John Bolton is no charmer. Unlike the devious guile of a Henry Kissinger, Bolton practises his bullying gunboat diplomacy with a kind of dour self-righteousness, asserting the rights of the US to have it their way no matter what anyone else thinks or wants. He brooks no opposition or even reluctance and is prone to giving corrective lectures to lesser minds. He isn’t so much about spreading US-style democratic values as imposing the imperial will.
Bolton has long lurked on the extreme flank of the Republican Party dedicated to a highly militarized approach to running the US Empire. He’s now 70 and has been at it since the days when he shilled for the presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater back in 1964. He rejects the title of a neoconservative as there is nothing ‘neo’ about his old school American nationalism. Like many of the US political elite he is minted from that seedbed of US power the Yale University Law School, where one of his classmates and friends was the controversial Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. With the Republicans in power he has held down various foreign-policy positions, including having briefly been the US Ambassador to the United Nations under the Bush administration in an unconfirmed recess appointment between August 2005 and December 2006. This appointment was particularly ironic given Bolton’s militant opposition to any form of multilateral check on US power, especially the UN. He believes that the UN should have only one permanent member of the Security Council (the US) and brought his usual take-no-prisoners style to UN diplomacy with the usual bull-in-a-china-shop results.
