Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton says he is now backing Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential race and warns voters that electing Hillary Clinton will just mean another four years of President Obama’s foreign policy.
After briefly considering a White House bid of his own, Bolton refused to endorse while the GOP nomination was still in doubt but said he would back the eventual nominee. Recent campaign suspensions by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Gov. John Kasich, R-Ohio, leave Trump as the only active Republican candidate on well on his way to clinching a majority of pledged delegates.
Bolton is urging party unity because he believes the U.S. national security cannot afford Clinton as president.
“Hillary is extremely happy with the Obama foreign policy. It’s almost an urban legend now that somehow she would be tougher, more hawkish (than Obama). I really don’t see that,” said Bolton, who says Clinton admits as much in her most recent book, “Hard Choices.”
“It’s very hard, if not impossible, to find any real differences between what Hillary Clinton writes and what the Obama policy was,” said Bolton. “The idea somehow that Hillary would be preferable because she would be an improvement on the Obama foreign policy is badly misguided.”
Bolton said Trump’s foreign policy speech in Washington just prior to becoming the presumptive nominee was a “good start” in laying out his vision that America’s national security interests must take top priority in the next administration. But Trump may still have a steep learning curve on national security, evidenced most publicly by his December debate performance in wich he appeared to have no familiarity with the nuclear triad.
Bolton admits Trump still has to prove he is ready for the job.
“It’s also important to demonstrate that Trump can can fulfill the most important job of the presidency, which is keeping the country safe. Obviously, the economy’s important. There’s a lot of important issues, but if the country’s not safe, everything else is secondary,” said Bolton.
Both Trump and Clinton plan to make economic issues central to their campaigns, but Bolton believes Trump’s business track record will lead Hillary to look for an advantage on international affairs and point to her time as secretary of state to show she has a much better handle on America’s national security challenges.
Bolton says Trump has to be ready to use Clinton’s record against her.
“Trump needs to demonstrate that her record at State, which is the same as the first four years under Obama, was a series of failures. To do that is going to require talking more about the subject,” said Bolton.
Still, Bolton has no doubt Trump would be better than Clinton and urges conservatives and Republicans to stop seeking further alternatives to Trump.
“I believe this is a binary choice. The next president will either be Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, unless Hillary gets indicted. Talk about a third party candidate I think is badly misplaced. The idea of not voting at all is no better because functionally that’s a vote for Hillary. And it may have a really harmful effect on Senate and House races where Republicans are going to be fighting hard to maintain control,” said Bolton.
Another major concern for Bolton is that the world will be far less stable by January 2017 because he expects our adversaries to take aggressive steps in the coming months because they don’t expect President Obama to resist them.
“The continuing deterioration of the Middle East and all across North Africa as well is going to accelerate and I think we’re going to see Iran challenge us on a variety of points. I think they’re going to press the outer limits of the Vienna deal on their nuclear weapons program. Recently, the head to the Revolutionary Guards Corps threatened yet again to close the Straits of Hormuz. I think threatening moves against friendly Arab states are all in the offing,” said Bolton.
Iraq is another hornet’s nest, with U.S. forces engaging in direct combat with ISIS in recent days and protests in and around Baghdad and even parliament leading to questions about whether the Iraqi government can survive. Bolton says the next president will deal with an irreparable Iraq.
“The violence in parliament is really a demonstration that what’s left of the government in Iraq really is on the verge of collapse. Iraq has functionally disappeared as a state. The Kurds are functionally independent. ISIS has carved out primarily the Sunni areas. The Shia areas of Iraq are dominated by the ayatollahs in Tehran,” said Bolton.
He says the top goal in the midst of that mess is rooting out ISIS and he believes the promise of a homeland for anti-ISIS Sunnis is much better incentive than a return to the status quo of living under the retribution of the Shia majority.
“We have to give the Sunni Arabs of western Iraq and eastern Syria an incentive to leave ISIS and join us. I think creating a new state out of what used to be Syria and Iraq makes sense. they’re not going to fight ISIS so they can come back under the domination of the ayatollahs in Iraq or the Assad regime in eastern Syria,” said Bolton.
He says Iraq is a good example of how the next president needs to approach the world’s challenges as they exist now how they wish things were.
“In foreign policy, if you’re not dealing with reality, you’re going to fail,” said Bolton.
