Another Washington pundit ‘fails up’ and into our living rooms as TV talking head. Former Ambassador John Bolton is again raising the battle cry for pre- emptive war on television and in the newspapers, this time with North Korea, though this is hardly new, considering he did his best to derail diplomatic talks between the U.S. and the Kim regime when he was a member of the Bush Administration in 2001. Like a bad broken record, Bolton offers the same reckless militarism that’s proven him wrong so many times before, though his reputation as a foreign policy “expert”—particularly in conservative media circles—didn’t seem to suffer much.
His latest call is for reunifying the Korean peninsula—with China leading the charge. If that fails, the U.S. should consider its own military attack on the regime. He admits that it would “undoubtedly be dangerous and somewhat chaotic,” but “whatever the risks, they pale before the risks of nuclear conflict emanating from the erratic Kim regime.”
On paper, Bolton’s got the credentials of an established Washington policy official and seasoned public servant. He’s an alumnus of three different Republican administrations—Reagan and Bush I—and worked in the State Department and served as Ambassador to the United Nations under Bush II. He advised Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign on foreign policy, and he’s a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
His public statements throughout the last 16 years of war, however, have been more in line with the radical warmongers of the extreme right of the Republican Party, and are as predictable as a daytime soap opera.
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