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“John Bolton is the kind of man with whom I would want to stand at Armageddon.” So said Bolton’s mentor, former senator and forever-segregationist Jesse Helms, describing the man he took under his wing during the Reagan years and helped set on the path to political power. Helms, who died in 2008, will never get to live out his doomsday fantasies. The rest of us may not be so lucky. Bolton’s appointment as national security advisor, a post that requires no congressional confirmation, is distinctly alarming, not least because the man currently running the United States has a habit of blithely going along with whatever the last person whispering in his ear told him to do. In this case, that man once said he thinks “too many Americans don’t live in a climate of fear.” Bolton’s worldview has always been terrifying, but at least when he served in the Reagan and Bush administrations his ability to put it into practice was tempered by the fact that his posts had some limits. As national security advisor, Bolton will not just have Trump’s ear on issues ranging from national security to foreign policy, but will also help coordinate the government’s responses to crises like terrorist attacks and pandemics. Bolton’s well-known love of war is alarming enough, but the rest of his career gives us even more reason to worry.

Salad Days As a college kid, Bolton worked on and enthusiastically supported Barry Goldwater, another ultraconservative whose views on military intervention were markedly to the right of most life on earth. In 1966, he penned an editorial for his school paper called “No Peace in Vietnam,” which warned against “spurious” hopes for an end to hostilities. But his support for the Vietnam War didn’t extend to actually fighting in it. Twenty-five years later, he claimed he didn’t enlist because he considered the war “already lost.” Bolton eventually joined Reagan’s Justice Department as an assistant attorney general, where, in a case of grim foreshadowing, he spent a fair amount of his time keeping inconvenient information from getting out. When Democrats requested internal memos that William Rehnquist, Reagan’s nominee for chief Supreme Court Justice, had written while serving in Nixon’s Department of Justice, Bolton refused to release them, citing executive privilege. Decades later, FBI files showed that Bolton was involved in getting the FBI to spy on witnesses who were set to testify against Rehnquist. When the chair of the House Judiciary Committee asked for documents related to the unfolding Iran-Contra affair, Bolton again refused, saying they were too “highly classified” for the committee’s staff to peruse. When several Reagan appointees (including Bolton’s boss) came under investigation for that scandal and others, Bolton attacked the system of court-appointed independent counsels as “out of control,” claiming that “nothing is too trivial for these people to investigate.” Bolton also found time to bully a female subordinate when she asked for four extra months of unpaid leave on doctor’s orders to recover from her recent pregnancy, her second in five years. The forty-two year-old lawyer, who had drafted a Supreme Court brief the day she went into labor, had her request denied by Bolton, who then accused her of making a fraudulent medical claim and gave her the choice of a demotion or a firing. But Bolton wasn’t being hard-hearted: as he explained to the press, his forty-two year-old wife had also just given birth. Besides, the department’s leave policy was more generous than most private firms. During the Clinton years, Bolton joined in on that age-old DC tradition of facilitating government corruption. As head of the corporate-funded National Policy Forum (NPF), an “issues development subsidiary” of the Republican National Committee (RNC), Bolton sent then-party chair Haley Barbour notes about which corporate executives to shake down for money. Many of the names on the list were business people who had participated in NPF conferences that happened to promote their company’s preferred views on government regulation and other issues. Coincidentally, the conferences’ attendees often included key Republican congressmen who were legislating on those very issues. In 1997, it emerged that the Taiwanese government had served as middleman for a donation to the NPF from a government-linked Taiwanese foundation. This is far from the only example of Bolton’s connection to Taiwan; for decades he has advocated for the United States to recognize Taiwan as an independent country. In this, Bolton goes further than most other Republicans, since China has long insisted it would consider such recognition an act of war. In the nineties, the Taiwanese government paid Bolton $30,000 to write three research papers about Taiwan and the United Nations. During the same period, he also appeared at congressional hearings calling for recognizing the island. Bolton insisted they were separate transactions and never registered as a foreign agent because he had been told he was simply “providing legal services.” The same decade witnessed the rarest of phenomena: a few Bolton-penned columns urging the United States not to intervene in a foreign country. In this case, Bolton wanted to stay out of Haiti, then controlled by a brutal three-man junta. In a 1994 Washington Post op-ed, Bolton criticized the concept of “nation building,” and argued the only “central American interest” in the country was stopping refugees from ending up in Florida. He even called on the United States to lift sanctions, which simply “hurt the people of the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.” Bolton would go on to disregard this advice for the rest of his career.

Don’t Call Him a Neoconservative Bolton’s op-ed on Haiti offers a glimpse of his ideology, which is to aggressively promote what he sees as American interests by any means necessary. He chafes at the “neoconservative” label, pointing out that he was never a liberal nor has he ever sympathized with the Wilsonian strain in neoconservatism. This is true insofar as Bolton has abstained from neoconservatives’ rhetorical paeans to the spread of democracy and freedom. Instead, Bolton described himself to the American Interest in 2007 as “a national-interest conservative.” “I look to define and defend American interests, and to protect and expand them,” he explained. In other words, Bolton is the worst of both worlds: a nationalist and an interventionist. This orientation makes him a perfect fit for Trump, who has repeatedly said he would bomb Iraq and then take its oil. Perhaps it’s no surprise that Robert Mercer, the billionaire most intimately involved with Trump’s campaign, has also donated millions to Bolton’s Super PAC over the past few years. If Bolton appears to have no real principles (witness him chide an interviewer for saying, in a discussion on Iraq, that he preferred to live in a dictatorship rather than a failed state, then elsewhere lament the fact that Egypt’s dictatorship was replaced with democracy) that’s because his guiding principle is the ruthless exercise and expansion of American power “Conservative foreign policy is unabashedly pro-American, unashamed of American exceptionalism, unwilling to bend its knee to international organizations, and unapologetic about the need for the fullest range of dominant military capabilities,” he wrote in Human Events in 2009. “Its diplomacy is neither unilateralist nor multilateralist, but chooses its strategies, tactics, means, and methods based on a hard-headed assessment of U.S. national interests, not on theologies about process.” In other words, use diplomacy and international institutions when it suits you, and, when the situation calls for it, use whatever military force you see fit. The important thing is to get your way. Bolton has said he views the United Nations “as an instrument for helping to advance US foreign policy,” and that he’s not against sharing sovereignty in alliances if it “leaves power with the United States.” He believes the United States should choose the international organizations it works with in order to get the results it wants. And if that fails, well, no one’s ever accused Bolton of being reluctant to resort to force.

The Resistance Prevails While the rest of us dread what’s to come, #Resistance liberals do have one reason to be jubilant about Bolton’s appointment. After spending nearly two years crowing about Trump’s supposed passivity toward Putin and Russia, they’ll find in Bolton an anti-Russian hawk who will help bring the two countries closer to open conflict. Bolton incessantly criticized Obama’s attempts to “reset” relations with Russia, which he mocked as “bending the knee to Moscow,” characterizing attempts to cooperate in arms control and nuclear proliferation as “concessions.” He charged that the 2009 arms control treaty with Russia was “almost entirely to Moscow’s advantage” and blamed Obama’s insufficiently strong condemnation of Putin’s human rights abuses for “emboldening” the autocrat to “crack down.” “It’s a measure of Putin’s confidence that he can basically act without fear of retaliation from the United States,” he said in 2013. Bolton claims Putin annexed Crimea because Obama said nothing about Russia’s involvement in Georgia in 2008 and believes that Russia’s perception of American weakness led the Kremlin to “rebuild their imperial ambitions.” “The biggest threats in the world today are China and Russia,” he explained in 2014. Obama’s desire to strengthen US-Russia relations, Bolton has said, meant that “our country’s response to Putin was weak.” In February, he wrote that since Mueller’s indictment fell short of charging actual collusion, Trump can now “pivot to the real task ahead, which is dealing strategically and comprehensively with Russia’s global efforts to enhance its influence.” For Bolton, this means a “retaliatory cyber campaign against Russia” that should be “decidedly disproportionate,” to properly scare Putin away from doing something similar in the future; it means an “analogous response” in the Middle East to counter Russia’s meddling; and it means more provocative military action by NATO. “Let Putin instead hear the rumble of artillery and NATO tank tracks conducting more joint field exercises with Ukraine’s military,” writes Bolton. To all of our misfortune, the #Resistance is about to be reminded of the need to be careful of what one wishes for.