A few weeks I ago, I posted on this blog that while I think Donald Trump is a worse person than George W Bush, I think Bush was the inferior president, given that Bush led the country into the disastrous war in Iraq and Trump has not done anything equal to that terrible mistake. But it now appears that he has taken a big step towards his own military disaster.
Last Thursday, Trump announced that his national security advisor Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster was being forced out, and that his replacement was former American ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton. Trump recently mentioned in a press conference that he is -"really at a point where we’re getting very close to having the Cabinet and other things that I want.” If Bolton is who he wants advising him on national security, the country is in serious trouble.
Bolton's last worked with the Bush administration, and since then he has spent most of time his appearing on Fox news, where he often clings to the notion that the Iraq invasion was a success. He has also repeatedly attacked Barack Obama's deal with Iran to limit their nuclear weapon capabilities and ridiculed the notion that negotiations with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un about limiting their nuclear weapons could be productive. In fact, he recently wrote an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal making the case for bombing North Korea's nuclear weapons arsenal preemptively. This is an exceedingly dangerous notion; even if the US military were able to take out Un's nuclear weapons before he could use them (no sure thing), he still could use his chemical weapons on both American troops and people in South Korea, potentially leading to a war with a casualty rate in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions.
As if that weren't bad enough, he has also made the case for abandoning the weapons deal with Iran and then bombing them if they attempt to build nuclear weapons of their own. Yes, if Mr. Bolton has his way, America could soon be embroiled in two more wars to go along with the still ongoing US conflict in Afghanistan.
So, will Trump listen to Bolton's war mongering? Well, Trump has an odd attitude towards the military; although he has never served in it, (and found a way to avoid the draft in Viet Nam due to a mysterious bone spur in his foot), he has an almost child like excitement about our military. On the campaign trail he boasted that "no one is more pro military than me", and swaggered as he said that he would "blow the shit out of Isis." In office, he has increased our already massive military budget by tens of billions of dollars. And he has decided that the country should have a military parade on Veteran's day, something we haven't done before, which will inevitably turn into another excuse for him to pump up his ego as he is saluted by passing soldiers.
Given all of this, along with Trump's often impulsive behavior and love of looking tough, it is entirely possible that Trump will listen to Bolton's war mongering ideas and lead the country into a potentially disastrous and unnecessary war sometime soon. And history will have to wonder how such a narcissistic psychopath could possibly been elected president.
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