The Deeply Underdeveloped Worldview of John Bolton
Survey the history of American national-security advisors going back to the position’s creation in the mid-twentieth century, and two things about John Bolton stand out. The first is his militancy: his incessant, almost casual, advocacy of war. The second—which has gotten less attention but is deeply intertwined with the first—is the parochialism of his life experience.
Many national-security advisors, including Robert McFarlane, John Poindexter, Colin Powell, James Jones, Michael Flynn, and H.R. McMaster, have come from the professional military. Even many of those who made their careers in academia, law, or government, like McGeorge Bundy, Henry Kissinger, Frank Carlucci, Brent Scowcroft, and Stephen Hadley,served in the military for a time. Walt Rostow, Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Scowcroft, Anthony Lake, Condoleezza Rice, Susan Rice, and McMaster, earned doctorates. In different ways, these experiences offered Bolton’s predecessors some critical distance on the foreign-policy debate in Washington.
To differing degrees, those who served in the military saw the consequences of those foreign-policy debates on the ground. Some were more hawkish than others. But many could relate to the of Colin Powell who, as a major in Vietnam, saw “recently healthy young American boys, now stacked like cordwood” on the floor of helicopters. Those who served in academia had an opportunity to put U.S. foreign policy in broader historical perspective. Kissinger, who wrote his dissertation on Klemens Von Metternich, the foreign minister of the Austro-Hungarian empire who tried to manage Europe’s balance of power in the face of
