John Bolton started his tenure as President Donald Trump's latest national security adviser on Monday, with a crisis brewing in Syria and a potential upcoming summit with North Korea.
Bolton, a former US ambassador to the UN, replaced H.R. McMaster. He is well-known for his hawkish statements, to say the least.
"John Bolton was by far the most dangerous man we had in the entire eight years of the Bush administration," Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush, tweeted on March 16. "Hiring him as the president's top national security advisor is an invitation to war, perhaps nuclear war."
It's quite the statement about an administration that included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and other notable hawks of the 21st century.
Here are nine things Bolton has said that scare the national-security establishment.
"The Secretariat building in New York has 38 stories; if you lost 10 stories today, it wouldn't make a bit of difference," Bolton said in a 1994 speech, referring to the UN's headquarters. He added later: "There's no such thing as the United Nations."
Source: YouTube, New York Times
"I expect that the American role actually will be fairly minimal," Bolton said in 2002, before the US invasion of Iraq. "I think we'll have an important security role."
Source: BBC
"The main thing people feared at that time was Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons stocks," Bolton said in 2009, defending the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
In reality, what most feared was the Bush administration's false claims that Hussein had nuclear ambitions and that the Iraqi government had ties to terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda.
Source: Hoover Institution
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