OPINION:
As former National Security Adviser John Bolton launches his $2 million fact-free vendetta against President Trump, it’s important to recall the particular swamp from which Mr. Bolton crawled.
Mr. Bolton has loitered in Washington for decades, a denizen of the neoconservative foreign policy establishment that has gotten the United States embroiled in foreign conflicts for years. He has advocated “regime change” wars in Iran, Syria, Libya, Cuba and North Korea. His conception of America First has been to send American soldiers to the front lines. His big idea has long been to spend American blood and treasure on ships patrolling the South China Sea, to keep watch in Eastern Europe, to send American youth to patrol the Hindu Kush.
John Bolton is an integral part of the Washington swamp apparatus that has spent $7 trillion on wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan that have produced never-ending battles. And they have never liked President Trump’s America First outlook.
Beside the cost in dollars and human lives, Mr. Bolton’s neoconservative war-mongering ideas have decimated American jobs, cities, minority communities, swaths of the Midwest and the South. He has been an advocate of the managed decline of America, in manufacturing and growth.
Mr. Bolton may be eager to send Americans into war, but he has shown no such bravery himself. He avoided combat in Vietnam with a student deferment, later writing in his college’s 25th reunion book, “I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy.”
But now John Bolton is very unhappy. Because Mr. Trump wouldn’t start the regime change wars Mr. Bolton wanted in deserts thousands of miles away. Mr. Trump refused to bomb all the places Mr. Bolton proposed, and he refused to put American soldiers unnecessarily in harm’s way.
So Mr. Bolton decided to do what forgotten Hollywood starlets and defeated politicians do; he wrote a novel, a work of fiction, filled with the kinds of veracity he has shown before, such as his discredited insistence that Cuba has biological weapons, or that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Neither of those things were true. And neither are the assertions in Mr. Bolton’s book.
He is already on the record in a 2010 interview with Fox Business saying he has no problem lying. Well at least he is telling the truth about that.
The fact is that Mr. Trump’s foreign policy is a stunning success despite Mr. Bolton. NATO has never been stronger, and member countries have increased their contribution, as Mr. Trump insisted. The United States has never been stronger in the Middle East. The ISIS caliphate has been destroyed. We have strengthened our alliance with India, the largest democracy in the world.
The coronavirus artificially interrupted the greatest economic recovery in modern times. But Mr. Trump is already bringing that recovery back.
John Bolton will take his $2 million book payout. The liberal media will help him spread his lies about Mr. Trump. But the spotlight on him will soon dim. He will have no choice but to crawl back into the swamp. And President Trump will again bring the American economy to greatness.
• Sara A. Carter is a national and international award-winning investigative reporter whose stories have ranged from national security, terrorism, immigration, and frontline coverage of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. She is currently a Fox News contributor.
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