Should-Read: I know I thought Saddam Hussein probably had an active nuclear weapons program because otherwise George W. Bush administration policy was just insane. Was Max Boot back in 2003 caught in the same trap?: Max Boot: Why I changed my mind about John Bolton: "To accommodate... Trump, the Republican Party has betrayed its principles on issues including Russia, immigration, free trade and fiscal austerity...
...Yet to listen to the president’s fans, the real hypocrites are Trump’s conservative critics.... My Post column critiquing newly appointed national security adviser John Bolton for ideological extremism and poor managerial skills. Trump’s fans predictably dredged up a 2005 Los Angeles Times op-ed I had written supporting Bolton’s nomination for United Nations ambassador. Ben Boychuk, managing editor of the website American Greatness, tweeted: “Gee, I wonder what changed.” James Taranto, the Wall Street Journal op-ed editor, wrote: “I mean, c’mon dude.” With its trademark subtlety, the pro-Trump FrontPage magazine hyperventilated: “Max Boot’s slimy smear of Bolton shows his hypocrisy.”...
I would say that a lack of change in one’s views over so many years is evidence of a terminally closed mind.... Quite a few facts have changed since 2005.... Even then, I noted that “I don’t see eye to eye with Bolton on everything. His animus toward the International Criminal Court—which led him to antagonize valuable allies because of his insistence that they sign treaties pledging never to refer U.S. soldiers for prosecutions—seems excessive to me. And he has never been known as a fan of nation-building or humanitarian interventions, which I believe are necessary in the post-9/11 world.”...
Today Bolton isn’t being sent to Turtle Bay. He is going to the West Wing, where he will be one of the most important influences on a president who is so ignorant that he makes Bush seem like an international relations PhD by comparison—and whose protectionist, isolationist, authoritarian instincts are at odds with more than 70 years of U.S. foreign policy. Like Bolton, I was a proponent of the Iraq War, but unlike him, I have concluded it was a bad idea.... As I wrote in 2013, “I would not have backed the invasion if I had known what we now know—that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction.” The failure of the Iraq intervention has soured me on preventative wars in general. Not so Bolton....
Bolton is not, as David French wrote in National Review, “squarely in the mainstream of conservative foreign-policy thought”—unless conservative foreign policy has been redefined to mean Trumpism. Nor is he, as countless reporters have written, a “neocon,” insofar as he is hostile to democracy promotion.... Among those who have soured on him is George W. Bush. “I don’t consider Bolton credible,” Bush told a group of conservative writers, including me, in the Oval Office in 2008. If the president who sent him to the United Nations can change his view of Bolton, so can I.
