Sen. Rand Paul went as far as to say he would block any Bolton nomination.
“John Bolton doesn’t get it. He still believes in regime change. He’s still a big cheerleader for the Iraq War,” he
said on ABC’s This Week in December 2016. “John Bolton is so far out of it and has such a naive understanding of the world.”
Bolton has been a controversial national security figure for decades. He is blunt (North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il was a “tyrannical dictator,” the idea that China would respond with force if the US recognized Taiwan — as
he suggested doing — “ is a fantasy") and has held hawkish views. Bolton advocated for the Iraq war as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security in 2002,
saying the Bush administration was “confident” that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had “hidden weapons of mass destruction.” More recently, in 2015, Bolton wrote a New York Times
op-ed headlined, “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran.” In February, he wrote an
op-ed for The Wall Street Journal laying out the legal case for a pre-emptive strike on North Korea. “It is perfectly legitimate for the United States to respond to the current ‘necessity’ posed by North Korea’s nuclear weapons by striking first,” he wrote.
