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Bolton 2012 Would Be Good For a Laugh

I just don’t think that a Republican can convincingly oppose the president using talking-point platitudes. ~John Bolton, explaining why he is considering a presidential bid. I think in the last two years, President Obama has deliberately, consciously downplayed the threats that the United States faces in the world. I don’t think he’s interested in national […]

I just don’t think that a Republican can convincingly oppose the president using talking-point platitudes. ~John Bolton, explaining why he is considering a presidential bid.

I think in the last two years, President Obama has deliberately, consciously downplayed the threats that the United States faces in the world. I don’t think he’s interested in national security….I don’t think he fundamentally believes that it is his job to advance American interests. ~John Bolton, offering up talking-point platitudes.

When I first heard murmurings about a possible Bolton run, I thought it had to be some sort of inside joke that made sense only to people at AEI. Personally, I would find a Bolton for President campaign very entertaining. Just imagine the spectacle at the primary debates as Bolton keeps trying to out-hawk everyone on stage. He could provide some of the major candidates with a perfect foil to show that they aren’t reckless and belligerent, or the other candidates will get into an escalating shouting match with him as they try to prove that they are far more gung-ho and aggressive than he is. It could really liven up what promise to be otherwise very dull events.

Obviously, Bolton has no illusions that he will be competitive as a candidate. He says he wouldn’t run a “typical” campaign, which means that he probably wouldn’t bother meeting with people in primary states to ask for their votes, but it wouldn’t matter if he did. Nothing could be more uninteresting to most primary voters of either party in the coming decade than a single-issue candidacy focused on the idea that the U.S. needs to be more activist and aggressive in the world. Iraq and Afghanistan are going to leave the public so sick of foreign entanglements for the next ten years that Bolton’s message will be very unpopular. Bolton is contemplating a run as a way of promoting his particular brand of hawkish foreign policy and forcing the major contenders to grapple with the issues he wants them to pay attention to, and as far as it goes it doesn’t matter very much.

What I do find interesting is Bolton’s apparent perception of the likely Republican field. It seems that he regards the likely contenders as being so unequal to the task of facing off against Obama on national security issues that he thinks it might be necessary to launch a protest candidacy as a way of bringing them up to speed. What I find amusing about all of this is that Bolton isn’t going to be critiquing Obama with anything more than “talking-point platitudes,” either, and there is really no need for Bolton to represent the interests of hawkish interventionists, since almost every likely Republican contender embraces Bolton’s worldview more or less completely.

Bolton’s latest remarks are much more amusing because they happen to have come out the day after a Robert Kagan column claiming that the main problems that Kagan and Bolton have had with Obama’s foreign policy are disappearing. Most of Kagan’s argument is horribly misleading to the extent that he simply invents the difference between the first year and a half of Obama’s foreign policy and the administration’s recent statements and decisions, but the more that the Kagans of the world are satisfied with the direction of Obama’s foreign policy the more ridiculous Bolton’s protests appear.

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