer decidedly to the right. At the same time, they maintained the decision to remove him had been long in coming and was not a response to Tuesday’s leak of briefing papers related to Trump’s phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, a disclosure that had generated considerable criticism and fresh speculation that McMaster was in trouble.