The Silence of John Bolton

President Donald Trump’s Singapore summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un was full of showmanship, featuring photo-ops, a long press conference, and one very unusual promotional video. But one player in the scene was surprisingly quiet: John Bolton, Trump’s national-security adviser.

Though Bolton was in Singapore for the summit, he has taken a lower-key approach in recent days as Trump has forged ahead with his plan of high-level diplomatic engagement with North Korea over its nuclear program. This was after Bolton had become a point of contention between the two sides leading up to the talks; he is famously hawkish on North Korea, and comments he made recently infuriated the North Koreans, throwing the summit into question. But the job of the national-security adviser isn’t to set policy, but to help implement it, and the North Korea summit shows that Bolton, despite his views