"Dr. Strangelove" Returns to the Screens - But This Time For Real
In the masterpiece 1964 Stanley Kubrick film, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Gen. Buck Turgidson, arguing in favor of a first strike nuclear attack against Russia, assures President Murkin Muffley, "I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed, but I do say no more than 10 to 20 million killed, tops." In an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, John Bolton wrote, "It is perfectly legitimate for the United States to respond to the current 'necessity' posed by North Korea's nuclear weapons by striking first." Now that President Trump has named Bolton as his national security advisor (his third in 14 months), reality again tops fiction in this increasingly surreal administration.
As Trump clears out the generals junta he initially placed in charge of national security policy, Bolton re-joins an illustrious roster of Republican draft dodging chicken hawks whose cavalier thinking on military power is surpassed only by their avid embrace of munitions to solve America's diplomatic problems. We've seen these guys - Cheney, Baby George W, the entire "neo-con" coven that got us into the Iraq quagmire, and now The Donald - bungle one foreign policy challenge after another. A kind of atavistic phallic competition pervades their decisionmaking: Trump's hand size, who's got the bigger nuclear button, North Korea "will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen."
Bolton has advocated waging war against Iran as well as North Korea. This is a guy who, like George W. Bush, managed to shirk military service in Vietnam by finagling a position in the National Guard. He wrote in his Yale 25th reunion book, “I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy. I considered the war in Vietnam already lost.” Sure. But it's now okay to order a generation of millennials to die in northeast Asian rice paddies. "Hypocrisy is the necessary burden of villainy," noted Samuel Johnson.
Bolton, in his memoir, Surrender Is Not an Option, made clear what he thought about the State Department: “State careerists are schooled in accommodation and compromise with foreigners, rather than aggressive advocacy of U.S. interests, which might inconveniently disrupt the serenity of diplomatic exchanges, not to mention dinner parties and receptions.” Said of a true chicken hawk. His open contempt for diplomacy and diplomats fits well in an administration hell-bent on demolishing the Department of State and whose weltanschauung aligns comfortably with that of Gen. Hideki Tojo. And allegations by his ex-wife of forced sex also fit neatly in an administration marked from the top down by moral squalor.
Bolton, 69, has been lurking in the foreign policy reaches of the Republican right for many years. When I was working in the State Department, career folks dreaded him as some foul, ghoulish soul snatcher who had an uncanny reverse Midas touch on policy issues. He consistently refused to allow facts to interfere with his extremist convictions. Resembling a demented Captain Kangaroo with his Fuller brush mustache and trick-or-treat demeanor, his reputation is that of a mean-spirited bully with several screws loose. Wherever he tread, small animals would cower and flowers would die. One fellow GOP foreign policy veteran told Congress that Bolton was a "kiss-up, kick-down" type, notorious for sucking up to those above and abusing those below him.
"If Bolton replaces McMaster, we are all going to die," tweeted Obama aide, Colin Kahl. The New York Times warned, “There are few people more likely than Mr. Bolton is to lead the country into war. His selection is a decision that is as alarming as any Mr. Trump has made so far.” Other leading pundits and publications echo this sentiment.
So, as President Trump packs the White House with yes-men cranks with beliefs on economics, social policy and national security that defy the gravity of reason, expect dangerous times ahead. Bolton's control of the national security helm evokes Dr. Strangelove's Major T.J. King Kong, "What's the nearest target opportunity?"