Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton is excited about Hillary Clinton running for president. “Nothing,” he told The Daily Caller News Foundation, “would give me greater pleasure than taking her record apart one day at a time.”
Clinton, the likely Democratic candidate, may work to distance herself from the Obama administration as she vies for the nomination, but whether it’s running on her old boss’s foreign policy or her own, Bolton says it’s a lose-lose for her.
If she employs her most recent work at the Department of State to characterize her presidential bid, he says, Republican contenders may point ti the killing of the U.S. ambassador to Libya at the hands of extremists, which occurred under Clinton’s watch, as a hit to her national security record. And the revelation that Clinton used a private email account for State Department business is likely to drag the House Select Committee on Benghazi‘s investigation of the terrorist attack on for longer than expected.
But her former boss may be a greater challenge to overcome, and Bolton compares the upcoming election to the change in administration from President Jimmy Carter to President Ronald Reagan, but more challenging for the Democrats because of what’s occurred under the current administration. President Barack Obama’s successor will need to restore America’s psychological edge, or faith in the role of the country, he maintains.
Obama’s foreign policy record, he told TheDCNF, shows dialogue is futile when leaders are hostile to U.S. interests– specifically, attempts at dialogue with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Campaigning as a president who ends wars in the Middle East, Obama has since reversed this course by asking Congress for a formal declaration of war against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.
Bolton, an ambassador to the U.N. under Bush from 2005-2006 and a frequent commentator on Fox News, is also critical of the Obama administration’s handling of nuclear negotiations with Iran. Forty-seven Republican senators sent a letter to Tehran explaining Congress’s role in international treaties and reasserting their authority in the process last week, and though it was highly criticized, Bolton argues it’s within the right of congressional leaders to object.
Any deal would legitimize a regime the administration still considers a state sponsor of terrorism and leave Iran with the capability to acquire a nuclear weapon, he contends. “We can’t have confidence that we know what Iran is really up to,” he told TheDCNF.
From a broader, foreign policy perspective, Bolton says America shouldn’t slip into “neo-isolationism.”
Protecting the country is the executive’s top priority. Threats exists internally and externally, he says, mentioning the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, international terrorism, and threats posed by Russia and China in eastern and central Europe as just a few.
It’s all this that Clinton, as former State Department head, will have to own. Or, as Obama’s democratic successor, she may distance herself from his policies. For the former ambassador, that’s a fight that should excite any Republican.
All to say, he’s excited for the campaign. Hillary and her husband were one year ahead of Bolton in law school, he told TheDCNF, so he’s been “burdened” with them for years.
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