Add another zealot to the White House - The Washington Post

Add another zealot to the White House - The Washington Post
by  Max Boot (Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Fellow, Hoover Institute)
***The job of the national security adviser is to coordinate all of the defense and foreign-policy agencies and to get them to work smoothly together. This requires the kind of interpersonal skills that Bolton singularly lacks. The national security system is chaotic enough under Trump; look for it to get worse without McMaster’s attempts to impose some discipline.

What Bolton lacks in management skills, he more than makes up for with his ideological extremism. A month ago he wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal making the case for a first strike against North Korea: “Pre-emption opponents argue that action is not justified because Pyongyang does not constitute an ‘imminent threat.’ They are wrong.” At least with Bolton on the job, there is less chance of Trump selling out South Korea in one-sided deal with Kim Jong Un. But the chances of failed talks leading the administration to launch a “bloody-nose” strike have gone way up — and such a strike, in turn, could easily escalate into an all-out war against a nuclear-armed state.***KEEP READING