Across the West, some are losing faith in liberal democracy because they feel that it doesn’t matter who they elect, or what position those candidates campaigned on—an unaccountable elite just keeps perpetuating its preferred policies.

President Obama contributed to that problem when he got elected largely on the proposition that Hillary Clinton and John McCain had supported a dumb war in Iraq, then staffed his foreign-policy team with hawks who supported that same war. His team’s ill-fated intervention in Libya showed that the staffing mattered.

Trump hiring Bolton would fuel this same loss of faith in democratic politics, even as it poses similar substantive risks: Bolton is another hawk who shows no evidence of having learned from past mistakes; and he’d be put in a position to urge many new wars—he has favored many more wars in his lifetime than America has fought, including all the most ill-considered wars that it has actually fought.

What’s more, the risks that a hawk prone to supporting ill-considered wars would pose to any administration are likely to be magnified under the erratic, bellicose Trump, especially if he seeks to compensate for his fragile ego or insecure masculinity, or simply decides he wants to be an even greater object of attention.

Even setting psychology aside, the elevated risks remain.

After all, Obama’s cautious instincts made him much less interventionist than (to cite just two examples) his Iraq-War supporting secretaries of state, whereas Trump, in spite of his anti-interventionist, “America First” campaign rhetoric, has his own long history of hawkishness, even recording a video in 2011 urging the U.S. to go into Libya and overthrow the regime there. Plus, Trump is arguably less prepared to prosecute a war than any of his predecessors in living memory (for reasons noted at length in this case against more U.S. warring in Syria), making it especially fraught for him to have an extreme hawk as an adviser.

As Damon Linker, who shares all of these concerns, points out, Trump is “prone to making impulsive decisions” and “tends to defer to the most forceful voice in the room, especially when it conveys information with confident bluster. That would give Bolton enormous power to shape policy—which means the power to get the U.S. to launch big new wars as well as expand the numerous ones we're already waging across wide swaths of the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia.”

Bolton is also unusually brash and undiplomatic in his rhetoric. The White House needs a counterbalance to those qualities, not another rhetorical bomb thrower. And just as Obama’s appointments carried an opportunity cost, robbing Democrats of a bigger bench of noninterventionists going forward, so too will the Trump administration deprive the GOP of folks who share the noninterventionist ideas that clearly appeal to a large swath of its primary electorate.