John Bolton is out. It was a long time coming — Trump resisted hiring him in the first place, passing him over in favour of a military man, H.R. McMaster, at first. Bolton is a near-synonym for war and regime change, a hawk’s hawk. That was an obviously awkward fit for a president who got elected by campaigning against America’s Mideast wars.
But just because John Bolton is gone doesn’t mean Boltonism is. Secretary of state Mike Pompeo is hardly less hawkish, just less principled. And Pompeo is the worse for mixing human rights-moralizing with his bellicosity: he represents an opportunistic confluence of humanitarian hawkishness and neoconservatism. It’s the optimal formula for being taken seriously by the Republican establishment and the nation’s left-of-centre media alike. Trump was never more beloved by network news and CNN producers than when he was bombing Syria, after all.
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