Bolton completes Trump’s war cabinet: Analyst

US President Donald Trump has recently picked hawkish conservative John Bolton as his National Security Adviser. Experts says the new addition completes the Republican head of state’s ideal war cabinet, which also features Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis.

In an article for The Washington Post on Thursday, award winning journalist David Ignatius wrote that Bolton was in no way the “honest broker” that everybody expected a person in his new position to be.

Instead, he describes the former US envoy to the UN as a “provocateur, bureaucratic infighter and permanent enfant terrible,” who is believed to share the same bellicose qualities of Trump himself.

A pupil of Secretary of State James A. Baker III, under former President George H. W. Bush, Bolton says he is on a mission to defend his country and doesn’t worry about being seen as a “nice person.”

The new role seems to be the dream job for Bolton, who, according to the article, has spent his whole career preparing for the three major challenges he is bound to face as national security adviser: North Korea, Iran and Russia.

With Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un set to hold direct talks for denuclearization in the coming months, Bolton’s choice as a fierce Pyongyang skeptic has already raised the alarms among Washington’s allies who hoped the talks would help reduce tensions on the Korean Peninsula.

He has warned in the past that North Korea “would betray its nuclear-disarmament promises” and Washington should avoid lifting sanctions against Pyongyang before it takes verifiable steps towards denuclearization.

Bolton is also a big supporter of pressuring Iran through economic and even military means and this, as Ignatius puts it, is like “the last nail in the coffin” for the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and the six world powers- the US, the UK, France, China, Russia and Germany.

The Trump administration has been actively trying to undermine the deal, under which Iran agreed to limit parts of its peaceful nuclear program in exchange for lifting all nuclear-related sanctions against Tehran.

Bolton is also expected to hinder Trump’s attempts at establishing closer ties with Moscow through arms-control talks, among other things.

Bolton’s policies towards these main issues is in many ways similar to those of Pompeo and Mattis.

“With Bolton, the war cabinet is complete. Trump will now be constrained only if he believes deep down that you can’t make America great again and also go to war,” the article concludes.

Courtesy: Press TV

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