From Israel-Palestine to North Korea, here’s where the newly-appointed national security adviser stands on key issues.
John Bolton, the newly-appointed US national security adviser, has been a force in Republican foreign policy circles for decades.
Regarded as the most divisive US ambassador to the UN, Bolton has served in the Republican administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H W Bush and George W Bush.
Here is a track record of his strong statements on key issues that the White House is currently dealing with: Israeli-Palestinian conflict:
Bolton has praised US President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and the decision to move the US embassy to the city.
He wrote on Twitter on December 14: “The Middle East peace process has long needed clarity and an injection of reality, and Trump has provided it by making the decision to move the US embassy in #Israel to #Jerusalem.”
After former president Barack Obama allowed passage of a UN Security Council resolution in December 2016 that condemned Israeli settlements, Bolton said Obama “stabbed Israel in the front” and that the measure was “clearly intended to tip the peace process toward the Palestinians”.
He further scolded Obama’s Secretary of State John Kerry for his speech laying out principles for an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal, in which Kerry warned a two-state future was slipping away as Israel continued to accelerate its occupied West Bank settlement presence.
“Just as a matter of empirical reality, the two-state solution is dead,” Bolton told far-right Breitbart News Radio at the time. “That’s about the only thing John Kerry came close to getting right.”
In a 2014 Op-Ed in the Washington Times titled “A ‘three-state solution’ for Middle East peace,” Bolton argued that Gaza should be given back to Egypt and the West Bank to Jordan.
“The only logic underlying the demand for a Palestinian state is the political imperative of Israel’s opponents to weaken and encircle the Jewish state, thereby minimising its potential to establish secure and defensible borders,” he wrote.
“As long as Washington’s diplomatic objective is the ‘two-state solution’ – Israel and ‘Palestine’ – the fundamental contradiction between this aspiration and the reality on the ground will ensure it never comes into being.” China:
Bolton has said Beijing needed to be called out on what he characterised as systematic cheating on global trade while enjoying the benefits of an open US market.
In an interview on Thursday with Fox Business News, Bolton accused China of stealing US intellectual property and pursuing “mercantilist policies in what is supposed to be a free-trade environment”.
