Bolton (if you can’t remember who he is, picture a Santa Claus without the sleigh, the full, white beard and the warm smile) has been in D.C. circles for decades, but is also one of the very rare people who can claim that he’s outside the establishment despite making Washington his home since the late 1980s as a Ronald Reagan appointee. He’s big into arms control and non-proliferation issues, having served as George W. Bush’s Under Secretary of State for Arms Control before being promoted to U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations in 2005. Known best for being one of the most unabashed cheerleaders for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and a man who has no regrets about how the war turned out — in fact, he wanted to go a step further and take George W. Bush’s regime-change crusade to Iran and Syria — the National Review called him “an ideal pick” for the job. This is a rather ironic view to take; the editors at NR apparently are unaware that Bolton has shown contempt for many of the negotiations that the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations have conducted. Last I checked, negotiating was the Sate Department’s specialty.

Compromising with nations you don’t like happens to be a major part of the Secretary of State’s job description. Bolton is a “way way or the highway” kind of guy, who views negotiations either as mechanisms to humiliate the other side through full capitulation or a fallacies that do nothing but postpone more forceful options. The Iran nuclear deal was branded by Bolton as “the worst act of appeasement in American history,” as if the accord allows Tehran to produce as many weapons as it wants without any oversight from IAEA inspectors or noncompliance penalties whatsoever. Diplomacy with the Iranians is practically compared to diplomacy with Adolf Hitler: an act that should be avoided at all costs. Better to bomb the crap out of Iran’s nuclear facilities and delay the program by five years rather than negotiate an agreement that kicks the can down the road for the next 10 to 15 years. The math doesn’t add up, but Bolton doesn’t seem to care.

One of the most pressing national security issues that a Trump administration will need to deal with is the growing probability that North Korea will acquire the capability to put a nuclear device on top of an intercontinental ballistic missile and send that missile toward America’s west coast. (or threaten to if Washington makes any stupid moves). Bolton has opinions here as well, most of which can be summarized with this statement: “The hell with Kim. We should overthrow his regime, not negotiate with him.”

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And if you thought that Trump’s views on Israel-Palestine were tough, Bolton’s are bizarre. He’s advocated for Egypt to swallow Gaza and take care of the Hamas problem and for Jordan to incorporate the West Bank into its dominion once again. Of course he doesn’t make a convincing case why these two Arab states would want to administer these economic basket cases, perhaps because there aren’t any good reasons for Cairo and Amman to do so. His plan is a fancy way of killing the option of a Palestinian state, which has been American policy for nearly a half a century.

Sure, John Bolton has experience that is worthy of him being vetted for Secretary of State. But as Donald Trump once said about another candidate in the not-so-distant past, it’s the wrong experience. Far from the realist paradigm that the National Review is convinced that a Bolton State Department would follow, the likelier course of action is pragmatic diplomacy being pushed out of the way to make room for regime change.