A hawkish new White House tilt, but some also see a glimmer of realism

When John Bolton was asked in a 2016 interview in the highbrow Octavian Report what he considered “the top threat to global order,” the uber-hawk did not quickly respond that it was Iran.

Nor did he finger North Korea.

Instead, the foreign-policy iconoclast that many would place to the right of a Dick Cheney or a Donald Rumsfeld said that for him the main threat was the withdrawal of the United States from its position of leadership and from “vigorously asserting its interests” around the world.

Under President Barack Obama the US had accelerated this retreat based on “the mistaken impression … that if the US is less assertive, less visible, less present in the world that there will be enhanced international peace and security,” Mr. Bolton opined. “I think exactly the opposite is true.”

The condemnation of a weakened America with its implied argument for an aggressively nationalist foreign policy was to some extent the intellectual’s

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