“Dangerous.” “Warmongering lunatic.” “Be very afraid.” “Extreme by Attila the Hun standards.”These were some of the words used by columnists and foreign policy experts when President Trump named John Bolton to succeed H.R. McMaster as National Security Adviser.The reason for the alarm is Bolton’s stated worldview, as aggressively nationalistic as it is hawkish. He has cheered U.S. military actions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. At the same time he has lamented that we have not taken similar actions aimed at “regime change” in Iran, Syria, and North Korea.But Bolton has voiced at least three criticisms of U.S. military operations in the past two decades: They didn’t start soon enough, they didn’t last long enough, and some were waged with the aim of saving civilians in other countries, not with the explicit goal of furthering U.S. interests.Here is a sampling of the many, many times John Bolton has evangelized for war.
Read: Experts use one word to describe Trump's new national security adviser: “dangerous”