Mouth For War: John Bolton
Many know John Bolton as a war hawk based on recent events. Others know his long history of involvement in beating the drums of war. Some don’t know much about him at all. So who is the mustached man running the U.S. war machine?
John Bolton has made headlines quite often over the last year after he began serving as National Security Advisor to Donald Trump. His rhetoric, for many of us, conjures up images of using the United States military over the last three decades for trivial interventions all over the world. We also know him as the man who fiercely backed (and still does) the Iraq War. Even more so, he is known as a nationalist who meddles in other country’s internal affairs on behalf of U.S. corporate interests.
Bolton has been advocating for military action and regime change in Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Venezuela, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen for over a decade. In March 2015, in a hyperbole-laden op-ed published by the New York Times titled “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran,” Bolton called for preemptively bombing Iran by basing his argument on an overly simplistic view of a complex situation. He did the same in February 2018. In a similarly worded op-ed published by the Wall Street Journal, Bolton provided vague rhetoric for the bombing of North Korea. Never taking into account — or caring about — the destabilization and the negative impacts such unilateral…
