John Bolton is en fuego today. It’s kind of tough to excerpt his piece and plenty of folks I suspect will pull out the bits where he called Barack Obama’s foreign policy “breathtakingly naive” and where he corrected Obama’s history on John Kennedy’s failed diplomacy with Nikita Kruschev. Those parts are good red meat for those of us who see that the real world is full of bad people for whom sit-down tea parties are nothing more than a delaying action they’ll use to kill more people.
Everyone, though, would profit from reading what Bolton has to say and following the paths he doesn’t have time to fully explore in a brief op-ed. It would be a good idea to read Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s “Dictatorships and Double Standards” to see where she was coming from when she gave the Democrats such an almighty smackdown in 1984.
I also like what see-dubya had to say on Bolton’s point of asymmetrical warfare and his reminder that we are, as we speak, sticking it hard to an ally who needs relatively little from us to do well. I don’t think we’ve ever really forgotten that such warfare, though it might not threaten to destroy us wholly, can certainly destroy our allies. The greatest flaw of the Reagan administration was not that it forgot that fact, but that it chose to let some of our allies (and potential allies) twist in the wind. The harsh reality of realpolitik is that the cost of “stability” is borne immediately by millions of other people. We only see the consequences years and years later, if ever. It seems to me that even a brisk read through history would show us what a morally-bankrupt, blood-soaked policy that’s been, even as folks like Obama want to bring it back stronger than ever.
Unfortunately, to really understand what Bolton is saying requries a knowledge of history that most people just don’t have and aren’t interested in getting. It doesn’t help that the Democratic Party is so very uninterested in its own history and intellectual traditions. It’s certainly not going to encourage folks to read up on how bad an idea it is to prop up tyrants just to keep the status quo.
Tags: Barack Obama, John Bolton, No More Tyrants
“Everyone, though, would profit from reading what Bolton has to say”
What a load of bollocks. He really does nothing to back up his thesis that Obama’s willingness to meet crackhead foreign leaders is “naive and dangerous”. Meeting them is not (for the hundredth time!) abetting them.
JB: “An ‘asymmetric’ threat to the U.S. often is an existential threat to its friends, which was something we never forgot during the Cold War. Obama plainly seems to have entirely missed this crucial point.”
Not really. Obama is fully aware of e.g. Israel’s position relative to Iran, and has pledged full support for the former.
JB: “Indeed, he has gone even further, arguing that the lack of negotiations with Iran caused the threats: ‘And the fact that we have not talked to them means that they have been developing nuclear weapons, funding Hamas, funding Hezbollah.’”
I don’t think he can read O’s word “means” as implying causation. Try this paraphrase: “All the time we’ve spent refusing to engage with Iran directly, they have been busy little beavers.” Just because he thinks we maybe could have slowed their evil progress if we had engaged with them doesn’t imply that he thinks we caused it. So take your “Blame America First” and shove it.
JB: “The inexperienced Kennedy performed so poorly that Khrushchev may well have been encouraged to position Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962″
Pure, ungrounded speculation on his part. If our State Dept or CIA had retroactively found that actually to be the case, Stache would surely know about it and be able to state is as fact, but he didn’t, so it mustn’t be based in reality.
J: “prop up tyrants just to keep the status quo”
Every modern US prez has let that happen. We can’t take on everyone at once. Bush, for one, has kept the execrable leaders of Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc. sitting pretty. I doubt McCain has other plans for them.
Given Mr. Bolton’s spectacular failures on nuclear proliferation, why we should we listen to him? North Korea has more nuclear weapons, thanks to his efforts. Iran has started and greatly expanded its enrichment efforts, thanks to John Bolton. And Mr. Bolton let AQ Khan off the hook and made no effort to try to interview him. AQ Khan has more information on illegal nuclear transfers than anyone in the world. But Mr. Bolton sees know reason to actually get information. The bright spot in his career is the Libya deal. But it was only completed after the British team had Mr. Bolton removed from the negotiations. So there it is, John Bolton’s big success: he stepped aside and let the Brits handle it. It’s pretty obvious why Mr. Bolton has such a negative attitude towards negotiation: he’s really bad at it.
North Korea built the nukes they have before Mr. Bolton took his position and they have continued to do so because the opposition party demanded that we not pursue unilateral negotiations.
Ditto Iran on those unilateral negotiations.
Ditto AQ Khan.
Surely you don’t advocate a “go it alone” approach on these things, yes. Surely you believe we should defer to our allies in the region, yes?
“Surely you believe we should defer to our allies in the region, yes?”
If our negotiator is John Bolton, most certainly yes. I’d welcome his exit anytime.
I’m a little curious as to the “opposition party” you speak of. Even if the Democratic party were to have raised any opposition to John Bolton’s endeavors, he would have told them to f*** off. So I don’t see much leverage coming from Congress. His deeds are his deeds. Congress controlled Bolton the way a human controls a gorilla with a piece of overcooked linguini.
Like the opposition that prevented Bolton from being confirmed as Ambassador to the UN?
It seems that Democrats, for no real reason at all save that he was blunt when bluntness was required, managed to oppose him just fine.