Last week, John Bolton was the keynote speaker at a dinner of the Lincoln Club at the Casa Del Mar Hotel and gave an excellent address about the foreign policy issues that will affect next year’s presidential campaign.
Here is a brief excerpt from his speech, followed by the brief interview he graciously gave JCI prior to the dinner:
I wanted to talk about what is still the case 20 years later about Governor Dukakis’s party, and that is that they are not ready to run the foreign policy of the United States. . . .
I want to make a pitch to you here tonight, not on behalf of any particular Republican candidate, because I haven’t declared for any yet — I’m still trying to get my book out next week, and I wouldn’t want to burden them with having to read through and defend what I say in 456 fascinating pages [laughter] . . . But the fact is that I think our candidates as a whole have a much clearer grasp of the threats that confront the United States and the challenges that they are going to have to deal with during their term of office, which will have an impact not just during those four years but for decades to come. And it is why it is so critical in next year’s election that we end up with adults running our foreign policy and not aging flower children. . . .
[L]et’s not let get lost as to why it was correct to overthrow Saddam Hussein in the first place – and where the support for that came. In the late 1990s, Congress passed statutes and resolutions by overwhelming bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress that said it was our national policy to overthrow Saddam Hussein. And the reason . . . was the same reason that was articulated in the Bush Administration’s first national security strategy dealing with the threat of terrorism and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction – nuclear, chemical, and biological. . .
[T]he only way to be safe from these weapons of mass destruction is to make sure that they don’t fall into the wrong hands in the first place. Because once the regimes and terrorist groups have acquired the weapons, then it is a matter of their decision, at a time and place of their choosing, when they may use those weapons.
Now, to be sure, the threat that we face today is not the kind of potential civilizational annihilation that we faced during the Cold War. But it is a mistake to look back on the Cold War as a pleasant, stable era. It was a time when we lived in fear that a miscalculation would be made that would plunge the world into nuclear winter. And I think most analysts of the Cold War would say that frankly we were lucky to get through it without a nuclear exchange. . . .
[N]or can we be comfortable that Cold War theories of deterrence and massive retaliation will work as well as they did in the Cold War. As I’ve said, they didn’t work all that well in any event. It’s not the kind of threat we want to live under. The regime in Tehran, whose leadership values the after-life more than the present life, and when we have a government in Pyongyang more like Hitler in his bunker than a rational government, and where you have terrorists in al Qaeda who believe that it’s part of their religious obligation to conduct jihad against the United States and to commit suicide to do it — these are not people who are subject to theories of deterrence.
And so when you look back at Iraq, let’s not forget that the point that led President Bush to overthrow Saddam Hussein was not, as many of the Democrats would have us believe, the threat that Saddam was imminently close to using weapons of mass destruction. The threat was the regime itself — the regime that had demonstrated its desire to have nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, had used chemical weapons against Iran in the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, that used chemical weapons against its own Kurdish citizens over the years, and that was committed to hegemony in the Persian Gulf region.
Here is the brief interview with JCI:
JCI: I’m speaking with Ambassador John Bolton; it’s October 30, 2007. Ambassador Bolton, I’d like to ask you if you think Condoleezza Rice will be successful in convening a peace conference in Annapolis, who might attend, what the outcome will be.
AMBASSADOR BOLTON: I think the odds are that conference will take place, but I am very skeptical that a positive outcome is possible. The circumstances in the region are just not conducive to progress, particularly on the Palestinian side, where there is no effective Palestinian Authority, no effective entity that can carry out commitments that might be made. And the risk is not simply that the conference will fail, but that a failed conference will leave us in a worse situation in the region.
In a later conversation, Ambassador Bolton said he thinks the two-state solution has just about run its course, that any future solution will likely be a three-state solution and/or one involving Egypt and Jordan.
Ambassador Bolton will be on Atlas on the Air this evening at 9 p.m. Eastern, 6 p.m. Pacific, speaking with Pamela Geller and those who wish to call in. His new book — Surrender is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations — will be published tomorrow.
