Earlier this year, as Donald Trump prepared to meet the North Korean Supreme Leader, Kim Jong Un, in Vietnam, he took a moment in the State of the Union address to congratulate himself on a diplomatic masterstroke: “If I had not been elected President of the United States, we would right now, in my opinion, be in a major war with North Korea, with potentially millions of people killed.” For John Bolton, the national-security adviser, the summit represented a conundrum. Two months before he entered the White House, in April, 2018, he had called for preëmptive war with North Korea. During the past two decades, Bolton has established himself as the Republican Party’s most militant foreign-policy thinker—an advocate of aggressive force who ridicules anyone who disagrees. In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, he argued that Kim’s regime would soon be able to strike the United States with nuclear weapons, and that we should attack before it was too late. “The threat is imminent,” he wrote. “It is perfectly legitimate for the United States to respond to the current ‘necessity’ posed by North Korea’s nuclear weapons by striking first.”

Trump—erratic, impulsive, and largely ignorant of foreign affairs—has promised since the start of his Presidency to scale back America’s foreign commitments and to cut its expenses. With North Korea, he began by trying to intimidate Kim into surrendering his nuclear arsenal, threatening “fire and fury” and mocking him as “Little Rocket Man.” When that failed, Trump embarked on a campaign of diplomacy by sentiment, meeting Kim in Singapore and, despite their failure to reach an agreement, declaring, “We fell in love.” In Hanoi, he intended to try again.

Since the early two-thousands, Bolton has told anyone who would listen that North Korea will never seriously consider giving up its nuclear weapons, no matter what threats or inducements the Americans present; negotiations only bought the regime more time. Privately, he told aides that the summit in Hanoi was unlikely to succeed. “It’s hard to find people here who aren’t deeply skeptical,” an Administration official said to me. “But this is something the President wants to try, and Bolton has promised to support him.”

When I saw Bolton in his office, on a frigid winter day, he was mild-mannered and spoke in a reedy voice that belied his ferocious opinions. His long face seems assembled around his mustache, a bushy walrus that evokes the late German author Günter Grass. When I asked Bolton about the contrast between his views and Trump’s, he said, “The President knows where I stand on all the issues, because he watched me on Fox News. You have to know in advance the President’s views are not always yours. When you enter government, you know that you aren’t going to win everything.”

In North Korea, he told me, Trump believed that the situation had changed enough to justify negotiations. He noted the combination of crushing economic sanctions and the ascension of Kim Jong Un, in 2011. Bolton argued that Kim, whose grandfather and father built a state based on terror and scarcity, was so eager to revitalize the economy that perhaps he could be persuaded to give up his weapons. Bolton wasn’t very convincing, after a career spent scoffing at such talk, but he went on gamely. “Kim told us, ‘I’m not like my father or the Founder.’ He has an ability to see another future that his country could have,” he said. To help persuade Kim, Trump had made a four-minute video extolling the possibilities of Western investment—an ersatz movie trailer, billed as a Destiny Pictures Production.

In Hanoi, the two sides gathered at the Metropole, a grand hotel built during the French colonial era, where they met in a conference room by the swimming pool. Trump brought six aides, Kim two. According to White House officials, the negotiations stalled when Kim offered to shut down the Yongbyon plutonium-manufacturing plant, which represents only a fraction of the country’s nuclear program, in exchange for a near-total lifting of U.S. sanctions. American negotiators had warned their North Korean counterparts beforehand that they would not consider such a proposal. “It was a preposterous position—preposterous—and they had no fallback,” a senior Administration official told me. After four and a half hours, it became clear that the meeting had failed. As the two leaders stood up, Trump told Kim, “Let’s keep talking.” Within hours, suspicious activity—possibly construction—had been spotted around the Yongbyon facility.

For Bolton, the outcome of the summit vindicated a twenty-year argument that the North Korean regime wouldn’t be moved by negotiations. But, even though he was now in the White House, it seemed that the rest of his argument—that America needs to strike immediately—was having little effect. A Western diplomat who knows Bolton told me, “The trouble for Bolton is, Trump does not want war. He does not want to launch military operations. To get the job, Bolton had to cut his balls off and put them on Trump’s desk.”

When Bolton moved into his office, down the hall from the President’s, he hung a framed copy of Trump’s executive order nullifying the U.S.’s nuclear agreement with Iran—one of President Obama’s signature foreign-policy achievements, which Bolton, a ferocious critic of Iran, has described as “execrable.” Nearby is a black-and-white photograph of Johnny Unitas, the quarterback for the old Baltimore Colts, Bolton’s home-town hero. During my visit, he asked if I knew whom it depicted. When I guessed right, he gave a half smile and said, “Good answer.”

Bolton was born in a working-class neighborhood, the son of a firefighter and a homemaker, neither of whom finished high school. He is often referred to as a neoconservative—a former liberal who endorses a hawkish foreign policy and wants to spread democracy abroad. In fact, he has been a conservative his whole life. His father, though a member of the firefighters’ union, was a steadfast Republican, and Bolton absorbed his values early. As a teen-ager, at the McDonogh boarding school, which he attended on scholarship, he volunteered to support Barry Goldwater during his run for President, in 1964. Goldwater, a Republican from Arizona, pitched himself as an unapologetic conservative, fighting for foundational liberties against “the Eastern establishment.” Bolton was enthralled. “I cheered when Barry said we should cut off the eastern seaboard and let it drift out to sea,” he wrote in his memoir, “Surrender Is Not an Option.” Goldwater lost, in one of the most lopsided electoral defeats of the twentieth century, but Bolton only grew more inspired. “If the sustained and systematic distortion of a fine man’s philosophy could succeed, abetted by every major media outlet in the country,” he wrote, “it was time to fight back.”

“If this gets boring, I can tell you how I borrowed money from the Mob, and how, right now, we’re actually on the run from them.” Facebook

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In the fall of 1966, Bolton started at Yale, on scholarship. He was a working-class kid among the upper class—at the time, twenty per cent of freshmen came from just five exclusive boarding schools—and a conservative on a liberal campus. (Bolton’s was the last all-male class at Yale; he opposed coeducation.) Yale was riven by the Vietnam War, which Bolton supported, at least rhetorically. The draft board was calling up tens of thousands of college-age men to serve, and Bolton preëmpted the possibility by joining the Maryland National Guard. In his memoir, he explained that he felt that the war had already been lost, by liberals who had prevented America from doing what it needed to do to win. “I wasn’t going to waste time on a futile struggle,” Bolton wrote. “Dying for your country was one thing, but dying to gain territory that antiwar forces in Congress would simply return to the enemy seemed ludicrous to me. Looking back, I am not terribly proud of this calculation.”